The Elusive Video Recognition
April 22, 2015
Pictures and video still remain a challenge for companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and more. These companies want to be able to have an algorithm pick up on the video or picture’s content without relying on tags or a description. The reasons are that tags are sometimes vague or downright incorrect about the content. VentureBeat reports that Google has invested a lot of funds and energy in a deep learning AI. The article is called “Watch Google’s Latest Deep Learning System Recognize Sports In YouTube Clips.”
The AI is park of a neural network that is constantly fed data and programmed to make predictions off the received content. Google’s researchers fed their AI consists of a convolutional neural network and it was tasked with watching sports videos to learn how to recognize objects and motions.
The researchers learned something and wrote a paper about it:
“ ‘We conclude by observing that although very different in concept, the max-pooling and the recurrent neural network methods perform similarly when using both images and optical flow,’ Google software engineers George Toderici and Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan wrote in a blog post today on their work, which will be presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston in June.”
In short, Google is on its way to making video and images recognizable with neural networks. Can it tell the differences between colors, animals, people, gender, and activities yet?
Whitney Grace, April 22, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
A Former Googler Reflects
April 10, 2015
After a year away from Google, blogger and former Googler Tim Bray (now at Amazon) reflects on what he does and does not miss about the company in his post, “Google + 1yr.” Anyone who follows his blog, ongoing, knows Bray has been outspoken about some of his problems with his former employer: First, he really dislikes “highly-overprivileged” Silicon Valley and its surrounds, where Google is based. Secondly, he found it unsettling to never communicate with the “actual customers paying the bills,” the advertisers.
What does Bray miss about Google? Their advanced bug tracking system tops the list, followed closely by the slick and efficient, highly collaborative internal apps deployment. He was also pretty keen on being paid partially in Google stock between 2010 and 2014. The food on campus is everything it’s cracked up to be, he admits, but as a remote worker, he rarely got to sample it.
It was a passage in Bray’s “neutral” section that most caught my eye, though. He writes:
“The number one popular gripe against Google is that they’re watching everything we do online and using it to monetize us. That one doesn’t bother me in the slightest. The services are free so someone’s gotta pay the rent, and that’s the advertisers.
“Are you worried about Google (or Facebook or Twitter or your telephone company or Microsoft or Amazon) misusing the data they collect? That’s perfectly reasonable. And it’s also a policy problem, nothing to do with technology; the solutions lie in the domains of politics and law.
“I’m actually pretty optimistic that existing legislation and common law might suffice to whack anyone who really went off the rails in this domain.
“Also, I have trouble getting exercised about it when we’re facing a wave of horrible, toxic, pervasive privacy attacks from abusive governments and actual criminals.”
Everything is relative, I suppose. Still, I think it understandable for non-insiders to remain a leery about these companies’ data habits. After all, the distinction between “abusive government” and businesses is not always so clear these days.
Cynthia Murrell, April 10, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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