Intrinsitivity

Context is ev … well, something, anyway

Today, computers can’t reliably identify the objects in digital images. But if they could, they could comb through hours of video for the two or three minutes that a viewer might be interested in, or perform web searches where the search term was an image, not a sequence of words. And of course, object recognition is a prerequisite for the kind of home assistance robot that could execute an order like “Bring me the stapler.” Now, MIT researchers have found a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about context. If the MIT system thinks it’s identified a chair, for instance, it becomes more confident that the rectangular thing nearby is a table.

A new landmark in computer vision

In the paper, we present a new technology that enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy.

Tour the World: building a web-scale landmark recognition engine (the paper)

The Quest for Computable Knowledge: A Longer View

There’s really a very long and rich history behind the kinds of things we’re doing with Wolfram|Alpha.