Upgrade! is a international network of new media artists that gather regularly to discuss and showcase art, technology and culture.
The Lisbon edition takes place tomorrow at Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea gallery, with 4 projects from N.I.P. (New Interfaces for Performance):
“Struct 7”, by André Sier (PT)
“Falling Angels”, by Isaac Carlos (NL)
“Rave Kettle”, by Torsten Lauschmann (UK)
“Crackle Canvas”, TokTek (NL)
More info here and here.
I’ve been postponing a visit to the gallery for ages, so let’s hope this time i’ll make it.
I know all the Section 508 Rehabilitation Act guidelines push software companies to some additional efforts regarding accessibility, but one has to wonder if all that money at Microsoft wasn’t able to deliver a better speech recognition technology for Vista.
Check the painful (and humorous) efforts of this guy trying to write a Perl script.
Google has just launched the their 2.5D maps! Thanks to technology by Immersive Media, we can now travel through streets with high resolution photos. Imagine now, being able to insert custom messages and interactivity in street images. Wow.
Just received my beta invitation to Spock, a startup focused on searching people, exploring an area where Google isn’t very active. Being in the middle of some recruitment process, i find it very hard to get in touch with people that have few or none information online, and they don’t seem to care enough about networking with other professionals or uploading their portfolio/CV .
The obvious choices to this kind of task would be LinkedIn, Wink or Monster.com but even these are quite limited in their search features. Spock ads some interesting features such as people tags, relationships between profiles or user reviewed data (sort of WikiPeople) . Most of this information is aggregated thanks to web services such as Google API or meta tags provided by (many) social networks, and Spock is bringing them all together in one place.
If Spock gets some traction, it will be one of the most interesting search companies I’ve seen in a while, specially when you consider the amount of competitive advantage you get with large amounts of user data collected, and in this case, a rather interesting one: business contacts. Really interesting would be if they manage to implement microformats.
I’ve got 3 invites left, so contact me and you might get one. Oh, some screenshots as an appetizer: [Read more …]
The same problem that search engines faced in the early days when searching text, we now begin to experience in other media such as images or video. While sites like Flickr or Blinx do a very good job at finding relevant results, they are mainly based in captions, tags or metadata, prone to human interpretation and ambiguity.
This was until i found last week the work of a portuguese working at the UCSD School of Engineering, with a interesting research in the fields of media search. Nuno Vasconcelos, a former member of the research staff at the Compaq Cambridge Research Laborator, and now Professor at USCD, explains his research on Supervised Multi-class Labeling in the video below (5 min) .
He was also kind enough to answer me a few short questions that i’ll transcript here:
Armando Alves: Are the applications of your research mainly scientific ( i.e, medical diagnostics) or are there any plans to release it under commercial license?
Nuno Vasconcelos:Right now, we are still in a research stage, and not thinking about commercial deployment. But, in the long run, it should be possible. I am certainly investigating the possibility of applying this technology to medical imagery, but we are still in the process of learning exactly what we can do.
Armando Alves: Would it apply only to images or do you plan to extend it to video as well ?
Nuno Vasconcelos:Could and will be extended to video. That is one of the areas that we intend to address sometime soon.
Armando Alves: How do you address the semantic relationships between 2 different sets of images?
Nuno Vasconcelos:The idea is to learn vocabularies that are large enough to build generic systems, which do not have to be re-trained across different datasets. There will always be a limit to this, since some domains (e.g. medical imagery) can be very specific. But, at least for regular users (Google style queries), we hope to be able to package the vocabulary with the retrieval system, which you would buy as a piece of software. But we are not there yet.
Portugal does have a slight problem in keeping their brightest minds, but it’s always rewarding to find fellow citizens that are being recognized for their work.
Many thanks for your attention Nuno, and best of luck on your research.
