An Application for Artificial Intelligence
When most people think of artficial intelligence, I think they picture Isaac Asimov's humanoid robots, with varying reactions. I have in mind a much more current application. Search. I think the search industry and artficial intelligence go hand in hand. Why is search important? Or what could artificial intelligence have to do with it?
If you want a picture of, say, cherries with dew on them, still on the tree, how would you go about finding one? In the old days you would hire a commercial photographer, but those days are past, and that expense is no longer necessary. Now all you have to do is comb through the thousands of stock photos that are out there. If you're looking for something very particular, you might still be better off hiring a photographer. There are two ways I'm familiar with for finding a particular picture on the internet. You could use Flickr, a website that allows multiple users to post and tag photos. By searching from the advanced search page for "cherries rain", I found 13 pages of photos, 128 of them, including cherries, cherry trees, cherry blossoms, some with raindrops or dew on them, and many of other things that apparently made users think of cherries. I found green cherry tomatoes with raindrops on them, dark cherries, chokecherries with raindrops on them, and red cherry tomatoes with raindrops on them. But not one closeup shot of red cherries with raindrops glistening in the sun like I had in my mind's eye.
Next I tried a Google Image search for variations on the same search. I did quickly find a "raindrops on cherries" image available from Getty Images.
I recently heard a radio program on research that suggests that our brains use a single neuron to recognize a special person or object - "a Jennifer Aniston cell appeared to respond to anything that evoked the concept of Jennifer Aniston, not just a particular view".
Some day there will be an artificial intelligence that will be capable of recognizing not only image content, but concept as well. Capable of analyzing images and tagging or categorizing them.
http://www.autonomy.com/content/Technology/ sells solutions for organizing and correlating data throughout an enterprise. Reading their website makes me feel like I'm trying to eat a large plate full of cold mashed potatoes very quickly. But I think if had time to wade through all the hip jargon I would find a real company doing real work, offering something that might very well revolutionize the way we handle large amounts of data.
Flickr and other collaborative efforts are themselves revolutionary and powerful, and it will be interesting to see how artificial intelligence compares with them as they both develop.
If you want a picture of, say, cherries with dew on them, still on the tree, how would you go about finding one? In the old days you would hire a commercial photographer, but those days are past, and that expense is no longer necessary. Now all you have to do is comb through the thousands of stock photos that are out there. If you're looking for something very particular, you might still be better off hiring a photographer. There are two ways I'm familiar with for finding a particular picture on the internet. You could use Flickr, a website that allows multiple users to post and tag photos. By searching from the advanced search page for "cherries rain", I found 13 pages of photos, 128 of them, including cherries, cherry trees, cherry blossoms, some with raindrops or dew on them, and many of other things that apparently made users think of cherries. I found green cherry tomatoes with raindrops on them, dark cherries, chokecherries with raindrops on them, and red cherry tomatoes with raindrops on them. But not one closeup shot of red cherries with raindrops glistening in the sun like I had in my mind's eye.
Next I tried a Google Image search for variations on the same search. I did quickly find a "raindrops on cherries" image available from Getty Images.
I recently heard a radio program on research that suggests that our brains use a single neuron to recognize a special person or object - "a Jennifer Aniston cell appeared to respond to anything that evoked the concept of Jennifer Aniston, not just a particular view".
Some day there will be an artificial intelligence that will be capable of recognizing not only image content, but concept as well. Capable of analyzing images and tagging or categorizing them.
http://www.autonomy.com/content/Technology/ sells solutions for organizing and correlating data throughout an enterprise. Reading their website makes me feel like I'm trying to eat a large plate full of cold mashed potatoes very quickly. But I think if had time to wade through all the hip jargon I would find a real company doing real work, offering something that might very well revolutionize the way we handle large amounts of data.
Flickr and other collaborative efforts are themselves revolutionary and powerful, and it will be interesting to see how artificial intelligence compares with them as they both develop.
posted by Farmer Field at 12:41 PM
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