…the genius of the system boils down to a higher-dimension, feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. It can very accurately detect minute but telling differences between similar objects, such as buildings or monuments, both by the appearance of the buildings themselves and their context in the streetscape.
Apparently the system gets it right about 80% of the time.
It’s well worth listening to Andrew Marr’s latest edition of Start the Week in which he goes back over some of the best interviews and guests of the year.
He chooses to focus on “anti-news” – developments and trends that don’t make the headlines but nevertheless have a huge long term impact on the way we live our lives. Futurismic stuff, in fact.
Topics include human identity, bioscience, genetic predetermination, information technology, black swans, and the morality of nanotechnology.
Is it me or does the smooth edges + white fascia look a little retro-futuristic, rather than futuristic? It looks like something from A Clockwork Orange or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become true Martians, we—the audience—literally enter the cosmic theater. Will we finally reach the stars?
In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.
Regardless of what any particular hobbyist or entrepreneur is actually looking for, if you have enough people experimenting there is a good chance they will find something remarkable (what Nassim “black swan” Taleb calls “stochastic tinkering“). Unfortunately there is also a downside:
Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.
Here’s hoping a balance can be struck between regulation and innovation.
Researchers at MOBVIS project are working on a pattern-recognition system that allows you to take a picture of a building on your mobile and have the software identify where you are and what you’re looking at:
Watch as a reporter from the BBC explores a hi-tech “
