Skip to main content
Researchers Hope to Improve Web Searches - BizReport:
"Carnegie Mellon University researchers are using an Internet game to help improve artificial intelligence, in hopes of making Web searches more powerful.
Graduate student Luis von Ahn and his mentor, professor Manuel Blum, believe search engines can one day adopt word labels generated by their ESP Game to help computers see images more as humans do.

Search engines use algorithms - mathematical recipes designed to solve problems - to sort, rank and filter pages, text and images on the Internet.

But they can't 'see' an image the way a human being can, and must rely on surrounding text to make an educated guess.

The ESP Game tries to improve upon that by asking two players who don't know each other to type in words that describe a series of images. Players win points when they match words - and those matches become labels von Ahn and Blum can affix to the image in question.

It would take too long for researchers to label the hundreds of millions of images that can be accessed by Google or other search engines. But von Ahn believes that task might be accomplished in a few months by getting a few thousand people to play the game each day."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Jodie Lane Project Responds to City Council Testimony

The Jodie Lane Project : New York, NY -- February 12, 2004. The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing today to investigate the causes of Jodie S. Lane’s tragic electrocution death on January 16th. The testimony revealed a startling lack of oversight on the part of the Public Services Commission, charged with overseeing Con Edison’s compliance with the National Electric Safety Code, last revised in 1913. With only 5 inspectors at their disposal, the Public Services Commission relies entirely on Con Edison to report safety problems. Because Con Edison only reports incidents resulting in injury or death, the PSC was aware of only 15 shock incidents in the last 5 years. Con Edison has acknowledged that it actually received 539 reports of shock incidents in the same period, effectively admitting to misleading the PSC by an order of magnitude. It is not only this discrepancy that is alarming, but also the fact that the Public Services Commission, charged with ensuring

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to