How researchers are helping to keep your computer in the picture
May 27 2008 By Giles Turnbull
Computers are very good at lots of things, but one thing they're rubbish at is understanding what's in a picture.
Some of them can recognise text in an image and make it searchable, but show a computer a photo of some people dancing at a party and it cannot work out who they are, what emotions they are showing, or differentiate between subtle changes of light and colour.
This is a problem when it comes to searching for images on the web. At the moment you can use most search engines to search for images, but the results are hit-and-miss, and nowhere near as good as the results for a normal text search.
To improve things, researchers have been working on ways to make images easier for computers to understand.
The simplest solution is to get real people to add tags, or keywords, to every image. But there are billions of images online and no one wants to spend hours going through them all.
One team of experts had a brilliant idea: make it into a game that people will want to play.
The result is Gwap (www.gwap.com), a selection of games designed to teach computers how to understand images (and other data) better.
The best game is ESP. You and an anonymous internet partner are matched up and asked to add keywords to randomly-selected photos. When you both guess the same word, you earn points and move on to another image.
It's loads of fun to play, especially as you're trying to second-guess the mind of a complete stranger. It promotes teamwork, observation, clear thinking and fast typing. And it's free to sign up.
If you dream of building your own home, you have something in common with Kevin and Suw Charman-Anderson. This pair of internet addicts (she's a social media consultant; he's blogs editor of The Guardian) have started a blog to record their thoughts and experiences as they go through the process of planning - and hopefully actually building - their own dream home.
The site (kitsandmortar.com) covers a bit of everything, from thoughts on how and where to buy cheap land, and photos of some of the more bizarre and expensive garden sheds you can buy these days (if you have the cash). And yes, the pair are sticking some adverts on it - every penny it earns them gets added to the house-building piggy bank.
A few years ago, Friends Reunited (www.friendsreunited.co.uk) was one of the biggest sites on the net, attracting thousands of people in the UK. Its founders sold the original site to ITV, and it wasn't long before Facebook (www. facebook.com) came along people stopped talking about Friends Reunited so much.
Now it's been relaunched with a fresh new look and new ideas. Most important of all, it's ditched the £5 a year membership fee which was needed to send messages to other members. Now you can sign up (or log in with your old user details, if you still have them), browse your list of old school buddies, and send them messages for free. There are other new features too - even if you're a Facebook fanatic, it's worth taking a look.
Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org.
