Confessions of a researchaholic

2009-05-11

Friendfeed

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 6:00 pm
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The basic concept of Friendfeed is technically sound: there are just way too many Web2.0 services around (facebook, myspace, blog, twitter, digg, delicious, linkedin, etc, etc), so why not put them together in one single place so that people can more easily track their friends?

However, this only works if the feeds are homogeneous, not only in terms of content but also the social psychological roles. It is perfectly OK to gather all news feeds from different RSS sources into one reader, as they are reasonably similar (except for the few like Dick Cheney who only watches Fox news). But I find it odd to mix up different services, like Facebook and twitter, which feels just like putting my bedroom and office together. People visit individual services with a specific goal or mood in mind, e.g. Facebook for meeting with private friends, and twitter for sharing quick thoughts with the public world.

There are indeed too many Web2.0 stuff and they need consolidation, but I doubt it will ever go down to just one (from the pure functional point of view without considering antitrust issues). The consolidation will eventually come, and I bet it will be fun to watch.

2009-04-21

Similar image search

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 11:19 am
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Google’s new toy similar image search looks intriguing, but still it does not allow query by images directly.

True content-based image search is definitely very hard, and so far I haven’t seen any system that (remotely) works.

I do not know exactly how Google’s similar image search is implemented, but it could entirely avoid content-based image search by providing similarity links between images that are already indexed in Google’s database. Thus, the similarity computation could not only be conducted offline, but also leverage contextual information such as texts surrounding images. The similarity links could even be edited by humans if necessary.

I still remember the first encounter that prompted me to feel the need for content-based image search. After submitting my camera-ready paper to SIGGRAPH 2000, Stephen Spencer asked me to secure proper copyrights for all images used in the paper. But there is this famous little green texture that I simply could not track down the original ownership (even until today).

If there is a system that would allow me to do so, I will consider it a real success. (I am looking forward to Google’s official deployment of their similar image search system to see if I could unveil the true origin of “my little green friend”).

2009-04-19

Patent cube

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 4:53 pm
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Once in a while the company gave me a little granite (?) cube for a filed patent.

patent cube

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