Slashdot Mirror

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statistics so far from http://yourvalue.inrialpes.fr/
Average price of users $0.001200
Price of the cheapest user $0.000076
Price of the most expensive user $0.008000

what's new here ? Three dimensional reconstruction from images or video are not really new. The INRIA does it for a long time ( http://grimage.inrialpes.fr/index.php ) and even forked a startup that works with the cinema industry ( http://www.4dviews.com/ ). I even recall a demo which is two or three years old where a guy playd street fighter in front of several cameras. I was not able to RTFA (slashdotted), so can someone enlighten me ? Is the novelty the webservice ?

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/

Agreed, but while Reed Solomon is well suited for small scratches on a CD or small losses of streamed data, it is rather inefficient in case of massive losses that can destroy a whole (contiguous) block of the data, as it operates on small blocks, and so its range of effect is limited. Fortunately there exist very robust FEC codes that can protect larger blocks. With Raptor or LDPC codes, one can protect very large blocks of data with redundant codes that yield a high probability of recovery given an overall loss rate.

In the case of critical data storage, I'd advocate in favor of large block codes such as Raptor or LDPC with a redundancy of at least 100% (meaning that one can recover the whole data is half of it is destroyed). Note that this need not be done on the physical layer, rather one could FEC-encode files with varying levels of redundancy.

Note that data recovery on damaged physical storage is no different than on unreliable transmission channels such as Wifi, 3G or IP multicast. For information, Raptor codes have been chosen for the DVB-H standard as the preferred FEC scheme for IP datacasting (based on the FLUTE protocol), and LDPC is used in DVB-S2.

For those interested by LDPC, there exists an excellent LGPL'd library by the french INRIA here (info) and here (download), and best of all it's a patent-free technology. As for Raptor, it is unfortunately proprietary and patented by Digital Fountain, but you can however find a lot of enlightening info on their Web site (worth a read if you're interested in FEC technologies).

Agreed, but while Reed Solomon is well suited for small scratches on a CD or small losses of streamed data, it is rather inefficient in case of massive losses that can destroy a whole (contiguous) block of the data, as it operates on small blocks, and so its range of effect is limited. Fortunately there exist very robust FEC codes that can protect larger blocks. With Raptor or LDPC codes, one can protect very large blocks of data with redundant codes that yield a high probability of recovery given an overall loss rate.

In the case of critical data storage, I'd advocate in favor of large block codes such as Raptor or LDPC with a redundancy of at least 100% (meaning that one can recover the whole data is half of it is destroyed). Note that this need not be done on the physical layer, rather one could FEC-encode files with varying levels of redundancy.

Note that data recovery on damaged physical storage is no different than on unreliable transmission channels such as Wifi, 3G or IP multicast. For information, Raptor codes have been chosen for the DVB-H standard as the preferred FEC scheme for IP datacasting (based on the FLUTE protocol), and LDPC is used in DVB-S2.

For those interested by LDPC, there exists an excellent LGPL'd library by the french INRIA here (info) and here (download), and best of all it's a patent-free technology. As for Raptor, it is unfortunately proprietary and patented by Digital Fountain, but you can however find a lot of enlightening info on their Web site (worth a read if you're interested in FEC technologies).

It seems to still be available in e format - not that I have the faintest clue what it's going on about.

oh la la!
French scientists are not allowed to write publications in any language other than French
First, I worked for a French scientific institute last year (I am French), and I wrote some publications in English (proof here).
Moreover, I read an article 2 days ago saying that, in France, a lot of mathematical publications are writting in French and in the other scientific domains in English... No law here!

the french government decreed that the word e-mail is to be forbidden and replaced with made-up "courriel"

Wrong. French government has no power over the langage... It's the "Academie Française" which is supposed to tell how to spell words, and which words are French. The government wants its administration to speak French, and so wants it to use the word "courriel" which was declared French by the Academie Française - so it's logical. What would be your reaction if the American government doesn't want its administration to speak English?
I had to say that the Academie Française is sometimes not really well understood by a lot of French people (me included)...

Maraist is right, C-JDBC is database independent and can even support clusters of heterogeneous databases (as long as they can understand the same SQL subset).
In fact, scheduling the requests upfront the database usually performs better than just letting the database doing the locking (check this article). The bet is that with this solution we can have a generic way to provide clustering solutions, it is much easier than implementing it inside a RDBMS engine (see Postgres-R work) and can perform at least as well as the DB specific implementation.

The project is spear-headed by INRIA (a French research institute). The whole system is open-source and they are doing quite advanced stuff (including group communications).

Can someone please port the Thot framework and editor (as used by Amaya) to Gnome-canvas, DSSSL and XML Schemas? Because that is the best structured-document editor out there, but it's tied to the ugly, crashy Motif system and an oddball DTD/stylesheet language all of its very own.

Amaya is a result of a project called Opera at the INRIA research institute in France, which is studying user interfaces for the editing of structured documents. (They also produced the thot editor and GRIF, a successful, commercial SGML editor.)

It may not meet everyone's needs, but is definitely work checking out, if only to see structured document editing done properly. Amaya also supports MathML, and has some preliminary support for Java and plugins.

Amaya is a result of a project called Opera at the INRIA research institute in France, which is studying user interfaces for the editing of structured documents. (They also produced the thot editor and GRIF, a successful, commercial SGML editor.)

It may not meet everyone's needs, but is definitely work checking out, if only to see structured document editing done properly. Amaya also supports MathML, and has some preliminary support for Java and plugins.