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Tag Images With Your Mind
blee37 writes "Researchers at Microsoft have invented a system for tagging images by reading brain scans from an electroencephalograph (EEG). Tagging images is an important task because many images on the web are unlabeled and have no semantic information. This new method allows an appropriate tag to be generated by an AI algorithm interpreting the EEG scan of a person's brain while they view an image. The person need only view the image for as little as 500 ms. Other current methods for generating tags include flat out paying people to do it manually, putting the task on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or using Google Image Labeler."
Honestly this is nice, but seriously if my mind was tagging my images there would be something like the following list of tags
idhitit, awesome,ohgod, thehelliswrongwithme, whydidisavethisagain, ohthatswhy, shit, wallpaper, and photoshop
and that's just keeping it within PG-13.
It didn't take, though. What gives?
No really what can go wrong with using your inconscient animal nature to tag every photo with a (decent) girl in bikini as "To Do"
This new method allows an appropriate tag to be generated by an AI algorithm interpreting the EEG scan of a person's brain while they view an image.
That's true, as long as "appropriate" means it was either X or Y, as the system really only works on discriminating between things like "a face" and "not a face". It's an interesting piece of research, sure, but it sure as hell won't replace good old fashioned tagging using a keyboard.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Wouldn't work with teenage males for example....
--- Mercutio was right.
MSFT: "Is his Windows and Office license legit? Let's read his mind and find out."
"Does he also run Linux?"
"Yep. Crank up up the juice and reprogram him."
The other thing I'd like mention, being only on my second cup this morning, those guys in the graphic when looked at quickly looked like they were wearing thigh high stockings.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
i just tagged this story with my mind
double the killer delete select all
Just don't let Rorschach tag any images of ink blot tests.
Summation 2
Using an EEG? Amateurs. They should be making and using a direct neural interface :)
Microsoft, be warned. Some people have a limited scope in terms of what they are thinking about at any given time.
Now you'll be able to see every bizarre thing that at least someone in the world finds attractive. "[Picture of the Grand Canyon] 17% of viewers found this image 'Sexy'"
...what could possibly go wrong? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
An EEG is not the same thing as a "brain scan". An EEG is an analog point to point system which is very good at "reading" the parts of the generalized electrical field that reaches the scalp from the brain. Using EEG output to control stuff is a fun sideline which is almost exactly as old as EEG technology itself.
It doesn't work very well, and it very probably never will. The variance in electrical activity in the brain between two people receiving the same sensory input is, in an average way, too great to be useful.
Once someone comes up with a way to shrink an MRI machine to the size of a quarter that you just stick to your forehead and talks bluetooth to all your devices, then we'll be ok.
Why does Microsoft throw money at such research topics -- which seem never to reach their products -- when they also could use the money to improve their software? If they continue like this, they may be researching the evolution of flying chairs in a few years...
You're not fast enough.
Get it to play 20 questions for you. ... Place/Thing ... StaplesButton/DolphinPanicButton"
"Person/NotPerson
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Honey, I wasn't looking at her breasts; I was just tagging the image using Microsoft's new mind tagging, honest!
It's not going to replace keyboard tagging now.
:) ).
;).
But in the future more advanced versions might.
Then you could use "thought macros" to control wearable computers.
The measurements of thought patterns are likely to be specific to each person. So devices that use thought input would have to be trained.
But after that, you could be thinking of stuff like "purple green striped elephant" as the escape sequence to tell the computer to start listening in and doing stuff based on the thought patterns it recognizes (which could include: take a picture of this, and associate it with this current thought pattern). You then use a different unique thought pattern to get it to stop (or press a manual button if stuff screws up
Then whenever you think of a thought pattern the picture or other computer memorized object (audio, url, file) will be recalled.
I have long considered this as the next step in augmenting humans.
Once you have that, people will have perfect photographic, "videographic" and "audiographic" memory, and be capable of "virtual telepathy" e.g. communicate with others just by thinking (which is trivial obvious step once you combine the thought macro stuff with wireless comms).
The problem people have to realize is the MPAA, RIAA, DRM and restrictive copyright laws will get in the way of such augmentation. It will either be crippled, prohibited or taxed severely.
They may not be happy with just a "penny for your thoughts", especially if they have got the law to consider it as "their thoughts" and their property, and not yours.
p.s. I don't see this development as "innovative", since I consider it a rather obvious step (along with the other rather obvious steps I've mentioned in this post), but I'm sure it's probably patented etc
This is typical of MS -thinking that something like this would be easy for the average user. FTA: "However, the mind reading approach has the advantage that it does not require any work at all from the user."
So, in order to use this sytem, we should all strap on EEG caps while we're surfing the web. Sounds real practical to me - I used to work in an EEG lab, and I can tell you that those caps are pretty uncomfortable to wear. After they put them on, you stick these little needles into the leads and squirt conductive goop on your scalp. It takes a few cycles to rinse that stuff out too.
Way to go MS for making productivity so much easier.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Tags.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It itches when you scroll.
It refuses to tag images of money, "evil".
I hear Apple has a multitouch brain helmet in the works! They say you'll never take it off!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
unlabeled and have no computer-readable semantic information.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, the old saying "an image is worth 1,000 words" implies that images frequently have semantic information, at least in the sense that anything on paper can have semantic information. It's just that computers can't parse it, catalog it, search on it, etc. Not well, anyways, not yet. They are getting there though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Just one minor nitnoid: the title of this article should be "Tagging Images With Your Brain", not Mind. Electrical impulses are used - using the word mind implies that some conscious effort is involved. This is strictly identifying patterns using machine algorithms independent of the user's thought process.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Useful, but real-world tagging is much more specific than "person", "animal", or "inanimate". The number of classes required in the classification task is thus far greater and one would expect the accuracy to be proportionally lower. OTOH, it could be a great preprocessing step for further manual analysis, or a step in a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Or maybe 3 classes suffice for certain specific situations.
What happens when I'm tagging a photo but listening to music at the same time?
Or I run the photo tagging software in a small window and watch a movie (or some porn) instead?
So they can create tags from brain waves, but there's no way to tell what a user is actually focussing on.
Question everything?
Any image that stimulates brain activity not close to the surface is unclassifiable?
Are brain scans really so cheap that it's cheaper to set up an EEG than to pay someone in a third-world country to do it?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
So we'll now have automatic 'Like', 'Dislike' and 'Eeeeeeagh my visual cortex where is the brain soap' responses?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I for one welcome our mask overlords
Maybe if this were integrated with an intelligent tag vocabulary, such as the one at http://annotator.imense.com/faq-annotator/, the lives of those poor people manually tagging these images can be improved. Not to mention the potential increase in accuracy.
Tagging images is an important task because many images on the web are unlabeled and have no semantic information.
And yet somehow we've managed to survive. I've never really seen the point behind "tagging" much of anything. In every implementation, it just amounts to a mostly random bunch of words that a mostly random person or group thought vaguely described the item at that time. It's never been useful for finding more of the same because tags are so absurdly broad, and it's never been useful for narrowing down searches. Most of the time they're not even useful for getting vague overviews of the item.
Right here on slashdot, tags on the front page include "!change", "social", "donotwant", and "duh". There will never be a point at which I am going to think "Gee, I'd sure like to read more stories about 'not-change'. I'll just click this tag here..." That doesn't even tell me what the story is about -- it only tells me that enough smartasses thought it was clever for some reason.
The same pretty much applies to anything else that gets "tagged" online. It's just noise. Why does it matter?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Dang, that's older than I thought!
How about, with or without the brain sensors, a Recaptcha-like system where multiple people tag each photo and each person has to tag several photos, one already heavily processed and one as-yet-untagged? This might prove to be a lot more difficult for machines to do than text systems. On the other hand, if the determined spammers out there figure out how to get a machine to do it, then they've done our work and we now have a machine that can tag photos.