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."

Comments

Looks Good on Paper...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fun and Easy to Use

[smitty777]

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.

Re:Fun and Easy to Use

[DynaSoar]

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.

Smitty, we've come a long way from those caps. There are now "caps" that are essentially nets of elastic cord with plastic cups containing pieces of sponge in them, the electrodes embedded in the sponge. Dip it in mild salt water for conduction, shake it out so there's no drips running together bridging the electrode sites, and pull it on. I could get good signal on 128 channels in less than 10 minutes from the time they walked in to data collection start.

There is also a European company selling a similar get up, but the preamps are built into the cups on the net, making impedance matching irrelevant and signal balancing automatic on the fly. These are so stable that they can be used ambulatory.

And nobody ever has to get goop or glue stuck on/into them any more.

no semantic information? Ahem *cough*

[davidwr]

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.