Project Name: "A Life" Project Goal: Obtain "A Life" and do something with it once obtained. Probability of success: (World Population - Number of people on MySpace) / World Population
1) This guy is clearly a scum bag, and worst, he is probably in the lower 5% in terms of intelligence amongst his theiving peers as he got caught. But, he has "Hollywood good looks", an "Addiction" and couldn't help himself according to TF interview. Instead of being demonized, he is portrayed as just your average guy who made some wrong decisions. He is just a moron that CHOSE to cheat his way into money, and failed. How is this even news worthy?
2) Everyone has an addiction. I am addicted to browsing the web at night and probably caffeine. That is not an excuse to do something that is morally and ethically wrong. Nor does it excuse the self-righteous way he presents himself. If you do something wrong, just take responsibility and say "Sorry. I made a mistake. I won't do it again". Blowing a one-line apology to a four-page article is crappy sensationalist journalism.
3) "He enjoyed chatting on AOL". This pisses me off.
Now excuse me while I go make a wrong decision and drive my car into some pedestrians. See, I am addicted to hitting people, ever since I played all those violent video games, like Grand Theft Auto. I can be contacted at "Ruins.Is@Moron.org" by the media if they wish to interview me./end sarcasm
The VW project sits on a few different fields of research under the umbrella term "Robotics", such as mobile robotics (path planning, SLAM, range sensor, scan matching), computer vision (getting meaning from video, tracking objects visually) and machine learning (training various software systems based on learning data, like road colour for example). All these fields have plenty of open problems and many problems that can only be solved in "controlled", a.k.a. near-trivial, environments.
Just a few points about your post: 1) AI will not already be available if it was a commerical effort. Not for at least a few more decades. This is coming from what I have read as a PhD student in Robotics and Computer Vision, so I *may* be a bit pessimistic. But many of the researchers I have talked to, both in and our of academia, feel the same
2) Making an intelligent machine is hard, and it is a long term goal. Commercial projects generally require short term results. The academic research setting allows for long term research that may yield useful results 5-10 years from now. To give you an example, try search for SIFT, which came from academic research, and is now used in many commercial software and robotics products.
3) I seriously doubt self-driving cars can make it to our streets anytime soon. Apart from the lack of adaptable machine learning and robotics systems, the *legal* problems will take a long time to overcome. Our legal systems, at lesat, in Western countries, will have major issues dealing with any semi-intelligent systems that makes decisions for us. Decisions which may directly cause injury and death. Liability is a problem when a learning system passes standardized tests, and it makes a mistake. Who is responsible, the system?
If you take away my morning coffee, I can probably generate all 200,000 matchable problems in a day's work...
Maybe they should just assume the marketing and sales adage "The customer is always right" and just forgo the whole support system all together.
P.S. Sorry for the lack luster sarcasm, but a story about customer support and problem signatures is a bit to exciting for me to make fun of. Seriously.
I have never really had a panic attack, but I do get nervous at big exams. I have had good performance at exams, including university exams. (I on scholarship, doing a PhD in robotics...)
Anyways, I find that if you can channel your nervous energy into thinking about the exam, especially during the actual 3-hour test, it helps a lot. I don't know if it was the adrenaline or just nerves, but I generally worked faster during the exam period. This might have to do with the fact that I tend to work better when there is an immediate deadline in front of me.
I did cram for exams quite a bit, usually a few hours before the exam, just to keep some of the tedious material fresh. This is pretty useful for subjects that require you to commit quotes and information to memory. But, for engineering and science subjects, its more about understanding than memorisation, so, I tend to just chill out before those exams. This may include music, some gaming or just playing some sports. I personally don't do much socializing before exams, as I find my friends can be very, very distracting. And I end up remembering most of our conversations, as opposed to exam material.
A final piece of advice. Don't think about anything else outside the exam. Not that job you want after graduation, not about the parties and not about what would happen if you fail. Just think about the exam and try to recall, in your mind, what you know and what you don't. Spend your time learning about what you don't know. When ever you feel pressured and panic, just say to yourself "What can I do to make the situation better?" and you should, after a while, just automatically either relax or re-read some parts of the material that you think you need extra work on.
How impressive this research really is won't be known until we can have a look at their methods, algorithms and training data set. I have a feeling that the novel aspect of their work is not in the extraction of features, or the method used to determine whether a surface is vertical or horiztonal. As others have already said, shape from shading (think shading a lit cube with a pencil on paper) and even geometric approaches can get you a 3D model from 2D images. It all depends on the assumptions you make before hand. However, if their system learned the classification from the 300+ images it got fed, that would be pretty impressive, even though they most likely hand labelled the images as mostly vertical, a bit of both, etc.
On a side note, Kanade is a very influential researcher in computer vision, and one with a massive and solid body of novel work. If he said that the CMU researchers' work is good and novel, it adds quite a bit of weight to their claims.
Oh, and to those that said images of buildings are not "everyday", keep in mind that most research papers I have seen operate on handcrafted images, sometimes of a single kind of object. Being able to handle arbitrary images of buildings is very, very general and "everyday".
Even though I don't technically live in the US, I do live in one of its "colonies", namely, Australia. We are in the process of getting similar IP laws to the US, we show ~80% US tv shows on our free-to-air TV stations and we followed the states in not signing the Kyoto treaty as well as going into Iraq.
Here is what I *think* the US is trying to do: 1) Strengthen it's military power as well as the fear and respect it generates 2) Use this military power (as well as its expertise with finance) to obtain new resources as well as improve the result of bargaining situations 3) ??? 4) Profit!
Developing new weapons, especially those designed to inflict maximum civilian damage, pretty much follows the US plan. I wonder if China will actually take the bait of going into an arms race with the US, given that it will be ahead economically in a decade or less.
Oh well, since Australia is both an ally to the US and China (uranium deal), I think we will be fine...
Slashdot Mirror
Project Name: "A Life"
Project Goal: Obtain "A Life" and do something with it once obtained.
Probability of success:
(World Population - Number of people on MySpace) / World Population
/begin sarcasm
/end sarcasm
1) This guy is clearly a scum bag, and worst, he is probably in the lower 5% in terms of intelligence amongst his theiving peers as he got caught. But, he has "Hollywood good looks", an "Addiction" and couldn't help himself according to TF interview. Instead of being demonized, he is portrayed as just your average guy who made some wrong decisions. He is just a moron that CHOSE to cheat his way into money, and failed. How is this even news worthy?
2) Everyone has an addiction. I am addicted to browsing the web at night and probably caffeine. That is not an excuse to do something that is morally and ethically wrong. Nor does it excuse the self-righteous way he presents himself. If you do something wrong, just take responsibility and say "Sorry. I made a mistake. I won't do it again". Blowing a one-line apology to a four-page article is crappy sensationalist journalism.
3) "He enjoyed chatting on AOL". This pisses me off.
Now excuse me while I go make a wrong decision and drive my car into some pedestrians. See, I am addicted to hitting people, ever since I played all those violent video games, like Grand Theft Auto. I can be contacted at "Ruins.Is@Moron.org" by the media if they wish to interview me.
The VW project sits on a few different fields of research under the umbrella term "Robotics", such as mobile robotics (path planning, SLAM, range sensor, scan matching), computer vision (getting meaning from video, tracking objects visually) and machine learning (training various software systems based on learning data, like road colour for example). All these fields have plenty of open problems and many problems that can only be solved in "controlled", a.k.a. near-trivial, environments.
Just a few points about your post:
1) AI will not already be available if it was a commerical effort. Not for at least a few more decades. This is coming from what I have read as a PhD student in Robotics and Computer Vision, so I *may* be a bit pessimistic. But many of the researchers I have talked to, both in and our of academia, feel the same
2) Making an intelligent machine is hard, and it is a long term goal. Commercial projects generally require short term results. The academic research setting allows for long term research that may yield useful results 5-10 years from now. To give you an example, try search for SIFT, which came from academic research, and is now used in many commercial software and robotics products.
3) I seriously doubt self-driving cars can make it to our streets anytime soon. Apart from the lack of adaptable machine learning and robotics systems, the *legal* problems will take a long time to overcome. Our legal systems, at lesat, in Western countries, will have major issues dealing with any semi-intelligent systems that makes decisions for us. Decisions which may directly cause injury and death. Liability is a problem when a learning system passes standardized tests, and it makes a mistake. Who is responsible, the system?
I propose testing the pedometer theory on the following animal:
Homo Sapiens
If you take away my morning coffee, I can probably generate all 200,000 matchable problems in a day's work...
Maybe they should just assume the marketing and sales adage "The customer is always right" and just forgo the whole support system all together.
P.S. Sorry for the lack luster sarcasm, but a story about customer support and problem signatures is a bit to exciting for me to make fun of. Seriously.
A single eye, composed of orange flames, sitting atop a tall tower, emitting a large beam of light, like a lighthouse, should work pretty well.
Then again, it didn't work out too well the last time someone tried it.
I have never really had a panic attack, but I do get nervous at big exams. I have had good performance at exams, including university exams. (I on scholarship, doing a PhD in robotics...)
Anyways, I find that if you can channel your nervous energy into thinking about the exam, especially during the actual 3-hour test, it helps a lot. I don't know if it was the adrenaline or just nerves, but I generally worked faster during the exam period. This might have to do with the fact that I tend to work better when there is an immediate deadline in front of me.
I did cram for exams quite a bit, usually a few hours before the exam, just to keep some of the tedious material fresh. This is pretty useful for subjects that require you to commit quotes and information to memory. But, for engineering and science subjects, its more about understanding than memorisation, so, I tend to just chill out before those exams. This may include music, some gaming or just playing some sports. I personally don't do much socializing before exams, as I find my friends can be very, very distracting. And I end up remembering most of our conversations, as opposed to exam material.
A final piece of advice. Don't think about anything else outside the exam. Not that job you want after graduation, not about the parties and not about what would happen if you fail. Just think about the exam and try to recall, in your mind, what you know and what you don't. Spend your time learning about what you don't know. When ever you feel pressured and panic, just say to yourself "What can I do to make the situation better?" and you should, after a while, just automatically either relax or re-read some parts of the material that you think you need extra work on.
How impressive this research really is won't be known until we can have a look at their methods, algorithms and training data set. I have a feeling that the novel aspect of their work is not in the extraction of features, or the method used to determine whether a surface is vertical or horiztonal. As others have already said, shape from shading (think shading a lit cube with a pencil on paper) and even geometric approaches can get you a 3D model from 2D images. It all depends on the assumptions you make before hand. However, if their system learned the classification from the 300+ images it got fed, that would be pretty impressive, even though they most likely hand labelled the images as mostly vertical, a bit of both, etc.
On a side note, Kanade is a very influential researcher in computer vision, and one with a massive and solid body of novel work. If he said that the CMU researchers' work is good and novel, it adds quite a bit of weight to their claims.
Oh, and to those that said images of buildings are not "everyday", keep in mind that most research papers I have seen operate on handcrafted images, sometimes of a single kind of object. Being able to handle arbitrary images of buildings is very, very general and "everyday".
Even though I don't technically live in the US, I do live in one of its "colonies", namely, Australia. We are in the process of getting similar IP laws to the US, we show ~80% US tv shows on our free-to-air TV stations and we followed the states in not signing the Kyoto treaty as well as going into Iraq.
Here is what I *think* the US is trying to do:
1) Strengthen it's military power as well as the fear and respect it generates
2) Use this military power (as well as its expertise with finance) to obtain new resources as well as improve the result of bargaining situations
3) ???
4) Profit!
Developing new weapons, especially those designed to inflict maximum civilian damage, pretty much follows the US plan. I wonder if China will actually take the bait of going into an arms race with the US, given that it will be ahead economically in a decade or less.
Oh well, since Australia is both an ally to the US and China (uranium deal), I think we will be fine...