[ExI] SINGULARITY ALERT: Fast image processing algorithm.

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-07-24 23:31, Alan Grimes wrote:
> Here's the free article:
> http://research.google.com/pubs/pub40814.html
>
> I believe that this is a very significant development because it shows
> an important cognitive process being implemented on a single desktop
> machine, not even a server, cluster, or mainframe.
>
> I have only skimmed the article so far, but it seems to have the general
> characteristics of what I believe to be the ideal intelligence
> algorithm.

Not so convinced it is general intelligence, since locality-sensitive 
hashing seems to be suited only for domains that have some kind of 
spatial structure. But still, it is a very neat result. And it shows 
that a single insight into an algorithm can boost the efficiency by four 
orders of magnitude.

I think a more important use is detection of constellations of objects 
in images. Imagine indexing all photos by what objects are seen: other 
algorithms can then use this sparse input to efficiently look for 
patterns. (like "photos showing teenage girl's rooms" or 
"foreign-looking people reading Islamic literature") The search and 
surveillance applications are pretty promising, since the error rate in 
individual object detection is now countered by the far lower likelihood 
of errors in all present objects.



-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University