

Image Recognition solved?  Or, human powered? - earle
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/29/image-recognition-problem-finally-solved-lets-pay-people-to-tag-photos/

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noonespecial
Check amazon mechanical turk. I bet you'll find the secret there...

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earle
Understanding the computational difficulty in both theory as well as practice,
I have to say, I find this reaching.

I guess the bigger question though is, "Who Cares?"

If someone's going to use humans to tag my 5k Flickr Photos, and I don't have
to pay for it, it's probably better than an automated solution anyways -- the
humans will invariably tag better anyhow.

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amichail
It matters if you care about privacy.

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wanorris
It depends what you use it for. If it's for your public Flickr stream or
something similar, privacy is irrelevant, right?

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astine
"privacy policy: TBD"

I would not touch that with a ten foot pole. That's one of the first things a
company should consider.

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JayNeely
I have to disagree. Depending on how long they've been around, maybe TagCow is
at the point where they really should have typed out a basic privacy policy.
But to say that it's "one of the first things" a company should consider is a
lawyer-fearing mentality that can kill a company before it's launched; it's
the kind of mindset that says the founders of a coffee shop company should be
discussing whether to put "WARNING: VERY HOT" on the cups before they're
talking about branding and business models.

Privacy and data storage are important issues that shouldn't be ignored,
certainly. But I think when you're starting a new venture, the default
assumption should be that your policies are going to be as user-friendly and
standard as possible, until something arises that forces you to say, "Standard
might not work for us. We need to take a look at the details."

As far as TagCow specifically is concerned, if TechCrunch's assumptions about
it being human-powered are correct, then TagCow is probably trying to figure
out a way of saying, "Your pictures will be shown to 3rd parties" (their
tagging contractors) without making it sound like "your family photos are
being spread around the internet like a coughing cold at summer camp". Best of
luck to them.

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amichail
How would you build a human computation game that assigns names to people in
images as a side-effect?

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greendestiny
A six-degrees of separation game. Tags in the same photo are a connection, and
you have build paths from John Doe to Jane Fro, the longer the better - humans
are worth more points than objects but both count.

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pmjordan
How would you avoid cheating? Hope that enough people are honest?

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greendestiny
User moderation so you can flag any dubious tags, with exponential lock outs
for dodgy taggers.

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pixcavator
After so many enthusiastic articles about image recognition technology, it is
funny how they have changed the attitude: "A trail of failed startups have
tried to tackle the problem... Google has effectively thrown in the towel..."
For a longer list of "failed startups" see here:
[http://www.inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image_search#Visu...](http://www.inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image_search#Visual_image_search_engines).

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angstrom
They took the jobsintown.de advertising campaign a little too seriously...
<http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2006/05/jobsintownde.html>

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randomhack
Hmm the site says on the front page "Automatically". This was added later?

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redorb
wouldn't be surprised if they were on a gov grant to help the semantic web.

