
Google Unveils Neural Network to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image - uptown
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neural-network-with-superhuman-ability-to-determine-the-location-of-almost/
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JoeAltmaier
We're closer to my nirvana: I go on vacation and take NO pictures, just enjoy
myself, but photobomb other people constantly. When I get home, Google makes a
vacation album for me, by identifying my face in all those other pictures!
With knowledge of my itinerary it should be easy now!

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Lanari
Years ago I was like Richard Stallman is totally crazy!, saying stuff like
don't post my pictures on Facebook and such. Today his fear is really really
justifiable...

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mwfunk
I'm all in favor of credit where credit is due, but that's like saying "the
Unabomber was right" because examples exist of modern technology being misused
in the past 20 years. If anything, his advocacy has damaged the credibility of
legitimate privacy and civil rights advocates.

Surely, SURELY RMS is not one and only person you have ever heard in your
entire life warn about the dangers of putting personal information online, or
the dangers of government surveillance. That's all just common sense and being
relatively informed and skeptical about the world and the people around you.

RMS says a heck of a lot more than "don't post your pictures on Facebook",
much like PETA says a lot more than just, "treat animals ethically", or Earth
First says a lot more than just, "don't destroy the environment". If sea
levels rise much more in my lifetime, one lesson I will not draw from it is,
"Earth First was right!"

If you care about this stuff, donate to the ACLU, not the FSF.

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MoOmer
Really? Let's not forget the NSA revelations that occurred so recently. Thanks
for reminding me to renew my fsf membership

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mwfunk
The ACLU would make much better use of your money.

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MoOmer
I'm also a member of the ACLU.

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joshfraser
You could improve the accuracy by using the timestamp of when the photo was
taken & looking at the amount of daylight in the photo.

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asciiiiii
Will this really work? Cameras are by design able to accurately control the
rate (and duration) of light they let in to create an image.

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astrange
For known cameras like iPhone, that shouldn't hurt since you can read the
exposure time out of the EXIF.

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danjoc
It's so good, it guesses the correct continent less than 50% of the time. I
bet it even gets the correct planet 100% of the time :)

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Houshalter
The median error is 1100 km. Which is better than that. But I agree with you
that this is nothing to worry about. I skimmed through the paper and thought
"wow that's really interesting it can beat humans and get results that good",
but it's not so good that it's a significant leak of privacy. Like the top
comments seem to be scared about.

The dataset might be a little biased though. I wonder how many pictures are
just of people's faces, or food, or random indoor scenes. It's much more
difficult to detect a location from such an image. How good are the results if
you exclude the images that don't have any clues at all?

As I understand it, the algorithm can identify common types of plants unique
to different regions, or architectural features, or popularity of types of
cars. So an outdoor photo is more likely to be recognized. But I'm not 100%
sure what features it's using. In fact the creators don't even know!

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andreyk
An impressive, if not very technically interesting, result. I wonder if it can
get cooler with hierarchical sets of neural nets with ever smaller grids...

An aside - I was really annoyed by "small-scale experiment shows that PlaNet
reaches superhuman performance at the task of geolocating Street View scenes".
It's absurd to say computers are superhuman at searching the web for instance,
and though this is a much more impressive perception-based result it is still
fundamentally very data intensive. Would be nice if 'superhuman' was used a
bit less now that Deep Learning has already been proven to be capable of
really impressive performance in perception tasks.

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amelius
It would be even more impressive if they could compress the images, given that
the backgrounds are already known.

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miyuru
in the article there is a game to identify locations by photos. its pretty
neat.

[https://www.geoguessr.com/](https://www.geoguessr.com/)

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dazmax
It's a great game, but a little misleading to use as a proof of concept since
presumably they trained it with google streetview data.

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hacker_9
What an impressive, and extremely creepy, use of state of the art neural net
technology.

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mey
An extensions of?

[http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

[http://parkorbird.flickr.com/](http://parkorbird.flickr.com/)

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cafebeen
I'm just going to leave this here:

[http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/)

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atrudeau
Ah, the luxury of having so much labeled data. Average machine learners like
us will never have access to such low hanging fruit...

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jmcdowell
Any idea who would have "126 million images along with their accompanying Exif
location data."?

That seems an insane amount to me.

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nl
Google Street View

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dooptroop
Yup. And we've already been tagging locations with adresses for years through
that captcha.

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nl
That isn't exactly needed for this. The GPS location will give you a street
address close enough for the metrics used by this.

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vedaprodarte
In 2008, when not all of us are using smartphones, we always remind the
smartphone users to protect their privacy. We told them not to upload their
photos. But now, who cares? Everyone should know where I am!

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nl
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/SUN/](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/SUN/)

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matchagaucho
_“Our model uses only 377 MB, which even fits into the memory of a
smartphone”_

Okay. But wouldn't this be more useful as a web service?

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dontreact
-Realtime feedback -Better privacy

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acd
Bad guys posting internet selfies are now going to get hunted by law
enforcement which is a good thing.

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hartator
Do you guys have an url where we can try it out?

Or you think it's like every "new" Google product from a few years where there
is a lot of talking before anything.

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stephenboyd
Blame the headline. It's an interesting AI research paper by a team with two
Google employees on it, not a product.

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throwawaypartay
Mark my words--this tool is going to be quickly hijacked by meme groupies who
will submit dick pics and post the location results:

"Check it out, I'm Mogadishu!"

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ck2
ah good, this means the data can be "poisoned"

 _They go further and use the machine to locate images that do not have
location cues, such as those taken indoors or of specific items. This is
possible when images are part of albums that have all been taken at the same
place._

I'm going to start including pictures of the moon surface in all my albums.

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DominikR
> I'm going to start including pictures of the moon surface in all my albums.

Sorry to say it but they're going to be able to exclude whatever you throw at
it.

And even if you found some way to meaningfully degrade the quality, they'll
analyse what you do and find a solution for that.

They are not going to suddenly throw their hands up in the air and decide to
give up.

It's a matter of how many resources can you throw at the problem and how many
can they to counteract you.

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gue5t
Exactly. Machine learning is an inequality-expanding lever just like many
other forms of capital. This is one of the reasons Google et al are so
dangerous.

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SquidLord
This has about as much reasonable intellectual bearing as suggesting that
language is an inequality expanding lever just like many other forms of
capital and one of the reasons Google and others are so dangerous.

This is just the Luddite fallacy repeated over and over. By this logic, we
should never develop new informatic methodologies, we should never develop new
forms of analysis, we should never develop new software – because of economies
of scale exist.

I'll the state the obvious: that's stupid. There's no way to soften that blow.

