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Comment Deep Learning Tutorials (Score 1) 152

by Potatomasher (#37528084) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Learn About Game Theory and AI?
Its definitely a subset of AI, but if you are interested in Machine Learning then you should check out the Deep Learning Tutorials [deeplearning.net]. They cover most of the building blocks of "Deep Learning", which you can think of as the new wave of Artificial Neural Networks. The tutorials include complete theoretical (and mathematical) descriptions of the model, as well as Python/Theano implementations. Pre-requisites would be a good math background (first year calculus should suffice), basic probability theory and coding in Python/numpy. You can learn Theano as you go along.

ps: sorry for the repost, forgot to log-in beforehand.
The Media

Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works 468

Posted by timothy from the exploding-cuban-cigar dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"
Software

Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation Software? 211

Posted by timothy from the what-we-all-want-when-we-wake-up-in-the-morning dept.
dv82 writes "I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be able to run the software on their laptops without a network connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?"
The Military

Konami Announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle In Fallujah 644

Posted by Soulskill from the tread-lightly dept.
The LA Times reports that Konami has announced Six Days in Fallujah, a video game due out next year that is based on an actual battle fought in Iraq in 2004. Quoting: "The idea for the game ... came from US Marines who returned from the battle with video, photos and diaries of their experiences. Instead of dialing up Steven Spielberg to make a movie version of their stories, they turned to Atomic Games, a company in Raleigh, NC, that makes combat simulation software for the military. ... 'The soldiers wanted to tell their stories through a game because that's what they grew up playing,' said John Choon, senior brand manager for the game at Konami... More than a dozen Marines are featured in documentary-style video interviews that are interspersed with the game's action. The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia, talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat."
Graphics

Using Photographs To Enhance Videos 102

Posted by timothy from the ready-for-my-closeup dept.
seussman71 writes with a link to some very interesting research out of the University of Washington that employs "a method of using high quality photographs to enhance a video taken of the same subject. The project page gives a good overview of what they are doing and the video on the page gives some really nice examples of how their technology works. Hopefully someone can take the technology and run with it, but one thing's for sure: this could make amateur video-making look even better than it does now." And if adding mustaches would improve your opinion of the people in amateur videos, check out the unwrap-mosaics technique from Microsoft Research.
Science

Inferring Personality From Email Addresses 309

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-really-don't-even-care-for-tacos-that-much dept.
paleshadows writes "Three researchers from the University of Leipzig published an interesting paper titled 'How extroverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses' (PDF). From the abstract: 'Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extroversion."'
Republicans

McCain Campaign Offers Rewards For Turn-Key Comments 375

Posted by timothy from the free-booze-for-edgar-allen-poe dept.
According to a story at the Washington Post, John McCain's presidential campaign is offering more than moral suasion to fire people up for a McCain presidency; they're also offering ready-made snippets of rhetoric for interested supporters to supply under their own names in public comments to online news sources and forums. Such pre-written commentary by itself is neither new nor necessarily nefarious, but it seems a bit off-kilter that prolific commenters are eligible for rewards — not just campaign swag like hats and stickers, but higher-ticket items like a ride with McCain on his campaign bus. Probably a script could be whipped up to compare the canned suggestions on the site with "grassroots" comments on political news sites around the web.

Comment Technically impossible (Score 5, Interesting) 189

by Potatomasher (#24382103) Attached to: Video Surveillance Tech Detects Abnormal Activity
I call shenanigans on this.

There is no way they can recognize 300 objects in real world conditions. I work in machine learning (academics) and the current record for generic object recognition sits at around 54-57% for the Caltech 101 database (contains images of 101 different objects). So basically the algorithms of the best and brightest minds in academia (LeCun, Poggio, Lowe, etc) get it wrong half the time !!

If any government officials are listening... Please don't waste our tax money on this !
Privacy

Video Surveillance Tech Detects Abnormal Activity 189

Posted by kdawson from the unblinking-eye dept.
Repton writes with news of a company, Behavioral Recognition Systems, that has received 16 patents on a new video surveillance application that can convert video images into machine-readable language, and then analyze them for anomalies that suggest suspicious behavior in the camera's field of view. The software can 'recognize' up to 300 objects and establish a baseline of activity. It should go on sale in September. "...the BRS Labs technology will likely create a fair number of false positives, [the CEO] concedes. 'We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept,' he says. 'We could be wrong.'"
Power

550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq 647

Posted by Soulskill from the war-on-gas-prices dept.
Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting: "While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."

Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness 199

Posted by CmdrTaco from the right-next-to-the-worlds-fattest-motercycle-twins dept.
Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours. You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com. Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."
Supercomputing

Cell-based "Roadrunner" Tops Elusive Petaflop Mark 269

Posted by timothy from the beep-beep dept.
prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."
Privacy

UK to Ban Possession of Certain 'Violent' Pornography 557

Posted by timothy from the oh-that's-a-great-idea dept.
Backlash writes "Massive surveillance? Check. Building a DNA database? Check. Laws against thought crime? Not yet, but coming very soon. The UK government is soon to pass legislation that would criminalise possession of certain types of 'violent' pornography, even if it was part of a consensual session between two adults. Lord Wallace of Tankerness pointed out an ideological schism during last week's debate in the House of Lords: 'If no sexual offence is being committed it seems very odd indeed that there should be an offence for having an image of something which was not an offence. ... Having engaged in it consensually would not be a crime, but to have a photograph of it in one's possession would be a crime. That does not seem to make sense to me.'" Combine laws like this with widespread computer ownership, and it makes a whole lot of (Orwellian) sense.

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