Comment Re:But does it work? (Score 1) 27
It's actually in the description:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000579
MIT & Harvard On Brain-Inspired A.I. Vision 27
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TGDaily:
"Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware. [A video describing their research is available.] 'Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,' says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. 'It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.' The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost."
Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft, Yahoo finalize search agreement
Joe Quimby writes: Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized and executed their Web-search agreement after five months of deliberation, the companies announced Friday.
Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site.
Link to Original Source
Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site.
Link to Original Source
Submission + - FreeNAS switching from FreeBSD to Debian Linux 1
dnaumov writes: FreeNAS, a popular free NAS solution is moving away from using FreeBSD as it's underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux.
Submission + - MIT/Harvard on Brain-Inspired A.I. Vision (tgdaily.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems [1] with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware like the PlayStation 3 and NVIDIA GPUs [2]. A great video describing their research is available [3].
From TGDaily: "Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task," says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard [4]. "It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do." The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost. "GPUs (graphics processor units) are a real game-changer for scientific computing. We made a powerful parallel computing system from cheap, readily available off-the-shelf components, delivering over hundred-fold speed-ups relative to conventional methods," says MIT researcher Nicolas Pinto [5]. "With this expanded computational power, we can discover new vision models that traditional methods miss."
[1] http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000579
[2] http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F07%2F27%2F0721222
[3] http://vimeo.com/7945275
[4] http://www.rowland.org/rjf/cox/Projects/Computation/computation.html
[5] http://pinto.scripts.mit.edu/Research/Research
From TGDaily: "Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task," says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard [4]. "It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do." The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost. "GPUs (graphics processor units) are a real game-changer for scientific computing. We made a powerful parallel computing system from cheap, readily available off-the-shelf components, delivering over hundred-fold speed-ups relative to conventional methods," says MIT researcher Nicolas Pinto [5]. "With this expanded computational power, we can discover new vision models that traditional methods miss."
[1] http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000579
[2] http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F07%2F27%2F0721222
[3] http://vimeo.com/7945275
[4] http://www.rowland.org/rjf/cox/Projects/Computation/computation.html
[5] http://pinto.scripts.mit.edu/Research/Research
Submission + - 13 yr-old Radio Pirate Defies Canadian Authorities
Freshly Exhumed writes: Broadcasting illegally on the FM Radio band from atop his father's strip club in Canada's capital city of Ottawa, young Jayhaed Saadé was handed a cease-and-desist order by Industry Canada inspectors on December 2 to shut down his MIX FM operation, then simply waited a few hours, pumped up the volume once again the next afternoon, and still remains defiantly on the air. His choice of programming has been described as a blatant rip-off of Lebanon's popular MIX FM music station. The story gets weirder as it seems Saadé's father is a former Ottawa mayoralty candidate, and apparently sees no harm in his son's illegal activities despite looming $20,000-per-day fines that Industry Canada may impose under Canada's Broadcasting Act, let alone the shark feeding frenzy that is sure to occur when the Mounties, the taxman, music industry copyright/plagiarism watchdogs, and other aggrieved parties descend on his second floor playhouse.
Submission + - Open Source attempt to crack GSM encryption (ieee.org)
Lexta writes: "Karsten Nohl, chief research scientist with H4RDW4RE, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security research firm, is mounting what could be the most ambitious attempt yet to compromise the GSM phone system". The intended approach is to create and open source project to spread the computation of a giant look up table across more than 80 machines. Interestingly they've openly stated that nVidia's CUDA technology will be used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPU's as well.
Submission + - What Drugs Do Astronauts Take? (discovery.com)
astroengine writes: Science fiction is stuffed full of examples of pill-popping space explorers and aliens enjoying psychedelic highs. After all, space is big, it can get boring/scary/crazy up there. It's little wonder, then, that our current space explorers consume a cocktail of uppers, downers, tranquilizers and alcohol to get the job done. Robert Lamb on tranquilizers in the space station: "Sure, it hardly makes for a civilized evening aboard ISS, but it beats someone blowing the hatch because they think they saw a something crawling on one of the solar panels."
Submission + - Nature Journal Finds Nothing Notable in CRU Leak (nature.com)
eldavojohn writes: Amid all the buzz and fallout of the CRU e-mail leak, the peer reviewed journal of Nature finds 'no scientific conspiracy.'
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