Google Prototype:Precision Image Search

Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

At the International WWW Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

Mr. Shah said there had been a number of technology demonstrations by Google Labs researchers, such as a project in 2005 that used machine learning techniques to recognize the gender of a person in an image. However, the company has been slow to deploy its research, he said.

iseecars.com : sale used cars

An experienced team of PhDs, software engineers, and former entrepreneurs, hailing from top universities throughout the world such as Harvard, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Peking University, and Princeton, has launched the public beta version of iSeeCars.com after having it in alpha for several months for testing and user feedback. iSeeCars.com is a revolutionary new Web2.0 search engine for used cars that gives consumers a powerful way to search for cars for sale across the Web and to discover and find the right car at the right price more easily, quickly and smartly. iSeeCars.com automates many of the manual, time-consuming steps that a consumer typically goes through today in the online search process. site: http://www.iseecars.com/

“With just one click, users of iSeeCars.com will be able to see used car listings from thousands of websites such as car classifieds sites like Craigslist, Cars.com, and Google; newspaper sites like New York Times and Boston Globe; and auction sites like eBay along with many local dealership websites,” said Jim Lee, a Co-Founder. “Think of iSeeCars.com as the Google for car classifieds. We conceived of and developed iSeeCars.com as a result of our personal frustrations with our own experiences in having to go through the tedious effort of performing multiple searches on multiple websites such as Craigslist, Cars.com, Autotrader and in having to spend an enormous amount of time manually combing through the car classified listings looking for the right car deal.”

Orkut or Yahoo360:Social Network fails!

In social networks, Google and Yahoo have tried and largely failed. To be sure, Google has Orkut, which is popular in Brazil and India, but not the United States. For its part, Yahoo has largely pulled the plug on Yahoo 360. But it is clear that MySpace and Facebook (and Bebo in the United Kingdom) remain firmly on top of the social network heap.

“We are not trying to be another social network,” said Yahoo president Susan Decker on Tuesday, during the company’s earnings conference call. “Rather, by linking users’ favorite destinations and content, with their friends’ families and communities, we can deliver better relevance on a scale that no one else has achieved.” Two days later, the company’s new chief technology officer, Ari Balogh, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, elaborated a bit on the idea. “We don’t think of social as a destination,” Mr. Balogh said. “We think of social as a dimension.”

Google has long hinted that it would take a similar approach. Earlier this week, it suggested that users of iGoogle, a personalized home page service, might be able to share activities with friends. And the company has allowed users of Reader, its blog viewing service, to share items with friends.

One challenge both companies face, however, is how to turn the voluminous amounts of data about relationships that they have in their e-mail, calendar and other services, into “social graph,” a set of relationships establishing who is friends with whom. They will have to tread carefully.

Service Pack3 : Windows XP

Microsoft confirmed today that the final version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been released to PC manufacturers right on schedule. The update will be available to end users to download next Tuesday, April 29, and pushed to Windows Update in June. A post on Microsoft’s TechNet developer site confirmed the release.

Far from being a new operating system, Windows XP SP3 is really an accumulation of updates for compatibility, security, and performance. It doesn’t contain new features found in Vista, aside from Network Access Protection (NAP), which lets XP systems work with Windows Server 2008’s ability to enforce system health requirements before allowing access to network assets. In addition to that feature, the only actually new ones are “Black Hole” Router Detection, more description in the Security Options control panel, kernel-level support for FIPS 140-1 Level 1 compliant cryptography, and a new Product Activation system that allows installation without immediately requiring a product key.

Windows XP SP3 will be available via Windows Update as a 70MB download and at Microsoft Download Center as a full installation weighing in at 580MB.

HR managers go for web2.0 to attract talent

At a seminar on “Innovative Hiring Strategies” organized by CII, recruiters said they are junking traditional talent tapping methods, and increasingly targeting social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Jobster to identify and attract quality human assets. They said while the bulk of senior and middle level hiring may still be through employee and headhunter referrals, the situation is fast changing.

According to P. Rajendran, director and COO, NIIT, employee referrals account for 30% of their recruitments. He says with web2.0 gaining popularity, this number could go up 60% in future.

According to a survey by Kelly Services, 40% of the respondents found their most recent jobs online. So, companies are actively looking at social networking websites, in addition to web portals.

With recruiters increasingly relying on social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to get the right man for the right job, what will happen to the traditional headhunter?

Ruby Hero Awards

Reasons to nominate someone

• They write educational blog posts / tutorials
• They contribute to a useful open source project
• They help organize educational events
• They give free support on the mailing list / IRC

Ruby Heroes was created to show some gratitude and give these people the recognition they deserve. Hopefully the type of recognition that keeps them doing what they’re doing, and continuing to make our community stronger.

Time has come to nominate such person for an honorary award.

Ruby Heroes is produced by the guys over at Rails Envy, and coded up by Brandon Beacher.

To nominate someone, click here.

Heroku & Morph AppSpaces : Rails Hosting

Heroku and Morph Labs are Ruby on Rails hosting providers, offering a complete environment for running Ruby on Rails applications. Compared to traditional hosters, they don’t just give you a server but offer some interesting tools and interfaces to make your live easier and relieve you from all the hassle of installing, configuring, managing and securing a server. Both are using the Amazon EC2 grid computing technology to run the
applications, so you don’t have to worry about scaling and performance issues either.

James Lindenbaum explains the unique features of Heroku:
“Heroku is hands down the easiest deployment platform for Rails apps. No humans in the loop, just drop in your code and you’re up and running. Heroku handles everything, from version control and collaboration to auto-scaling (built on top of Amazon’s EC2). We offer a full suite of tools for developing and managing your app, through either the web
interface or our new external API.“

Asked about their target audience, James replied:
“Honestly, almost everyone who wants to develop or deploy Rails apps should use Heroku. About a third of our users are beginners (many of whom haven’t written a web app before at all), and they love it because they can get up and running instantly. Another third of our users are more serious Rails developers, who just don’t want to deal with the hassles of setup, configuration, and deployment. We have started to offer features for this group over the last couple of months, and thousands of these users have been happily banging away on our private beta. The last third of our users are really hardcore Rails developers.
We’ve just begun to offer features for this group (the API, external access to Git code repositories), and have many more to be released in the coming months. It’s this hardcore group that has accounted for the largest part of the load on our platform over the last 6 weeks. “

Morph eXchange is a portal into Morph Labs’ Software as a Service offerings. The Morph AppSpaces can be found in their DevCenter. We asked Macel Legaspi from Morph Labs about the characteristics of their offering:
Morph AppSpaces are a Platform as a Service for Ruby on Rails applications. The Morph AppSpace provides all of the technology and infrastructure needed to deploy, deliver and manage a web application written in Ruby on Rails. Each Morph AppSpace provides a highly available, fault tolerant environment for a web application. Load balancers, distributed application servers, integrated web delivery stacks, security and managed backups are all part of every Morph AppSpace. A Morph AppSpace subscription is near nirvana for a Ruby on Rails web application developer. The Morph AppSpaces run on top of the Morph Application Platform. The Morph Application Platform brings together a collection of open source technologies and Morph intellectual property to provide the Morph AppSpace environment. The Morph Application Platform uses cloud computing including Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to provide computer power and online storage as needed by the Morph AppSpaces.

JRuby upgraded to version1.1

JRuby, which provides a version of the Ruby programming language to run on the Java Virtual Machine, has been upgraded, according to Sun.

Unveiled Monday as the second major project release, JRuby 1.1 features performance improvements, a re-factored IO implementation and improved memory consumption.

Also featured is compilation of Ruby to Java byte and an Oniguruma port to Java. Oniguruma is a regular expressions library.

“The main goal for version 1.1 was to improve performance,” said Sun engineer Thomas Enebo, in a statement released by Sun. “With the help from the community, we have made great strides in performance. There have been more and more reports of applications exceeding Ruby 1.8.6 performance; we are even beating Ruby 1.9 in some micro-benchmarks.”

Google takes down Google Apps Engine

Google has taken down its new Google Apps Engine development tool just a day after launching a free preview.

One of the applications Google made available to developers, HuddleChat, bears a striking resemblance to Campfire, a real-time chat application form 37Signals LLC, according to several tech bloggers who called Google to task on the matter.

Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, told ReadWriteWeb, he is disappointed that Google “stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout.”

Fried added, “We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe it’s time to reevaluate what they stand for.”

Google has not addressed the issue on its new AppEngine blog, but writes at www.huddlechat.com, “Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we’ve decided to take it down. If you’d like to see more sample applications written on Google App Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.” The entry is signed “The Google App Engine Team.”

In announcing Apps Engine on Tuesday, Kevin Gibbs, a tech lead for Google App Engine, wrote on the company’s corporate blog, “In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.”

The tool was available free to the first 10,000 developers that signed up during a preview release. The App Engine Web site now cautions that space is limited and “for now you’ll have to wait.” It’s unclear whether Google reached that quota first or shut Apps Engine’s preview before reaching that number.

Ref:A news site

OpenWebDeveloper Summit:NY

The inaugural Open Web Developer Summit (April 21-22, 2008) – devoted to Google APIs, open source and all things code, from Android to the YouTube Data API – is designed to help developers with learning how best to leverage the engineering muscle of Google in their own code, on their own web sites, and in their own businesses.

At the 2-day Summit, delegates will hear from leading developers and industry experts about the impact Google’s multifaceted initiatives are having on the world of Internet technologies today and on what the future is likely to bring from Google tomorrow. Technical sessions will explore a world of web development and application-building opportunities.

April 21-22, 2008 in New York City

In the Summit, sessions will feature topics like Google Gears, Google Mashup Editor, and Google Gadgets. They will include OpenSocial, the set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites, and GWT (used for building AJAX apps in Java). Speakers will also be looking at Android, the software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications.