The great promise of this kind of algorithm is in image search. At the moment, it is straightforward to hunt for images taken at a specific place or at a certain time. But it is hard to find images taken of specific people. This is step in that direction. It is inevitable that this capability will be with us in the not too distant future.
via The Face Detection Algorithm Set to Revolutionize Image Search | MIT Technology Review.
“We’re almost at a 1 percent efficiency rate of converting sunlight into isopropanol,” Nocera said. “There have been 2.6 billion years of evolution, and Pam and I working together a year and a half have already achieved the efficiency of photosynthesis.”
via Researchers design bionic leaf capable of converting sunlight into liquid fuel – Techie News.
Mayfield told CBS News that the exact same thing – turning electrons into biomass – has already been done many a times previously by using the same bacteria.
Accuracy of 90 percent with 80 percent consistency sounds good, but the scores are “actually very poor, since they are for an exceedingly easy case,” Amaral said in an announcement from Northwestern about the study.
Applied to messy, inconsistently scrubbed data from many sources in many formats – the base of data for which big data is often praised for its ability to manage – the results would be far less accurate and far less reproducible, according to the paper.
via Test shows big data text analysis inconsistent, inaccurate | Computerworld.
Here’s an interesting explanation as to how LDA, Latent Dinchlet Allocation works. From: What is a good explanation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation?
From a 3000 foot level as I understand the explanation of LDA; it seems like a mechanism to score words in order to categorize sets of words like paragraphs or entire papers. Interesting exercise but a human must data model this first. Any time some program has to estimate or guess like this there will be error, the only issue is how much is acceptable to even use the results that this kind of analysis produces.
As an example, the researchers wrote about looking at data from September 23 and 24 and who went to a bakery one day and a restaurant the other. Searching through the data set, they found there could be only person who fits the bill – they called him Scott. The study said, “and we now know all of his other transactions, such as the fact that he went shopping for shoes and groceries on 23 September, and how much he spent.”
The Aragoscope is named after French scientist Francois Arago who first noticed how a disk diffracted light waves. The principle is based on using a large disk as a diffraction lens, which bends light from distant objects around the edge of the disk and focuses it like a conventional refraction lens. The phenomenon isn’t very pronounced on the small scale, but if the telescope is extremely large, it not only becomes practical, but also extremely powerful.
via Lensless space telescope could be 1,000 times stronger than Hubble.
Engineers at Russia’s chief manned spacecraft contractor are developing a habitable orbital laboratory, which could serve as the cornerstone of a future deep-space outpost. The new 20-ton module is scheduled to dock at the Russian segment of the International Space Station, ISS, in 2017 or 2018.
Poker being what it is, the robot, named Cepheus after a constellation in the northern hemisphere, will lose if it’s dealt an inferior hand, but it will minimize its losses as best as is mathematically possible and will slowly but surely take your money by making the “perfect” decision in any given scenario. Heads-up limit Hold’Em, it can be said, has been “solved.”
via This Robot Is the Best Limit Texas Hold’Em Player in the World | Motherboard.
And it was solved by computer scientists at the University of Alberta who don’t actually play the game. That’s because solving the game is more of a math problem than anything else.
This development is like when they discovered Basic Strategy for blackjack.
In Shell’s view, this means avoiding the costly tasks of building a pipeline to the Australian coast and of constructing an LNG facility that might face a long series of planning battles, and require a host of new infrastructure on a remote coastline.
So Prelude will be parked above the gas field for a projected 25 years and become not merely a rig, harvesting the gas from down below, but also a factory and store where tankers can pull alongside to load up with LNG.