There are a lot of unsolved problem in the world. From as profound as “Where did we come from?” to as trivial as “Where did I come keep leave my keys?”.
One very interesting problem, that I had mentioned in one of my previous posts was the lack of online geographic data on places outside the US and Europe. So can the mass participation of people on the web help tackle this problem?
Today when I got home, Sabah showed me a cool site, Wikimapia – a play on wikipedia and maps. It turns out is a mashup using google maps and the concept of open participation of a Wiki.
I marked all the places I know of pretty quickly (talk about being territorial) and was able to find them because of information put up by other users. Soon I hope every inch of the globe is covered with relevant tags.
One up to human processing power 
.
I have been following Riya – a photo sharing and searching web app for quite some time. It is interesting to see that someone is trying facial recognition at this scale. Facial recognition is a really hard problem to solve. In a nut shell think of a complex graph formed by common facial features like – distance between eyes, width of the nose etc to form a faceprint. Then these nodal points are compared to a reference set of images in a database.
Easier said than done of course!
When one talks about photo sharing sites, Flickr cannot be left out of the conversation. I was thinking about how fundamentally the two approaches differ. What it boils down to is – the former using computing power and the later using the social computing power of the web to make images searchable.
So I wonder which is more accurate and what kind of results would one produce versus another?
One thing is for sure; computers can recognize but not interpret.
I have been fascinated with robotic since I was a child. But it was never easy to build a robot – a very expensive hobby to say the least. But with Lego’s mindstom I saw hope and I am waiting for Mindstorms NXT to be released.
I am more into software, as that gives you options and some possibility of “AI” to a robot. That being said I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s announcement today about their Robotics Studio.
I know there will be challenges putting the two together, but I for sure want to get back into building robots. Once a technology crosses a certain threshold, things become “obvious” that were previously novel and abstruse. Aren’t we living it on the Internet?
Vikas is a good friend and co-entrepreneur who engages uncertainty like me (don’t wish to wed it!) . He wanted to know the capacity of CDMA and what made it better. While I am not a expert on what is best for the mobile MAC (Medium Access Protocol) enviroment, CDMA does take advantage of many phenomenon that occur in wireless cellular networks -
- Relax Bandwidth Capacity - Unlike TDMA, there is no hard limit on the bandwidth. One can trade off the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) to accomodate addtional users.
- Voice Activity Dection – Since humans talk only 35% time of time, it does cause enable to increase the the capacity by almost 5-6 folds in CDMA. However it does not hold true if you are downloading rich media. Design so much depends on the Traffic pattern, no wonder my Advisor keeps asking me – “What traffic pattern are you assuming?”
There are a several other aspects and a small post would not do justice to it. The best place to start is at the source paper : Overview of Cellular CDMA that appeard in the IEE transactions on Vehicular technology in May 1991.
How well one can solve a problem really depends how well one can abstract the noise and distill to the core of the issue. While this is true in every aspect of problem solving it is particularly true in Software Development. All the rage about AJAX – it is RPC, it is Web 2.0 and every other term coined to make it sellable.
Basically it is an excellent example of abstraction. It enables the decoupling of UI from programming logic. So now the user who interacts with a web application does not have to depend on what is on the server and what is on the client.
If I may speculate, this abstraction may finally refine the web to its true potential of a socio-technical, distributive-collaborative application platform.