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<< Previous   of   Next >> Associated Press  (click to enlarge) Carnegie Mellon University's www.gwap.com Web page features five games that are each designed to help computers with tasks they can't automatically do.   ADVERTISEMENT   Related Stories • UPS horse wins; rest of field mails it in 5/18/08   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Sunday, May 18, 2008 Web page can help computers become smarter Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope Web surfers will spend their free time playing Internet-based games to help other people's and businesses' computers get smarter. On Wednesday, the researchers launched www.gwap.com with five games designed to help computers with tasks they can't automatically do. "There are a lot of things that computers cannot do, but we'd somehow like to get them done," said Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science. "So what we're doing is getting humans to do it for us." The tasks include improving computer searches for images or audio clips. For example, if you search on the Web for "sad songs," a search engine will generally show you links to audio files that have the word sad in the filename. But by getting people to describe audio clips as sad in online games like "Tag a Tune," researchers can improve searches for audio files. Users older than 13 are matched with other players on five games, with others to be added later. Among the games are: ESP, in which opposing players are shown a picture and try to guess what words the other player will use to describe the image. The game's goal is to help improve image searches on the Internet by creating descriptions of uncaptioned images. The game has already been licensed by Google as Google Image Labeler. Matchin, in which opposing players are shown the two images and asked to choose which one they like best. The more the players choose the same image, the more points they rack up. The goal is to help computers recognize what images people would prefer to see when they are searching for pictures on the Web. Squigl, where two players are given a word describing part of an image and must trace what the word is describing. Points are awarded based on how similarly the players traced the image. The goal is to help computers more easily recognize images. Players don't communicate with one another or see one another's answers; the games tell them just that they've made a match. Google caves in to privacy concerns: After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however. Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year. As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing -- everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity. Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there. This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View. Panasonic's navigation system extends beyond automobiles: Drivers in Japan can check on their pets, turn lights and air conditioning on and off and lock their front doors -- all from inside their cars -- with a new navigation system from Panasonic. In addition to guiding drivers to destinations as regular global positioning system navigation gadgets do, the $3,400 Strada F-Class will link to the home through any Internet-capable mobile phone. Users could use the phone itself to communicate with your Web-enabled home, but Panasonic says it's easier while driving to use the Strada F-Class. Users just touch icons on the navigation system's screen that read "turn off the light" or "lock the door." They can make it look as though they're home -- to ward off burglars -- by turning lights off and then on, all while they're away, said Naohisa Morimoto, an official with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which puts out Panasonic brand products. The catch is that they need a Web-enabled camera, front door and other devices. Only about 2,000 homes in Japan have such Net-linking systems, Morimoto said. But Panasonic offers home servers for about $1,900 in Japan, and cheaper ones are available. New memory card streamlines image sorting by location: A wireless memory card for digital cameras now comes with an added twist: Besides making it easier to store and share photos, the latest version of the Eye-Fi card also helps sort images by location. Eye-Fi Explore, due out next month, taps into a database run by Skyhook Wireless. That company sends trucks up and down streets to scan for home wireless routers or commercial hotspots and record the unique identifying code and location of each. The Eye-Fi card can sense the Wi-Fi access point that happens to be nearby, regardless of whether that access point is open or password-protected. The unique code for that access point gets matched with what's in the Skyhook database. When you take a photo, Eye-Fi automatically attaches data about the current location, as determined by Skyhook. "Today, that's a very manual and time-consuming process," said Jef Holove, chief executive of Mountain View, Calif.-based Eye-Fi Inc. "We're saving people the time and the hassle." Like GPS-based "geotagging" products, Eye-Fi tag photos with latitude and longitude coordinates. That could boost geotagging, which remains limited to more tech-savvy or professional photographers. Without the aid of Eye-Fi or a GPS device, location information needs to be entered manually. From Herald news services

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