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Sarcastic software can spot withering put downs
TECHNOLOGY don smith/flickr/getty
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
New puzzle champ declared SOLVING a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle should be a piece of cake – but it has won a computer a new world record. The previous record of 320 pieces was set by a Danish team in 2008, but their computer could solve simple cartoon-style puzzles only. The new software, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Taeg Sang Cho’s team, can cope with any image, including photographs of outdoor scenes. The team diced up 5-megabyte pictures into 400 squares and fed them into the software. Just as a human might, the computer analyses the predominant colours to try to work out what kind of image is hidden in the jumble, referring to an image database to roughly arrange the pieces in their likely positions. For instance, a mix of green and blue pieces might imply a landscape scene
with a blue sky above green grass. Then the software examines the colours along the boundaries of each piece and searches nearby pieces for a close match to “guess” how they should fit together. It completed the 400-piece puzzle in just 3 minutes. Because the software is good at
“Just as a human might, the computer tries to work out what kind of image is hidden in the jumble” finding image pieces that blend well, Cho hopes it will one day help image-editing packages like Photoshop make manipulated pictures look more realistic. The team will present their work at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in San Francisco next month.
–Computers are getting closer–
Webcam spies out shoulder surfers
Just what we need: sarcasm software
IN CROWDED cafes and on public transport, it’s easy for people to eyeball the info on your laptop or smartphone screen. Now Sony Ericsson is patenting an answer. Some privacy settings already let you hit a button to blank your screen when you sense a shoulder surfer is lurking. But we are often too engrossed in our work to notice such interlopers, say inventors Martin Ek and Bo Larsson. As many netbooks and laptops now have webcams, and some smartphones have front-facing cameras, the pair have developed software that can tell when more than one face is in front of the device – and blanks the screen till they’re gone (bit.ly/9fp5Gj). They suggest certain friends could be allowed to read your screen if facial recognition software is used to exempt them from the blanking mechanism.
COMPUTERS are getting better at understanding human languages, thanks partly to algorithms that can analyse sentences for positive or negative sentiments, says Ari Rappoport of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. But picking up on sarcasm is still a problem. “In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognise”, never mind computers, he says. Rappoport and colleagues wrote a sentiment-analysing program. They then trained this software to recognise sarcasm by feeding it sentences that had been
$1m
The fine imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission on internet service provider 3FN for aiding cyber-criminals
flagged up by human reviewers as likely to contain sarcasm. The team used the trained program to analyse a selection of product reviews on Amazon.com and a random selection of posts on Twitter. Three human volunteers were asked to rate the same material for sarcastic content. The algorithm agreed with the volunteers 77 per cent of the time for Amazon.com product reviews and 83 per cent of the time for the tweets. The research was presented at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington DC this week. The tool could be used by marketers to track online public sentiment surrounding brands.
“It turns out on the internet, people use Flash” Google executive Vic Gundotra takes a swipe at his company’s increasingly bitter rival Apple over its refusal to allow multimedia applications made using Adobe Flash to run on its iPhone and iPad (sfgate.com, 21 May)
29 May 2010 | NewScientist | 21
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
New puzzle champ declared SOLVING a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle should be a piece of cake – but it has won a computer a new world record. The previous record of 320 pieces was set by a Danish team in 2008, but their computer could solve simple cartoon-style puzzles only. The new software, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Taeg Sang Cho’s team, can cope with any image, including photographs of outdoor scenes. The team diced up 5-megabyte pictures into 400 squares and fed them into the software. Just as a human might, the computer analyses the predominant colours to try to work out what kind of image is hidden in the jumble, referring to an image database to roughly arrange the pieces in their likely positions. For instance, a mix of green and blue pieces might imply a landscape scene
with a blue sky above green grass. Then the software examines the colours along the boundaries of each piece and searches nearby pieces for a close match to “guess” how they should fit together. It completed the 400-piece puzzle in just 3 minutes. Because the software is good at
“Just as a human might, the computer tries to work out what kind of image is hidden in the jumble” finding image pieces that blend well, Cho hopes it will one day help image-editing packages like Photoshop make manipulated pictures look more realistic. The team will present their work at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in San Francisco next month.
–Computers are getting closer–
Webcam spies out shoulder surfers
Just what we need: sarcasm software
IN CROWDED cafes and on public transport, it’s easy for people to eyeball the info on your laptop or smartphone screen. Now Sony Ericsson is patenting an answer. Some privacy settings already let you hit a button to blank your screen when you sense a shoulder surfer is lurking. But we are often too engrossed in our work to notice such interlopers, say inventors Martin Ek and Bo Larsson. As many netbooks and laptops now have webcams, and some smartphones have front-facing cameras, the pair have developed software that can tell when more than one face is in front of the device – and blanks the screen till they’re gone (bit.ly/9fp5Gj). They suggest certain friends could be allowed to read your screen if facial recognition software is used to exempt them from the blanking mechanism.
COMPUTERS are getting better at understanding human languages, thanks partly to algorithms that can analyse sentences for positive or negative sentiments, says Ari Rappoport of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. But picking up on sarcasm is still a problem. “In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognise”, never mind computers, he says. Rappoport and colleagues wrote a sentiment-analysing program. They then trained this software to recognise sarcasm by feeding it sentences that had been
$1m
The fine imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission on internet service provider 3FN for aiding cyber-criminals
flagged up by human reviewers as likely to contain sarcasm. The team used the trained program to analyse a selection of product reviews on Amazon.com and a random selection of posts on Twitter. Three human volunteers were asked to rate the same material for sarcastic content. The algorithm agreed with the volunteers 77 per cent of the time for Amazon.com product reviews and 83 per cent of the time for the tweets. The research was presented at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington DC this week. The tool could be used by marketers to track online public sentiment surrounding brands.
“It turns out on the internet, people use Flash” Google executive Vic Gundotra takes a swipe at his company’s increasingly bitter rival Apple over its refusal to allow multimedia applications made using Adobe Flash to run on its iPhone and iPad (sfgate.com, 21 May)
29 May 2010 | NewScientist | 21