Prof. Luis von Ahn (CMU)
Title: Human Computation
Abstract: This talk is about harnessing human time and energy to address problems that computers cannot yet solve. Although computers have advanced dramatically in many respects over the last 50 years, they still do not possess the basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual capabilities that most humans take for granted. By leveraging human skills and abilities in a novel way, I want to solve large-scale computational problems and collect training data to teach computers many of the basic human talents. To this end, I treat human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation. Unlike computerprocessors, however, humans require an incentive in order to become part ofa collective computation. Among other things, I show how to use online games as a means to encourage participation in the process.
Prof. Luc Van Gool (ETHZ and Univ. Leuven)
Title: Mining from large image setsAbstract: In this talk two recent applications of image mining will be discussed.The first deals with the automated collection of images of landmarks,which are then also automatically annotated and enriched with Wikipediainformation. The target application is that users photograph landmarkswith their mobile phones or PDAs, and automatically get informationabout them. The object of interest can also be automatically delineatedin the images. The entire mining of images and information is fullyautomatic. It actually retrieves more images than manual keyword inputwould produce.
A second application deals with webcams, that produce image data over prolonged periods of time. The proposed method automatically picks up rare events in such streams, which can run over months or years.