Re: A New Site for Discussing Innovative Computer Science Ideas

From: Amir Michail (amichail_at_cse.unsw.edu.au)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: 29 Dec 2003 22:16:30 -0800

"Eugene Fridman" <fridman@compuserve.com> wrote in message news:<bsqhve$6qr$1@ngspool-d02.news.aol.com>...
> Amir,
>
> >> We are particularly interested in ideas that are highly
> >> counter-intuitive yet likely to work nonetheless (such as for example
> >> http://www.espgame.org).
>
> What is "counter-intuitive" about this game? What does it have to do with
> the computer science?
>
> Please clarify.

Maybe "counter-intuitive" is the wrong word for this example, but it
certainly requires some creative thinking.

Labeling images is important for image search. Currently, this is
done by looking for text near the image, perhaps on hyperlinks to it.

Obviously, one would get better results if you actually look at the
image itself, but this is a difficult problem. There is some computer
vision research along this direction, but I believe it's pretty
elementary compared to say what a human being can do.

The ESP game is very interesting because it looks at this problem from
a completely different point of view, were the image labeling is done
as a byproduct of a "fun" two player game.

I'm not going to argue about whether this is considered computer
science, but it does provide a potential solution to the web image
labeling problem.

Amir