Posts Tagged ‘Photos’
Facial Recognition Software Takes One Glance at You and Brings Up Your Facebook Profile
A simple system that compares Facebook pictures and webcam snapshots can make a positive match after less than three seconds, according to Carnegie Mellon University researchers. Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues presented their findings at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas.
“A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you,” Acquisti told .
The system was able to correlate Facebook profile pictures to webcam shots, and to otherwise anonymous photos on a dating website. The Facebook-webcam system identified about 31 percent of users, and only 10 percent of the dating site users, but the message was clear — anonymity is becoming harder and harder to maintain.
This can be problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is the damage that can be done by mistaken identity. Computer systems that put the can cause headaches or worse. But in simpler terms, do average Facebook users really want random people to find out their e-mail addresses and phone numbers simply by looking at their faces?
Google engineers have discussed using its own this technology for such a purpose, but say they have no plans to actually do it.
Acquisti, an information technology and public policy professor, made a database of about 25,000 photos taken from CMU students’ Facebook profiles, CNET explains. Acquisti had volunteers peer into a webcam, and facial recognition software connected their images to their Facebook profiles. The system made a successful identification for 31 percent of the students after less than three seconds. The team also compared about 278,000 Facebook pictures to 6,000 dating website profile pictures, in which the members used pseudonyms, and about one in 10 were identifiable, CNET says.
Then the CMU researchers also developed an iPhone app that works the same way, running a photo through facial recognition software and displaying that person’s name and information on the screen.
The system only works with front-facing photos, and it would need to be refined, but as technology improves it will only get easier, Acquisti said.
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The 25 Best Places to Photograph on Planet Earth
First-Ever Photos of Space Shuttle Docked At Space Station
How the once-in-a-lifetime photo-op came to be
See the gallery.
The photo-op arose because, by sheer coincidence, the Soyuz capsule was scheduled to come home while Endeavor was docked. Two such ISS missions have never overlapped before, said a NASA spokesperson. Realizing the rare opportunity, the astronauts and space agencies arranged a photo shoot.
After the Soyuz capsule took off on March 23, Mission Control Moscow rotated the ISS 130 degrees to provide Nespoli with an optimal view of the docked shuttle. With the capsule paused for a few minutes at 600 feet away, the astronaut managed to take video footage and dozens of photographs.
The images are likely to be not only the first but also the last of their kind, since NASA’s final shuttle mission flies in July.
[via via ]
How L.A. Noire Rebuilt 1940s Los Angeles Using Vintage Extreme Aerial Photography
L.A. Noire's carefully reconstructed world owes a huge debt to Robert Spence, who photographed Los Angeles while leaning out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera in the 1920s
Since 1997, when players first sped stolen police cars through the bird’s eye canyons of Liberty City in the original Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games has constructed bigger, better, and more detailed virtual worlds than any other gaming house. These worlds--from the dusky horizons of Red Dead Redemption to the cocaine-dusted nightclubs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City--have always owed as great a debt to the popular imagination as they have to historical research. They are uncannily skillful recreations of places we know from movies and magazines. They are hyperreal, rather than authentic.
But building a faithful version of 1940s Los Angeles for their newest, L.A. Noire (out today), required more than a mastery of popular culture and a healthy knowledge of . It required Robert Spence. A Los Angeles photographer, Spence was the subject of a recent profile in and was Rockstar's secret weapon in re-creating the city.
of Robert Spence's daredevil photos and the L.A. Noire screenshots they inspired.
Team Bondi, the Australian developer behind L.A. Noire, pored over Spence’s photographs in the UCLA Department of Geography, where they’ve been held since 1971. The pictures gave Team Bondi building locations and conditions, public transportation routes, traffic patterns; the real arterial structure of a city preserved mostly in film and literature. As a result, gamers will be immersed in the most accurate version of 1940s Los Angeles ever created.
"During the roaring twenties," writes Air and Space, "Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture." Spence in turn hired a pilot and an accompanying airplane to complete the task, leaning out from the cockpit with his 46-pound camera (makes you think better of the "bulky by 2011 standards" , eh?) and shooting at an angle rather than straight down, as most other aerial photography was done at the time.
That was a huge help to Team Bondi--Simon Wood, production designer for Team Bondi, calls the Spence collection a "magical find, as they're the equivalent of satellite photography" decades before satellite photography would become common. Spence's photos actually showed Los Angeles as it was to its residents. Says Wood, "They showed us the density of the traffic and the pedestrians, the trolley car routes; they showed us different mosaics and sidewalk patterns that we couldn't make out from the other street photo reference materials. They showed the different types of rooftops and tar roof styles and air conditioner units."
The booming decade also meant a boom in real estate, which meant construction. Everywhere. Team Bondi incorporated details from the construction, captured by Spence, into several missions in L.A. Noire--without Spence's photos, Team Bondi never would have understood the now-abandoned construction methods used at the time. They even reproduced in full the now-unrecognizable Pershing Square--Los Angelenos can't experience, as Wood says, the "curved footpaths, street lamps, the food stall and the fountain" that were integral to the park. But players of L.A. Noire can wander around in the park to their hearts' content.
The Spence Collection held some surprises for Team Bondi, as versed as they were becoming in 1940s Los Angeles. "The most striking thing," says Wood, "were the oil wells! There was one on almost every corner, it was crazy! Reading about the mini-wells/nodding donkeys [the above-ground part of ] is one thing, but actually seeing them in people’s backyards was incredible." These photographs gave the developers and artists a more personal look at what living in Los Angeles at that time was really like, especially as the Spence Collection spans several decades, capturing the evolution of the great sprawling city and its surrounding areas--the filming of Ben Hur, the construction of Dodger Stadium and Disneyland, and the organic evolution of Los Angeles's peculiar downtown-surrounded-by-independent-communities layout.
We've compiled , courtesy of UCLA. They capture a Los Angeles long gone, but one that gamers are now able to experience. There's even a black-and-white mode in the game, to really get that film noir feel--and get that much closer to these amazing source photographs.
This Is Your Massive Snowstorm, America
The image, taken by NASA's GOES-13 satellite, shows the low-pressure system hitting the Midwest today, with heavy snow in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, but also pounding the Big Sky region, from Montana all the way down to Arizona. That's all moving east as well, into the Tennessee valley and soon up the coast to the Northeast. All in all, about a third of the continental U.S. is going to get absolutely pounded, so it's as good a time as any to start investing in snow-pooping robots.
[NASA Goddard Flickr via Gizmodo]
Foursquare launches new Android app earlier than expected
Foursquare may have just , but the company isn’t done with the upgrades just yet. Cofounder and chief executive Dennis Crowley just that the Android version of the new app is now available, complete with the new comments and photos features.
Though the company noted the Android version wouldn’t be out till sometime “later next week,” Android users are getting an early Christmas present. The reason may be a crowdsourced approach to testing the app, according to another from Crowley.
The comments feature is meant to give users some added value around meeting up with friends and exploring around town and the photos feature will allow for users to attach photos to a friend’s comment or the venue itself. On Monday afternoon, .
The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.
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