Google Technology Identifies Landmarks, Google News Searches by Author

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 23 Jun 2009

At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Florida, Google presented a paper that showcases how the search engine giant plans to enhance its image recognition technology: landmark recognition. To put it bluntly, the new technology will be able to swiftly identify the landmark from the picture you took during your last holiday. The new technology will throw a few errors your way from time to time, but Google says it accurate 80% of the time.

Head of Computer Vision Research, Jay Yagnik, explains: “In the paper, we present a new technology that enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy. To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it's cool. For our demonstration, we begin with an unnamed, untagged picture of a landmark, enter its web address into the recognition engine, and poof — the computer identifies and names it: "Recognized Landmark: Acropolis, Athens, Greece." Thanks computer.”

If the new technology caught your attention, then you can check out the full paper here (PDF warning).

Moving on, Google News, the automated news aggregator provided by the Mountain View search engine giant, now comes with the option to search for your favorite author. Besides being able to search for a specific topic in Google News, you can also search for news articles written by a specific editor/blogger.

Research Engineer, Nemanja Petrovic, explains: “We launched a feature that highlights the contributions of journalists everywhere by allowing you to find more articles by individual reporters. If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they've written. You can also search for articles by a specific journalist under Advanced Search or by searching their name after "author:" in the Google News search box.”


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