Puzzle 1 done overnight!

Puzzle 1 was completed overnight! Very cool. They definitely get harder. But, the crowd helped UCSD complete puzzles 2 and 3 within a couple of days. So, we could easily catch up.

On to puzzle 2

DARPA Shredder Challenge - you could win $50,000

On October 27th, DARPA announced their Shredder Challenge. Try to unshred 5 documents for $50,000. There has been a few notable efforts such as UCSD's web based approach. But, that page has recently been compromised due to malicious users.

With the help of a few colleagues, we had also created a web-based version very early on. But, it was missing some of the login engineering and UI of the UCSD effort. So, we never made it public. But rather than attempt to build a full on competitor, we've decided to open up the tool we built for anyone to try to win the contest themselves!

http://www.unshred.me/1

You can create a private branch of each puzzle if you want to try to give it a go alone, or you can contribute to the main public copy of the puzzle. If our image analysis tinkering goes well, we may add some tools to help make finding matches easier.

NOTE: The deadline for submitting answers to DARPA is December 4, 2011 (11:59PM EST)! Only 13 days left.

GO!

Technology as a story

Generally, I consider myself a technologist. I work in technology, I choose environments that have people who are excellent at it. New technologies make the world move forward. If it is shared broadly enough, it is impossible to "un-invent" a technology and thus the world has been irrevocably changed, even if just by a little bit.

However, what saddens me is when I encounter technologists with the brilliance to create new and wonderful things, but lack a sense of what is beautiful to people. Technology is most often known for being ugly and unpleasant to use, because technologists most often build technology for other technologists.

But to touch millions of people, you have to tell a story - a story that they can believe in, a story that can inspire them. Technology is a tool by which new stories can be crafted. They are not the end product unto themselves. All too often, I find engineers and researchers who are eager to build the technology without understanding the story that goes around about why people should care, why what they built can be inspiring rather than just enabling.

It is not a skill you learn at school. I have encountered people who understand this, and others who don't. I can't say that I have mastered this ability. However, I can at least respect how powerful it can be and strive to be better at it.

As an engineer, as a technologist, as a researcher, or inventor... I encourage you understand the power of stories. A story isn't merely the sequence of events in a book or film. It can be a story about you, and how your life or the lives of the people around you could be a bit different... or how the world could be different than it is today.

It is inspiring to see what a talented artist can do with the very simplest of tools. I recently came across the following video which I feel exemplifies this idea.

When you build something or design something, take a moment to imagine the stories than can be told around what you create and to share that story with others.

The Kinect Effect

This is hands down, the best Microsoft commercial I have ever seen. It has soul. It has spirit. It has open optimism about what a company and creative enthusiasts can do together. They are even showcasing kinect projects on the official website Kinect.com

Bravo.

My hats off the the tens of thousands of creative developers who have explored the wide ranging uses of Kinect and, of course, to Microsoft & Xbox for seeing that it is a very positive thing to embrace. Yes, Kinect is a product that ultimately must make money through games and applications. But, it can also have a remarkably positive impact on our culture.

Best $3000 I ever spent.

Giving Computers a Human-Scale Understanding of Space

Computer vision and Human-Computer Interaction are just about to hit their stride. Within the past 4 years, the real-time/robotics computer vision research community has made leaps and bounds - much of it out of the Active Vision Group at Oxford and the Robot Vision Group at the Imperial College of London. One of the first pieces of work that really started to impress was PTAM (Parallel Tracking and Mapping) by Georg Klein:



Full up markerless augmented reality had been a long time dream of many. But, few people knew actually how to do it. PTAM was the first system that showed promise that it could handle the rough conditions of real-time motion of a handheld camera.

Also from Oxford, Gabe Sibley and Christopher Mei started demonstrating RSLAM (relative simultaneous localization and mapping) which provides fairly robust real-time tracking over large spaces. The following video uses a head-mounted stereo camera rig:



Just in the past couple weeks, some new projects done with the help of Richard Newcomb show what happens when you combine this tracking ability with either a depth camera like Kinect, or try to do traditional reconstruction from the RGB. These projects are called KinectFusion (a Microsoft Research Cambridge project) and DTAM (Dense tracking and mapping) respectively.



The following video uses a normal RGB camera (not a Kinect camera):


It's important to remember that no additional external tracking system is used, only the information coming from the camera. Also, it's worth pointing out that the 6DOF position of the camera is recovered precisely. So, what you can do with this data reaches well beyond AR games. It gives computers a human-scale understanding of space.

This is pretty exciting stuff. It'll take a little while before these algorithms become robust enough to graduate from a lab demo to a major commercial product. I usually like to say that "people will beat the crap out of whatever you make, and quickly gravitate to the failure cases". But as this work evolves and people begin build useful applications/software on top, it'll be an exciting next few years.

UIST 2011 Student Innovation Contest

UIST 2011 is just a couple months away, and Microsoft Hardware is generously providing the toys again this year. This time it's a touch mouse that provides a full capacitive touch image (which is fairly unique). If you are a student, try to enter, win some prizes and get to meet a bunch of other people interested in interface technology.

Official Contest Page

Myth of the Dying Mouse

It's definitely not the most polished delivery I've made (ignite talks don't let you control your slides, which is very unsettling for me). But, here's a 5 minute ignite talk I recently gave entitled "The mouse and keyboard are NOT going away, and there's NO SUCH THING as convergence".