What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It? 1. I'm generally skeptical of the singularity and of post-scarcity economics in general. 2. I think it's interesting to ponder why the singularity might not occur. 3. 4. 5. 6. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps | Video on TE. David Merrill demos Siftables. Twine, A Tiny Gizmo That Holds The Internet's Future | Co. Design.
"In the future, your house will send you a text message to warn you that your basement is flooding. " Sounds like the kind of hooey you only hear in those fantastical "future of…" videos, doesn’t it? Not anymore. Two MIT Media Lab graduates have created a "2.5-inch chunk of the future" called Twine that does exactly that, and more, and is available right now. Well, not quite: It will be available in early 2012, thanks to its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Here’s the basic idea behind Twine: Software and physical stuff should be friends. Twine is a small slab of gray plastic that hides that PhD’s worth of engineering magic--a bunch of internal and external sensors and a Wi-Fi hub--"the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing," in Carr and Kestner’s words. PhotoSketch. Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage Tao Chen1 Ming-Ming Cheng1 Ping Tan2 Ariel Shamir3 Shi-Min Hu1 1TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University 2National University of Singapore 3The Interdisciplinary Center Abstract We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels.
The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Paper Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage System Pipeline Retrieval Results Composition Results Video Supplementary Materials 1. 2. Sktech2Photo Team Acknowledgments Note.