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It is not a list, it means the message was scanned for viruses etc.,
along the way, and found ok.<br><br>
Dave<br><br>
At 08:50 AM 4/6/2016, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""> <br>
<font size=2>Good morning,<br>
</font> <br>
<font size=2>I keep seeing things with {disarmed}. What is
this? Is it a list? If so, how does one aubscribe?
Thanks. <br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>----- Original Message ----- <br>
<dd>From:</b> <a href="mailto:nfbk@nfbnet.org">Cathy Jackson via Nfbk</a>
<br>
<dd>To:</b> <a href="mailto:nfbktad@nfbnet.org">NFB of Kentucky,
Technology Assistance Division</a> <br>
<dd>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:cathyj1949@gmail.com">Cathy Jackson</a> ;
<a href="mailto:nfbk@nfbnet.org">NFBK</a> <br>
<dd>Sent:</b> Saturday, April 02, 2016 9:58 AM<br>
<dd>Subject:</b> Re: [Nfbk] [Nfbktad] {Disarmed} Decades of computer
vision research, one ‘Swiss Army knife’<br><br>
<dd>Ann worked for our national office not NFB of Maryland.<br>
<dd>Cathy<br><br>
<dd>Sent from my iPhone<br><br>
<dd>On Apr 2, 2016, at 9:03 AM, Kevin Pearl via Nfbktad
<<a href="mailto:nfbktad@nfbnet.org">nfbktad@nfbnet.org</a>>
wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
<dd>Anne Taylor is a senior project manager at Microsoft and a former
NFBK member. She also worked for the NFB in Baltimore. <br><br>
<br>
<dd><h1><b>Decades of computer vision research, one ‘Swiss Army
knife’ - Next at Microsoft</b></h1><br><br>
<dd>When Anne Taylor walks into a room, she wants to know the same things
that any person would.<br><br>
<dd>Where is there an empty seat? Who is walking up to me, and is that
person smiling or frowning? What does that sign say?<br><br>
<dd>For Taylor, who is blind, there aren’t always easy ways to get this
information. Perhaps another person can direct her to her seat, describe
her surroundings or make an introduction.<br><br>
<dd>There are apps and tools available to help visually impaired people,
she said, but they often only serve one limited function and they
aren’t always easy to use. It’s also possible to ask other people for
help, but most people prefer to navigate the world as independently as
possible.<br><br>
<dd>That’s why, when Taylor arrived at Microsoft about a year ago, she
immediately got interested in working with a group of researchers and
engineers on a project that she affectionately calls a potential “Swiss
Army knife” of tools for visually impaired people.<br><br>
<dd>“I said, ‘Let’s do something that really matters to the blind
community,’” said Taylor, a senior project manager who works on ways
to make Microsoft products more accessible. “Let’s find a solution
for a scenario that really matters.”<br><br>
<dd>That project is <a href="https://youtu.be/3WP7Id8SxYQ">Seeing AI</a>,
a research project that uses computer vision and natural language
processing to describe a person’s surroundings, read text, answer
questions and even identify emotions on people’s faces. Seeing AI,
which can be used as a cell phone app or via smart glasses from
<a href="http://www.pivothead.com/">Pivothead</a>, made its public debut
at the company’s <a href="http://build.microsoft.com/">Build
conference</a> this week. It does not currently have a release
date.<br><br>
<dd>Taylor said Seeing AI provides another layer of information for
people who also are using mobility aids such as white canes and guide
dogs.<br><br>
<dd>“This app will help level the playing field,” Taylor
said.<br><br>
<dd>At the same conference, Microsoft also unveiled
<a href="https://www.captionbot.ai/">CaptionBot,</a> a demonstration site
that can take any image and provide a detailed description of
it.<br><br>
<dd>Very deep neural networks, natural language processing and more<br>
</b>
<dd>Seeing AI and CaptionBot represent the latest advances in this type
of technology, but they are built on decades of cutting-edge research in
fields including computer vision, image recognition, natural language
processing and machine learning.<br><br>
<dd>In recent years, a spate of breakthroughs has allowed computer vision
researchers to do things they might not have thought possible even a few
years before.<br><br>
<dd>“Some people would describe it as a miracle,” said
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/xiaohe/">Xiaodong
He</a>, a senior Microsoft researcher who is leading the image captioning
effort that is part of
<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services">Microsoft
Cognitive Services</a>. “The intelligence we can say we have developed
today is so much better than six years ago.”<br><br>
<dd>The field is moving so fast that it’s
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/264408/ImageCaptionInWild.pdf">
substantially better </a>than even six months ago, he said. For example,
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/people/ktran/">Kenneth Tran</a>, a
senior research engineer on his team who is leading the development
effort, recently figured out a way to make the image captioning system
more than 20 times faster, allowing people who use tools like Seeing AI
to get the information they need much more quickly.<br><br>
<dd>A major a-ha moment came a few years ago, when researchers hit on the
idea of using deep neural networks, which roughly mimic the biological
processes of the human brain, for machine learning.<br><br>
<dd>Machine learning is the general term for a process in which systems
get better at doing something as they are given more training data about
that task. For example, if a computer scientist wants to build an app
that helps bicyclists recognize when cars are coming up behind them, it
would feed the computer tons of pictures of cars, so the app learned to
recognize the difference between a car and, say, a sign or a
tree.<br><br>
<dd>Computer scientists had used neural networks before, but not in this
way, and the new approach resulted in big leaps in computer vision
accuracy.<br><br>
<dd>Several months ago, Microsoft researchers
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/jiansun/">Jian
Sun</a> and
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kahe/">Kaiming
He</a>made another big leap when they unveiled a new system that uses
very deep neural networks called
<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385">residual neural networks</a>
to correctly identify photos. The
<a href="http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/12/10/microsoft-researchers-win-imagenet-computer-vision-challenge/">
new approach</a> to recognizing images resulted in huge improvements in
accuracy. The researchers shocked the academic community and won two
major contests, the <a href="http://www.image-net.org/">ImageNet</a> and
<a href="http://mscoco.org/home/">Microsoft Common Objects in
Context</a>challenges.<br><br>
<dd>Tools to recognize and accurately describe images<br>
</b>
<dd>That approach is now being used by Microsoft researchers who are
working on ways to not just recognize images but also write captions
about them. This research, which combines image recognition with natural
language processing, can help people who are visually impaired get an
accurate description of an image. It also has applications for people who
need information about an image but can’t look at it, such as when they
are driving.<br><br>
<dd>The image captioning work also has received
<a href="https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/inside_microsoft_research/2015/06/11/microsoft-researchers-tie-for-best-image-captioning-technology/">
accolades for its accuracy</a> as compared to other research projects,
and it is the basis for the capabilities in Seeing AI and Caption Bot.
Now, the researchers are working on expanding the training set so it can
give users a deeper sense of the world around them.<br>
<dd>
<a href="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2016/03/FSPB4720.jpg">
<img src="https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2016/03/FSPB4720-1024x634.jpg" width=643 height=398 alt="Margaret Mitchell">
</a> <br><br>
<dd>Margaret Mitchell<br><br>
<dd><a href="http://m-mitchell.com/">Margaret Mitchell</a>, a Microsoft
researcher who specializes in natural language processing and has been
one of the industry’s leading researchers on image captioning, said she
and her colleagues also are looking at ways a computer can describe an
image in a more human way.<br>
<br>
<dd>For example, while a computer might accurately describe a scene as
“a group of people that are sitting next to each other,” a person may
say that it’s “a group of people having a good time.” The challenge
is to help the technology understand what a person would think was
<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.06974">most important, and worth
saying</a>, about the picture.<br><br>
<dd>“There’s a separation between what’s in an image and what we
say about the image,” said Mitchell, who also is one of the leads on
the Seeing AI project.<br><br>
<dd>Other Microsoft researchers are developing ways that the latest image
recognition tools can provide more thorough explanations of pictures. For
example, instead of just describing an image as “a man and a woman
sitting next to each other,” it would be more helpful for the
technology to say, “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are posing for a
picture.”<br><br>
<dd>That’s where
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/leizhang/">Lei
Zhang</a> comes in.<br><br>
<dd>When you search the Internet for an image today, chances are high
that the search engine is relying on text associated with that image to
return a picture of Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift.<br><br>
<dd>Zhang, a senior researcher at Microsoft, is working with researchers
including Yandong Guo on a system that uses machine learning to identify
celebrities, politicians and public figures based on the elements of the
image rather than the text associated with it.<br><br>
<dd>Zhang’s research will be included in the latest vision tools that
are part of
<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services">Microsoft
Cognitive Services</a>. That’s a set of tools that is based on
Microsoft’s cutting-edge machine learning research, and which
developers can use to build apps and services that do things like
recognize faces, identify emotions and distinguish various voices. Those
tools also have provided the technical basis for Microsoft showcase apps
and demonstration websites such as
<a href="http://how-old.net/">how-old.net</a>, which guesses a person’s
age, and
<a href="http://news.microsoft.com/features/fetch-new-microsoft-garage-app-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-name-that-breed/">
Fetch</a>, which can identify a dog’s breed.<br><br>
<dd>Microsoft Cognitive Services is an example of what is becoming a more
common phenomenon the lightning-fast transfer of the latest research
advances into products that people can actually use. The engineers who
work on Microsoft Cognitive Services say their job is a bit like solving
a puzzle, and the pieces are the latest research.<br><br>
<dd>“All these pieces come together and we need to figure out, how do
we present those to an end user?” said Chris Buehler, a software
engineering manager who works on Microsoft Cognitive Services.<br><br>
<dd>From research project to helpful product</b><br>
<dd>Seeing AI, the research project that could eventually help visually
impaired people, is another example of how fast research can become a
really helpful tool. It was conceived at last year’s
<a href="http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2015/07/27/oneweek-hackathon-2015-heard-around-the-world/">
//oneweek Hackathon</a>, an event in which Microsoft employees from
across the company work together to try to make a crazy idea become a
reality.<br><br>
<dd>The group that built Seeing AI included researchers and engineers
from all over the world who were attracted to the project because of the
technological challenges and, in many cases, also because they had a
personal reason for wanting to help visually impaired people operate more
independently.<br><br>
<dd>“We basically had this super team of different people from
different backgrounds, working to come up with what was needed,” said
Anirudh Koul, who has been a lead on the Seeing AI project since its
inception and became interested in it because his grandfather is losing
his ability to see.<br><br>
<dd>For Taylor, who joined Microsoft to represent the needs of blind
people, it was a great experience that also resulted in a potential
product that could make a real difference in people’s lives.<br><br>
<dd>“We were able to come up with this one Swiss Army knife that is so
valuable,” she said. <br><br>
<dd>This article is online at: </blockquote>
</dl></blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<x-tab> </x-tab>David
Andrews and long white cane Harry.<br>
E-Mail: dandrews@visi.com or david.andrews@nfbnet.org<br>
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