AAAI Conference Competition

[JonHylands]

Here's a fun one:

http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2007/aaai07robotcall.php

Read specifically the Scavenger Hunt. Now that's a challenge !!

- Jon

[Admin]

"In order to determine what these objects look like, the robots are given an opportunity to search the web for images of the objects in their list before starting their search."

I believe google has spent several millions trying to solve this problem with little success . . . The person who can solve this will be an instant multi-millionaire, bought out by google of course 

Too much disembodied AI I think . . .

[JonHylands]

Well, its a slightly different problem. Google is trying to classify objects in pictures with no tagging information. With this contest, you're trying to find examples of a given tag - I assume they're going to give you the name of the thing you want to find, and you'll use Google Image or one of the online photo databases to find images to (quickly) train from.

- Jon

[Militoy]

It looks to me like maybe a different approach to the problem – but still the same problem. The robot must look at different images which are similarly tagged, and then attempt to recognize untagged objects as belonging to the same set. In the Google problem, there’s nothing to stop them from loading their AI with thousands of tagged images to compare to when searching for images that fit into the same set. The challenge is the same – only differing as a matter of scale, since the Scavenger Hunt will of course be much narrower in scope than a Google search algorithm.

This looks like it would be a good conference to attend – especially as Vancouver is such a beautiful city. I expect I may be too busy in July; but if I can wangle a business trip around that time to Seattle, maybe I can go.