Researchers Find Online Photos are Worth Much More than 1,000 Words

The next time you pull out your smartphone and snap a photo of a landmark to upload to Facebook, think about the broader implications: Not only are you sharing your experience with your friends, but you’re contributing a small piece of data that could one day build a model of the world.

Researchers David Crandall of Indiana University and Noah Snavely of Cornell University are developing algorithms to create models of patterns based on the vast troves of photographs uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and other photo-sharing websites each day. Not only can their models be used to build 3D representations of a place, but they can also shed light on the people who visit those places.

“This analysis can also generate statistics about places, such as ranking landmarks by their popularity or studying which kinds of users visit which sites,” Crandall and Snavely wrote in an article that was published last month in the academic journal ACMQueue. “At a more local level, we can use automatic techniques from computer vision to produce strikingly accurate 3D models of a landmark, given a large number of 2D photos taken by many different users from many different vantage points."

Crandall and Snavely suggest that photo-sharing sites can be used to model human behavior at given points in time and history. The implications are huge for marketers and could offer an explanation as to why Facebook has made a recent push into expanding its photo and mobile offerings.

There are, of course, limitations to the techniques, which will likely be overcome in time. Photo collections have an extreme scale and an unstructured nature, the researchers said; many different people take photos with many different cameras from largely unknown viewpoints, which complicates the ability to build the models.

Building 3D Models

The paper demonstrates how Crandall and Snavely were able to use 6,500 photos publicly shared on Flickr to build a computer-simulated reconstruction of Old Town of Dubrovnik in Croatia.



The advantages of using social media are clear: Such models can be built at a relatively low cost and don’t require costly site visits or surveys. The problem faced by the researchers is in developing algorithms that can extract useful data from the “noisy data” that flows through the typical API stream.

Mapping the World

Most photo-sharing sites allow users to share more information than just the photo; the time and date a photo was shot, the location and even the type of camera used can be collected. Already, the researchers have been able to put together a list of the most-photographed places in the world (New York, London, San Francisco, Paris and Los Angeles round out the top five) and the five most-photographed landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, Tate Modern, Big Ben and Notre Dame).

But the data can reveal so much more, including what types of people visit those places. Beyond that, algorithms are being developed that can effectively map how people travel through highly photographed places like Manhattan:



“We can infer a user’s social network with startling accuracy based only on such patterns,” the researchers wrote. “After observing that two people were at about the same place at about the same time on five distinct occasions, for example, the probability that they are friends is nearly 60%.”

To entice people to take more photos in places that aren’t photographed as frequently as, say, New York or Paris, the researchers have been experimenting with gamification. One such effort known as PhotoCity allowed them to collect 100,000 photos of the Cornell and University of Washington campuses by offering points to players who took photos at specific places.

“Imagine all of the world’s photos as coming from a ‘distributed camera,’ continually capturing images all around the world. Can this camera be calibrated to estimate the place and time each of these photos was taken?” the researchers concluded. “If so, we could start building a new kind of image search and analysis tool - one that would, for example, allow a scientist to find all images of Central Park over time in order to study changes in flowering times from year to year, or that would allow an engineer to find all available photos of a particular bridge online to determine why it collapsed. Gaining true understanding of the world from the sea of photos online could have a truly transformative impact.”

 

8 Mind Games Interviewers Play in the Job Interview

1. They will stop their conversation for a while just to hear you talking: 

 

Many times during the job interview it is seen that Interviewers suddenly pause for an awkward silence creating some discomfort for the interviewee, this is because they want you to be in a high stress situation and plead for things in order to feel normal. Mark suggests the interviewers, that in such kind of a scenario where the interviewee feels uncomfortable, he/she is most likely to reveal the facts which you are looking for.2. To get you in the honesty mode, they will ask you questions about your preceding boss: 

 

Keep in mind that if the hiring manager is asking questions specifically about your ex boss, suggests that he/she is trying to psychologically turn you to honesty mode. Moreover, they can ask you to spell your boss’ name at the beginning of the interview to check your honesty. Mark in his book advises the recruiter that asking about the former boss make the interviewee more alert as they tend to think that their former boss will be contacted by the hiring manager so they are most likely to be in a position to spell out the truth.

3. To see that how you will finish the answers they will leave out parts of questions

 
Remember that if the job interviewer asks you to describe a difficult situation which you have faced in your lifetime without specifically asking you what you did in order to fix it, means that they are trying to find out from your answer that whether you are a problem solver or a problem bringer. This kind of question is generally framed to judge the candidate’s real attitude, so if you are a problem solver you will definitely answer the things that you have done to fix the problem, without the interviewers asking. Whereas, on the other hand if you are a problem bringer you will answer the question as it is.

4. Your pronoun usage is judged by the interviewer

 
Most interviewers today evaluate a candidate with his/her pronoun usage.  According to the survey conducted by leadership IQ, good performers in the interview answered in the first person which is 60 percent more than the candidates who declined to perform well.  The survey results demonstrates that low performers answered in the second person using you, your, which is 400 percent more than the high performers.

5. Interviewers tend to check the candidates adverb usage

 

Based on the survey it is seen that low performers are more likely to use adverbs, which is 40 percent more than the high performers. According to Mark the answers that are usually delivered by the high performers are direct, personal, and factual and in the past tense. Whereas, low performers might use adverbs to rise up their answers as the facts do not speak well enough on their own. Moreover, low performers answer the questions 90 percent with negative emotions than higher performers.

6. When you answer a question they will listen to your past tense:

 
The survey highlights that high performers respond more often in the past tense which is 40 percent more than the low performers. Whereas, on the other hand, low performers used the present tense 120 percent more frequently than high performers.

7. They will carefully observe whether you converse in active voice or not

 
People trying to sound smarter often use passive voice , which in turn sound more awkward  than the active voice. So job interviewers prefer hiring people who are more likely to use active voice in their sentences.

8. Usage of words like “ always” and “never” are observed by the interviewers

 
Job interviewers see that how often a candidate use words like “ always” and “never” in his/her sentences as this kind of words are generally used by low performers, which is 100 percent more often than high performers.

5 Reasons Big Data is Big Deal

The world is growing fast and so is technology. But is it really technology that plays a major role in this growth? Well researches have revealed that technology has an impact on the growth but only with the help of a silent partner, and that’s Big Data.  Big data are nothing but large amount of data that continuously keeps on growing. Later when these data’s start to turn itself into complex ones, the analysts applies large algorithms, statistics and finds solutions to existing problems. Big data has the power to revolutionize the world and better the technology itself.

 
Below given are 5 reasons that made big data the real “BIG DATA”.

 
1. Big data is big in business:

 
Big data are not just any data that accumulates time to time. These data’s are collected from all the sources that you see in your day to day life. From details of shipping crates to simple data’s that are stored in your mobiles, big data’s are all around your daily life. Sensing these data’s and by using sophisticated tools to combine them, big data’s are used as competitive advantage for every industry and to improve their intelligence.

 
"It's a revolution," says Gary King, director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. "We're really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched."

2. Big data’s fuels culture:

 
Advanced computer tools are now introduced to the main stream as there are much better access to Internet data’s, natural language processing tools and  pattern recognition tools. We now are living in such a world that applications can interpret big data are also now being introduced to the common citizen. One such example is Apple’s coveted virtual iPhone 4S assistant Siri, which is an application that can interpret big data and simply distribute it to its users.
3. Big data can predict future:

 
Big data’s are also now being used as real time answers for most of the daily and future problems. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are the best examples that provide real time data. One such example is, The Federal Bank of New York has asked to keep a note on the comments that pops up on these social sites. These real time data’s are to be categorized into “positive, negative or neutral” posts and analysts are to run tests on these data’s and they are sure that they can come up with a result from the public opinion on certain insurances and policies.

 
"I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand," says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. "It's something you can only do with Big Data."

4. Big data could fight cancer:

Another sector that can benefit from big data is the medical sector. Many of the well known medical foundations has started taking the initiatives in collecting big data, analyze and to take measures in finding the cure. "Big data collection and computing is allowing us for the first time to get a complete molecular characterization of cancer," said David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC-Santa Cruz.

"I think you're going to start to see this sort of big data effort on several fronts -- partly because of supercomputing capabilities that we haven't had until recently and also because of wireless devices that are increasingly being used to transmit data," Haussler said.
5. Is Big data Big brother?

 
Although big data is in the path of revolution it has its own downfalls too. Potential findings of false discoveries, misinterpretations all can grow along with the evolution of big data. False facts can turn itself into base of certain misconceptions. Analysis and patterns from searches in search engines; social media posts all can justify this misconception. So is big data the real deal? Evaluations are still to be done for an answer.