Video Content Search Gets a Boost

A new online video search tool launched this week makes it easier to search the content of video lectures by automatically transcribing words used in the lecturer's visual aids.

TalkMiner was created by researchers at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), in California, to help students and professionals search the ever-expanding online archives of video lectures and presentations. "It gives you a good shot at finding something that wasn't mentioned in the title or abstract but is buried deep inside the video," says Larry Rowe, president of FXPAL.

Video lectures are becoming an increasingly popular study tool, and more and more universities are providing them, says Rowe. But if you're a student trying to review part of a lecture for a midterm exam, or a professional searching for something specific in an online TED lecture, the process isn't quick. Even if you know the date a lecture was given, there's no way to search it for specific content without watching the entire thing, says Rowe.

TalkMiner overcomes this by skimming videos to find the speakers' presentation slides. It analyzes the footage once per second for telltale signs of a presentation slide, such as its shape and static nature; captures the slide image and compensates for any skewed angles; and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to detect the words on the slides. These words are then indexed into TalkMiner's search engine, which currently makes available 15,000 videos from institutions such as Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and TED.

"OCR and the search indexing have been done before," says Rowe. What's new is automatic extraction of slide content from video.

"The quality of the video production is often very poor," says Rowe. "So you have got to find the slides and then clean them up." The slides can appear anywhere in the image, or sometimes not at all. And "if they have multiple cameras, they may switch between a full-screen image of a slide and [an image of] the speaker."

The absence of a standard format for recording lectures doesn't help. "It's a very uncontrolled environment," says John Adcock, who also worked on the project. The challenge, he says, was to make a system that would work no matter how the lecture was recorded.

Although TalkMiner is application-specific in its current form, it could ultimately extend the range of situations in which OCR can be used, says Adrian Ulges, a researcher in multimedia analysis and data mining at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Kaiserslautern. Google's Street View could use TalkMiner to capture additional information about particular geographic locations, such as opening times or special offers, he says, or it could improve the accuracy of mobile apps such as Word Lens, which translates text viewed by a phone's camera.

"OCR is still not considered a solved problem, even though recognition rates are pretty decent," says Ulges. Different lighting conditions, poor contrast, different-colored slides, and even different fonts can all trip up OCR.

But even when OCR fails to recognize any text, TalkMiner can still serve a purpose. Adcock explains, "An awful lot of TED presentations don't use text in their slides," but merely capturing static images of whatever's being displayed is enough to create a visual index.

Originally researchers tried indexing the video based on what was actually said by the speaker, detecting key words in the audio track. But the speech recognition software wasn't reliable enough to make it accurate, says Rowe With the current approach, users don't have to concentrate on copying down the content of slides, so they can pay closer attention to what the speaker is saying, he says. And, yes, in theory, lazy students could become over-reliant on TalkMiner and miss vital bits of information. "But I view this as just another tool for learning, and as with [all] tools, [it] can be misused."

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Video Content Search Gets a Boost

A new online video search tool launched this week makes it easier to search the content of video lectures by automatically transcribing words used in the lecturer's visual aids.

TalkMiner was created by researchers at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), in California, to help students and professionals search the ever-expanding online archives of video lectures and presentations. "It gives you a good shot at finding something that wasn't mentioned in the title or abstract but is buried deep inside the video," says Larry Rowe, president of FXPAL.

Video lectures are becoming an increasingly popular study tool, and more and more universities are providing them, says Rowe. But if you're a student trying to review part of a lecture for a midterm exam, or a professional searching for something specific in an online TED lecture, the process isn't quick. Even if you know the date a lecture was given, there's no way to search it for specific content without watching the entire thing, says Rowe.

TalkMiner overcomes this by skimming videos to find the speakers' presentation slides. It analyzes the footage once per second for telltale signs of a presentation slide, such as its shape and static nature; captures the slide image and compensates for any skewed angles; and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to detect the words on the slides. These words are then indexed into TalkMiner's search engine, which currently makes available 15,000 videos from institutions such as Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and TED.

"OCR and the search indexing have been done before," says Rowe. What's new is automatic extraction of slide content from video.

"The quality of the video production is often very poor," says Rowe. "So you have got to find the slides and then clean them up." The slides can appear anywhere in the image, or sometimes not at all. And "if they have multiple cameras, they may switch between a full-screen image of a slide and [an image of] the speaker."

The absence of a standard format for recording lectures doesn't help. "It's a very uncontrolled environment," says John Adcock, who also worked on the project. The challenge, he says, was to make a system that would work no matter how the lecture was recorded.

Although TalkMiner is application-specific in its current form, it could ultimately extend the range of situations in which OCR can be used, says Adrian Ulges, a researcher in multimedia analysis and data mining at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Kaiserslautern. Google's Street View could use TalkMiner to capture additional information about particular geographic locations, such as opening times or special offers, he says, or it could improve the accuracy of mobile apps such as Word Lens, which translates text viewed by a phone's camera.

"OCR is still not considered a solved problem, even though recognition rates are pretty decent," says Ulges. Different lighting conditions, poor contrast, different-colored slides, and even different fonts can all trip up OCR.

But even when OCR fails to recognize any text, TalkMiner can still serve a purpose. Adcock explains, "An awful lot of TED presentations don't use text in their slides," but merely capturing static images of whatever's being displayed is enough to create a visual index.

Originally researchers tried indexing the video based on what was actually said by the speaker, detecting key words in the audio track. But the speech recognition software wasn't reliable enough to make it accurate, says Rowe With the current approach, users don't have to concentrate on copying down the content of slides, so they can pay closer attention to what the speaker is saying, he says. And, yes, in theory, lazy students could become over-reliant on TalkMiner and miss vital bits of information. "But I view this as just another tool for learning, and as with [all] tools, [it] can be misused."

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The Caucus: Obama Announces Changes to National Security Team

WASHINGTON ? President Obama announced a revamped national security team Thursday afternoon in an East Room ceremony in which he declared, ?We are a nation still at war,? and said the new leaders of the defense and intelligence agencies would help keep the country safe.

?These are the leaders that I?ve chosen to guide us through the difficult days ahead,? Mr. Obama said as he named Leon Panetta, currently the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to become the next secretary of defense, and Gen. David Petraeus to head the C.I.A.

The announcements had been long expected, sparked by the decision of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to retire this summer. Mr. Obama also named new officials to command troops in Afghanistan and to serve as the ambassador to that country.

Mr. Petraeus, in brief comments, declared himself ?deeply honored? to lead the C.I.A., and said he would leave his post as the top military official in Afghanistan with cautious optimism about the future of that country.

Before announcing the leadership changes, Mr. Obama expressed sadness for the loss of life from tornadoes and storms that swept through several Southern states on Wednesday.

The president said he had ordered the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Alabama to help with the recovery there. And Mr. Obama said he would fly to Alabama  on Friday to meet with officials there.

?We can?t control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it,? Mr. Obama said, promising to do ?everything we can? to help local officials.

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App-Specific Processors to Fight Dark Silicon

A processor etched with circuits tailored to the most widely used apps on Android phones could help extend the devices' battery life. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have created software that scans the operating system and a collection of the most popular apps and then generates a processor design tailored to their demands. The result can be 11 times more efficient than today's typical general-purpose smart-phone chip, says Michael Taylor, who leads the GreenDroid project with colleague Steven Swanson.

"Chip design for mobile phones needs rethinking for two reasons," says Taylor. "One is to improve their use of the limited energy available to a phone, and the other is to attack a problem called dark silicon, which is set to make conventional chip designs even less efficient."

"Dark silicon" is a portion of a microchip that is left unused. Although uncommon today, dark silicon is expected to become necessary in two or three years, because engineers will be unable to reduce chips' operating voltages any further to offset increases in power consumption and waste heat produced by smaller, faster chips.

Operating shrinking transistors with lower voltages was "traditionally the escape valve that enabled more computational power without more heat output," says Taylor, "but now there is no place to go." Operating voltages have crept close to a fundamental limit at which transistors cease to function practically. This means that soon, as transistors continue to get smaller, each generation of chips will be less efficient than the one before, he says. "If you kept using all of the chip, each generation would generate double the heat of the one before." Keeping energy use constant will require switching on only certain parts of a chip at any one time.

Taylor and Swanson's GreenDroid design sidesteps this by surrounding a processor's main core?the part of a chip that executes instructions?with 120 smaller ones that each take care of one piece of code frequently needed by the apps used most on a phone. Each core's circuits closely mimic the structure of the code on which they are based, making them up to 10,000 times more efficient than a general-purpose processor core performing the same task. "If you fill the chip with highly specialized cores, then the fraction of the chip that is lit up at one time can be the most energy efficient for that particular task," Taylor says.

Rather than manually translating source code into processor cores, the UCSD team has developed software to do it. They record the computational demands of the Android OS when running popular apps for e-mail, maps, video, and the Web radio service Pandora, among others, and from that information, the software generates the GreenDroid chip design.

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The Next Web

Microsoft has reported its earnings for the quarter ending on March 31, 2011. Total revenues for the quarter were $16.43 billion, up 13% from 12 months ago. Operating income was $5.71 billion, a 10% rise year over year. Net income was $5.23 billion, up 31% from the same quarter last year.

Diluted EPS was $0.61 per share for the quarter, up a sharp 36% year over year. Analysts had been expecting earnings of some 56 cents per share.

Microsoft cited a ?mixed? PC market for the quarter, but called their results ?strong.? The Microsoft Business Division, responsible for Office among other products grew 21% year over year, which helped Microsoft post the numbers that it did. The company also cited its Kinect and Xbox lines as strong, saying that the pieces of consumer hardware were being purchased at ?tremendous rates.? The Kinect is the bestselling consumer gadget of all time.

Microsoft?s stock was up $0.33 on the trading day which ended before the earnings were released, or 1.25%. In current publicly available after-hours trading information, Microsoft?s stock is down over 2%. According to some analysis, investors were expecting more of a ?blowout,? causing the sell off of Microsoft?s stock.

While certain parts of Microsoft?s empire are strong, its Online Services Division lost more money, $726 million, than it brought in in revenue, $648 million.

What follows is the Microsoft earnings release:

?

Redmond, Wash. ? Apr. 28, 2011 ? Microsoft Corp. today announced third-quarter revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2011, a 13% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.71 billion, $5.23 billion, and $0.61 per share, which represented increases of 10%, 31%, and 36%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period. Diluted earnings per share included a $0.05 tax benefit primarily related to an agreement with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to settle a portion of their audit of tax years 2004 to 2006.

?We delivered strong financial results despite a mixed PC environment, which demonstrates the strength and breadth of our businesses,? said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft. ?Consumers are purchasing Office 2010, Xbox and Kinect at tremendous rates, and businesses of all sizes are purchasing Microsoft platforms and applications.?

Microsoft Business Division revenue grew 21% year-over-year. Since its release last spring, Office 2010 has become the fastest-selling version of Office in history, and the integrated innovation with SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics CRM is driving significant growth for the division.

Server & Tools revenue grew 11% year-over-year, the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Strong business adoption of Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and System Center are driving record revenue and margin expansion.

Windows 7 remains the fastest selling operating system in history with 350 million licenses sold. Revenue for the segment was down 4% in the third quarter, in line with the PC trends, excluding prior year launch impact.

Online Services Division revenue grew 14% year-over-year primarily driven by increases in search revenue. Bing?s US search share increased to 13.9% this quarter.
Entertainment & Devices Division grew 60% year-over-year, fueled by Kinect for Xbox 360, the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, continued strong Xbox 360 console sales and growth of Xbox Live.

?We delivered strong third quarter revenue from our business customers, driven by outstanding performance from Windows Server, SQL database, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and increasingly our cloud services,? said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. ?Office had another huge quarter, again exceeding everyone?s expectations, and the addition of Office 365 will make our cloud productivity solutions even more compelling. We continue to see strong adoption of our cloud-based services among the Fortune 500.?

Business Outlook
Microsoft reaffirms operating expense guidance of $26.9 billion to $27.3 billion for the full year ending June 30, 2011. Microsoft also offers preliminary fiscal year 2012 operating expense guidance of 3% to 5% growth from the mid-point of fiscal year 2011 guidance, or $28.0 billion to $28.6 billion.

]]>

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App-Specific Processors to Fight Dark Silicon

Google Talk for Android rolling out video and voice chat

Today Google announced on the Official Google Mobile Blog that it is launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.

Whether your Google Talk contacts are on any compatible Android tablet or phone, or happen to be using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer, you can now video or voice chat with them right from your Android phone. Calls can be made over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.

A video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts In your Google Talk friends list, and to connect with them you just have to touch the corresponding button. If you need to check something else, the video will automatically pause, allowing you to go back to your phone?s home screen or another app. As an added bonus, any text chats from the person you?re talking with will be overlaid on your phone?s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video.

Google plans to roll out Google Talk with video and voice chat gradually to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of its Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update. The announcement states that It will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices ?in the future?.

Google has put together a video to go along with today?s announcement, which we?ve embedded below.

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Playstation attack preventable, came from US Government IP claims hacker

A conversation log of a group of Playstation hackers has revealed some interesting claims about the way that the Playstation Network hack went down. If the claims are true the intrusion attempts began on March 3rd at 16:00 GMT. The hackers didn?t get through until March 16th and when they did, the successful probe came from a US Department of Defense IP address.

The log, which you can see here, seems to be a group of Playstation hackers discussing the intrusion of the PSN. A link to the log was posted on Twitter, spotted by a TNW reader and sent to us.

In the transcript the hackers discuss the hack, Sony?s response and failures by the company to recognize known vulnerabilities in the version of Apache that they were running on their servers.

One of the hackers, trixter, claims to know when the intrusions began and exactly when the successful breach of the network occurred. When asked about the source of his information, he replies with a coy ?it magically appears on my monitor.?

[21:13:06]
the probes to get into PSN appear to have started March 03 16:00 GMT. It seems it took them until March 16 to actually get in though
[21:13:23]
from a US Department of Defense IP no less
[21:13:38] trixter: where did you get that info from? :)
[21:13:46]
it magically appears on my monitor

Then he derides Sony for running an older version of Apache, 2.2.3 which he claims has ?even more? known vulnerabilities than version 2.2.19, which was the version that the servers were running with the intrusion occurred.

[21:15:22]
what is funny is that the auth server used to be a redhat box running apache 2.2.19 (which has some known vulns in it) but now its a redhat box with apache 2.2.3 which has even more known vulns.

He also speculates that the hacker to breach Sony?s network successfully resides in Europe.

[21:14:13]
given the probe date and time I am guessing that it is someone in europe (after school or work for example) and in relation to graf

He then says that he is not affiliated with the hackers that attacked the PSN but that he tried to ?warn? Sony months ago.

[21:17:55]
note I am not affiliated with the person or persons that attacked PSN, but I did say MONTHS ago ?sony if you are monitoring this channel you should upgrade your servers they have known vulnerabilities?

He attributes the server?s vulnerabilities to the success of the hack.

[21:29:37] so is the downtime due to server-side holes?
[21:29:45]
yes, someone penetrated
[21:29:52]
raped em like a prison bitch

Now we?re taking this report with a grain of salt, because we know how hackers like to talk and there?s no way of verifying the contents of this log. But if this is true then it raises some questions about Sony?s knowledge of system vulnerabilities and how long they knew without taking steps to

We?re continuing to look into this matter and will update if we find any more information.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/04/28/playstation-attack-preventable-came-from-us-goverment-ip-claims-hacker/

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Playstation attack preventable, came from US Government IP claims hacker

A conversation log of a group of Playstation hackers has revealed some interesting claims about the way that the Playstation Network hack went down. If the claims are true the intrusion attempts began on March 3rd at 16:00 GMT. The hackers didn?t get through until March 16th and when they did, the successful probe came from a US Department of Defense IP address.

The log, which you can see here, seems to be a group of Playstation hackers discussing the intrusion of the PSN. A link to the log was posted on Twitter, spotted by a TNW reader and sent to us.

In the transcript the hackers discuss the hack, Sony?s response and failures by the company to recognize known vulnerabilities in the version of Apache that they were running on their servers.

One of the hackers, trixter, claims to know when the intrusions began and exactly when the successful breach of the network occurred. When asked about the source of his information, he replies with a coy ?it magically appears on my monitor.?

[21:13:06]
the probes to get into PSN appear to have started March 03 16:00 GMT. It seems it took them until March 16 to actually get in though
[21:13:23]
from a US Department of Defense IP no less
[21:13:38] trixter: where did you get that info from? :)
[21:13:46]
it magically appears on my monitor

Then he derides Sony for running an older version of Apache, 2.2.3 which he claims has ?even more? known vulnerabilities than version 2.2.19, which was the version that the servers were running with the intrusion occurred.

[21:15:22]
what is funny is that the auth server used to be a redhat box running apache 2.2.19 (which has some known vulns in it) but now its a redhat box with apache 2.2.3 which has even more known vulns.

He also speculates that the hacker to breach Sony?s network successfully resides in Europe.

[21:14:13]
given the probe date and time I am guessing that it is someone in europe (after school or work for example) and in relation to graf

He then says that he is not affiliated with the hackers that attacked the PSN but that he tried to ?warn? Sony months ago.

[21:17:55]
note I am not affiliated with the person or persons that attacked PSN, but I did say MONTHS ago ?sony if you are monitoring this channel you should upgrade your servers they have known vulnerabilities?

He attributes the server?s vulnerabilities to the success of the hack.

[21:29:37] so is the downtime due to server-side holes?
[21:29:45]
yes, someone penetrated
[21:29:52]
raped em like a prison bitch

Now we?re taking this report with a grain of salt, because we know how hackers like to talk and there?s no way of verifying the contents of this log. But if this is true then it raises some questions about Sony?s knowledge of system vulnerabilities and how long they knew without taking steps to

We?re continuing to look into this matter and will update if we find any more information.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/04/28/playstation-attack-preventable-came-from-us-goverment-ip-claims-hacker/

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DirecTV considering taking on Netflix

DirecTV recently asked a subset of its customers to fill out a web survey that was pretty much all about Netflix. The company was interested in Netflix usage patterns, and also proposed the same two options Netflix has for movies: physical discs and online streaming. DirecTV openly asked its existing satellite television subscribers what they think of a DirecTV version of Netflix, according to Zats Not Funny!:
In this next section, we would like you to evaluate a new service that DirecTV is thinking about offering to their customers. DirecTV plans to offer a streaming-only Netflix-like service for a flat fee per month, which would appear as a line item on your monthly bill.

Here are some of the features DirecTV is proposing:

  • The service would allow you to stream thousands of movies and television shows over a broadband Internet connection to your television, computer, or tablet.
  • The content available would likely be past season of current shows as well as older TV series and older movie released (released more than five years ago).
  • You could watch as many programs as you want for one flat monthly fee, similar to what Netflix streaming offers.

Netflix will likely be okay whether or not DirecTV goes through with its plan. It's quite clear that DirecTV just doesn't get it: the only way it could possibly take on Netflix is if it offered such a service at the same price as whatever it currently charges its subscribers. In other words, DirecTV should have a Netflix-like service included within its existing pricing structure. Then again, the company just started offering $30 movie rentals, so we're hardly surprised.

DirecTV is not the only satellite service provider interested in the streaming content market. Dish recently bought bankrupt Blockbuster for $228 million in cash and we speculated that it was interested in the retailer's online content to use as a base for an online product to deliver movies.

This year will be a very important one for Netflix because the company is going to get attacked from multiple sides. The service will get hit by competition that is very similar to its offering as well as alternatives that will likely be backed by much bigger companies. For the sake of the movie industry, we hope Netflix comes out on top.

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