Tech Talk

I was trying to search for a reference in IEEE. Out of laziness, I just copied the text from acroread and pasted in the google search box on my flock. Here is the reference I tried to copy.

This is the text that got copied is “Proving and applying program Transfonnations Expressed with second-order patterns”. See anything interesting?? Yes, Transformations was mis interpreted!! It reminded me of the fact that scanned text is an image and never the text itself… Image recognition research still has a looong way to go.

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Tags: acroread, copy, reference, research

Ok. My Manager used to repeat a question (he was an image processing person for a long time) about the understanding implicit to the human brain. It was this. Show a four year old kid a toy model of a car, tell him it is a car and that kid would just as easily identify all the other road going vehicles as a car. Mind you, he might never call a two-wheeler a car. Maybe he would call a HMV lorry as a car. This, according to him, is a major image recognition problem. How on earth did that kid relate a toy to all those monsters on the road?

I was dweling on this question for some time. Though I am not thoroughly an image processing guy, there are portions of this science that I wish to master and which I believe are perfectly related to robotics as a whole and humanoid in particular. Yes, Machine vision systems. I don’t very much know how all those humanoids already built recognize whatever they do recognize. But, is it someplace possible to mime the way a kid understands and learns something? This is precisely what I ve begun studying now. I haven’t gotten too far yet. Primarily because, I not a student of biology and I don’t quite understand the idea of neurons and their communication paradigms completely yet!

On the other hand, I was attending some lectures on gene mapping. Nothing related to what I do, alright. Some lectures could give insights on how protiens are formed from the huge gene pattern etc.. Again I can’t express much here because of my poor grasp of the subject. But, there could be simpler engineer’s explanation of the whole thing. After all, the last cell is a bunch of some atoms, right? So, a particular group of atoms in particular combinations and conditions emulate what we call “life”. So, can there be a definition for life, in terms of chemistry and physics instead of a whole lot of philosophy? Is there anybody working in these directions? I should love to be there and work along to understand this in its primitives. For, that can surely answer my above question and many more road blocs in constructing a true humanoid. Are there know road blocs to constructing a humanoid, by the way?