From: on behalf of Ben Goertzel <an To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> Cc: Itamar Arel Subject: Re: Distinguishing Cats from Dogs Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:59:09 +0000 Hi Jeffrey, First: Regarding MIT ... IMO the best vision work being done there now is Tomaso Poggio's work, which I suppose you're familiar with. He has some biologically realistic neural nets that classify images and videos, and that appear to effectively emulate the way humans classify images when they see them very briefly. (But not how humans classify images when they see them at length ... because this requires feedback connections which Poggio's networks don't model.) Based on discussions with some people who are involved in trying to commercialize Poggio's work, my strong impression is that Poggio's networks provide inferior classification results to Itamar's system Next, about the "cats vs. dogs" task: of course it *isn't* that interesting.... People talk about "distinguishing cats vs. dogs" because Jeff Hawkins likes to give speeches about how hard the problem of distinguishing cats vs. dogs is (because Hawkins' Numenta vision system can't solve it). And of course if a famous guy like Hawkins speechifies about it, it must be important ;-D So when Itamar first built his vision system he loaded in some cats vs. dogs pictures to see if it would distinguish them OK, and it seemed to ... and then he didn't pursue that anymore, since it was of no practical use and not terribly interesting [except to prove a point to people].... But it's not much work for him to download some more pictures of cats vs. dogs and run the algorithm on them again though. However, the machines his algorithm is running on are currently doing some practical video classification work as part of a contract with ITT, so this will wait a week or so till the machines are available... (the code now is running on ordinary PCs, though there is an almost-complete port to the Nvidia GPU supercom