This summer I will be going for my 2nd summer internship at Google's Computer Vision Research Group in Mountain View, CA. My first real internship ever was last summer at Google -- I loved it.
There are many reasons for going back for the summer. Being in the research group and getting to address the same types of vision/recognition related problems as during my PhD is very important for me. It is not just a typical software engineering internship -- I get an better overall picture of how object recognition research can impact the world at a large scale, the Google-scale, before I finish my PhD and become set in my ways. Being in an environment where one can develop something super cool and weeks later millions of people see a difference in the way they interact with the internet (via Google's services of course) is also super exciting. Finally, the computing infrastructure that Google has set up for its researchers/engineers is unrivaled when it comes to large scale machine learning.
Many Google researchers (such as Fernando Periera) are big advocates of the data-driven mentality, where using massive amounts of data coupled with simple algorithms has more promise than complex algorithms with small amounts of training data. In earlier posts I already mentioned how my advisor at CMU is a big advocate of this approach in Computer Vision. This Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data is a powerful mentality yet difficult to embrace with the computational resources offered by one's computer science department. But this data-driven paradigm is not only viable at Google -- it is the essence of Google.
Showing posts with label large dataset. Show all posts
Showing posts with label large dataset. Show all posts
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Algorithmic Simplicity + Data > Algorithmic Complexity
Decades ago (during the era of Rodney Brooks, Takeo Kanade, and other such great computational thinkers) computer vision researchers were manually designing complex AI programs for image analysis. Back then, if the algorithm was able to work on a single real image it was publishable. The parmaters of some of these complicated models were often tuned by hand -- and that was okay -- there simply wasn't enough image data to fit these models from examples.
We are now living in a Machine Learning generation where hand tweaked parameters are looked down upon and if you want to publish an object recognition paper you'll need to test your algorithm on a standard dataset containing hundreds of images spanning many different types of objects. There is still a lot of excitement about Machine Learning in the air and new approaches are constantly being introduced as the new 'state-of-the-art' on canonical datasets. The problem with this mentality is that researchers are introducing a lot of complicated machinery and it is often unclear whether these new techniques will stand the test of time.
Peter Norvig -- now at Google -- advocates an alternative view. Rather than designing more advanced machine to work with a measly 20,000 or so training images for an object recognition task -- we shouldn't be too eager to make conclusions when dealing with such paltry training sets. In a recent Norvig video lecture I watched he showed some interesting results where the algorithms that obtained the best performance on a small dataset no longer did the best when the size of the training set was increased by an order of magnitude. In some cases, when fixing the test set, the simplest algorithms provided with an order of magnitude more training data outperformed the most advanced 'state-of-the-art.' Also, the mediocre algorithms in the small training size regime often outperformed their more complicated counterparts once more data was utilized.
The next generation of researchers will inevitably be using much more training data than we are at the moment, so if we want our scientific contributions to pass the test of time, we have to focus on designing simple yet principled algorithms. Focus on simplicity. Consider a particular recognition task, namely car recognition. Without any training data we are back in the 1960/1970s generation where we have to hard-code rules about what it means to be a car in order for an algorithm to work on a novel image. With a small amount of labeled training data, we can now learn the parameters of a general parts-based car detector -- we can even learn the appearance of such parts. But what can we do with millions of images of cars? Do we even need much more than a large scale nearest neighbor lookup?
As Rodney Brooks once said, "The world is its own best representation," and perhaps we should follow Google's mentaly and simply equip our ideas with more, more, more training data.
We are now living in a Machine Learning generation where hand tweaked parameters are looked down upon and if you want to publish an object recognition paper you'll need to test your algorithm on a standard dataset containing hundreds of images spanning many different types of objects. There is still a lot of excitement about Machine Learning in the air and new approaches are constantly being introduced as the new 'state-of-the-art' on canonical datasets. The problem with this mentality is that researchers are introducing a lot of complicated machinery and it is often unclear whether these new techniques will stand the test of time.
Peter Norvig -- now at Google -- advocates an alternative view. Rather than designing more advanced machine to work with a measly 20,000 or so training images for an object recognition task -- we shouldn't be too eager to make conclusions when dealing with such paltry training sets. In a recent Norvig video lecture I watched he showed some interesting results where the algorithms that obtained the best performance on a small dataset no longer did the best when the size of the training set was increased by an order of magnitude. In some cases, when fixing the test set, the simplest algorithms provided with an order of magnitude more training data outperformed the most advanced 'state-of-the-art.' Also, the mediocre algorithms in the small training size regime often outperformed their more complicated counterparts once more data was utilized.
The next generation of researchers will inevitably be using much more training data than we are at the moment, so if we want our scientific contributions to pass the test of time, we have to focus on designing simple yet principled algorithms. Focus on simplicity. Consider a particular recognition task, namely car recognition. Without any training data we are back in the 1960/1970s generation where we have to hard-code rules about what it means to be a car in order for an algorithm to work on a novel image. With a small amount of labeled training data, we can now learn the parameters of a general parts-based car detector -- we can even learn the appearance of such parts. But what can we do with millions of images of cars? Do we even need much more than a large scale nearest neighbor lookup?
As Rodney Brooks once said, "The world is its own best representation," and perhaps we should follow Google's mentaly and simply equip our ideas with more, more, more training data.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
dude, where's my image?
Check out IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image. This is CVPR2008 work done by James Hays and Alexei Efros. Some crazy titles that have been suggested to James can also be seen on his project site -- some of them are rather funny too!
Anyways, you can just read his abstract and browse his results if you are interested in the kind of computer vision research that uses millions of images. The basic idea is to predict the location of an image using only information embedded inside the image (and a training set of over 6 million geo-tagged Flickr images.)
Anyways, you can just read his abstract and browse his results if you are interested in the kind of computer vision research that uses millions of images. The basic idea is to predict the location of an image using only information embedded inside the image (and a training set of over 6 million geo-tagged Flickr images.)
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