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Exactly what motivates Google developers is largely unknown but their creations are rapidly being used for causes that even the world’s search leader couldn’t anticipate. Disclosures obtained yesterday by a national newspaper reveal Palestinian militants call on Google Earth to help plan the launch of rocket attacks against Israel. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah party, admit they use the company’s free mapping tool, which includes satellite maps and detailed 3D models. Group commander Abu Walid showed the Guardian an aerial image powered by Google of the southern Israeli town of Sderot, pointing to how it lets him select targets. He said: “We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas.” Asked to respond, Google apparently declined to comment specifically on the admission , but said its mapping product is no different to a range of others. “The imagery visible on Google Earth and Google Maps is not unique: commercial high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery of every country in the world is widely available from numerous other resources,” the company said. The Guardian’s exposé does not represent the first time that Mountain View developers have been accused of unwittingly abetting the activities of militants. British officials tabled concern in January that al-Qaida was using aerial photography on Google Earth to locate potential targets inside British bases in Basra. The news comes one week after another Google invention was said to be helping a specific cause, albeit one much closer to the company’s interests of technology. Researchers at UC San Diego and UCLA have used Google Sets to develop an approach to injecting “common sense” into off-the-shelf object recognition systems. Fresh out of Google Labs, Google Sets lists related items or objects from a few examples: type in ‘Heineken’ and ‘Carlsberg’ and it returns them, alongside ‘Corona’, ‘Budweiser’ and ‘Stella Artois’. Similarly, Google Sets returns the worlds ‘Ringo’ ‘Beatles’ and ‘John Lennon’ just by entering ‘John,’ ‘Paul’ and ‘George.’ The academics found the “semantic context” provided by Google Sets “can compensate for ambiguity in objects’ visual appearance” when run through an automated image labelling system. Prof Serge Belongie from UC San Diego told Information World Review that in some ways Google Sets is “a proxy for common sense,” which can help image labelling systems “disambiguate between visually similar objects.” In his paper, Prof Belongie added: “In this work, we developed an approach that uses semantic context as post-processing to an off-the-shelf discriminative model for object categorization. “We observed that semantic context can compensate for ambiguity in objects’ visual appearance. Our approach maximizes object label agreement according to the contextual relevance.” Oct 26, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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