Video games are moving towards emotionally responsive character modelling. Well, that’s a mouth full, so let get the right lingo: Image Metrics.
Here’s a blog that talks about it. In the following video clip, Emily will demonstrate what image metrics are.
Not convinced? How about this one?
Wired magazine (July 16, 2008) has two new articles: the Petabyte Age and the End of Theory. Both speak about the huge amount of data one may harvest with today’s technology, and how the “ginormous” amount of data is changing the (known & existing) theories of science…
Data collecting is happening everywhere (via the Internet, particularly) whether you realize or not. Even at traffic junction, camera and flow rate of vehicles are being recorded every second of the day. Not to mention all the cell-phone image recording that went on around us… with or without our consent.
But more than just tracking using all kinds of sensors, it’s the visualization that “interests” me. The article showed that “the biggest challenge of the Petabyte Age won’t be storing all that data, it’ll be figuring out how to make sense of it.” Martin Wattenberg (a mathematician and computer scientist who works at IBM) suggested, “The information [in Wikipedia] probably totals less than a terabyte, but it’s huge in terms of encompassing human knowledge. Today, if you’re analyzing numbers, there are a million ways to make a bar chart. If you’re analyzing text, it’s hard. I think the only way to understand a lot of this data is through visualization.
Some of the images produced even look “video-game like.”
GraphIn this article by Paul Kedrosky (CNET News.com):
Dow Jones Insight is applying text analysis to thousands of documents to measure trends, such as favorability and issue coverage of the presidential candidates over time.
(You can see the rest of the “graphs” here.)
Dow Jones Insight, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and BuzzLogic are 3 companies offering similar data mining and data visualization analysis through text/media parsing.
Over the past two months, MIT researchers have been collecting the electronic communications of the city of New York in order to build a census that shows, neighborhood by neighborhood, New York’s telephone and Internet links to other cities across the planet and how those connections change over time.
Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told reporter, “Our cities and the globe are blanketed with flowing bits of digital data, and looking at this data, we’re able to better understand the physical world.” Visualizations from the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) project are part of a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “Design and the Elastic Mind,” and is open to the public through May. Yahoo! News reported:
Researchers stress that no information about individuals or actual conversations and messages are being collected. AT&T Inc. is giving MIT only aggregate data from its switches in the city.
The information reveals a trove of interesting population patterns. By looking at the neighborhoods where the data came from, researchers determined that New Yorkers who engage in global gab tend to be on the high end of the socio-economic scale or struggling to make ends meet. Translation: international business and professional people or poor immigrants.
“The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end,” Saskia Sassen, a Columbia University professor and globalization expert, wrote for the project catalog. “The vast middle layers of our society are far less global. The middle talks mostly nationally and locally.”
The MIT team started monitoring billions of electronic streams flowing to and from New York about two months ago, relying on information provided by AT&T, one of the world’s largest providers of communications services.
AT&T Labs, based in Murray Hill, N.J., collects the data on phone calls, e-mail messages, cyber-phone connections and Web browsing, then transfers only that information (which has no personal, identifying details) to MIT in Cambridge, Mass., for processing and analysis.
As the data accumulate over the next few months, the team hopes to see a reflection of human migration – essentially, a snapshot of globalization.
Already, graphs on display at MoMA (and on the Web) show clusters of intense activity from New York to South America, the Caribbean, Canada, and parts of Europe and Africa, matching neighborhoods across the city with more than 170 ethnic groups.
Nayan Chanda, an expert on globalization, said such research “is absolutely worthwhile.”
“This fast communication that links the world has made globalization much more intense and much more visible. It gives you a very valuable footprint of the extent to which a country is involved in global communications. It’s interesting for demographers, for people studying economics, telecommunications and business,” said Chanda, director of publications at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.
The first graph (Globe Encounters) uses 3-D real-time animations to show New York’s links to world cities. The second (Pulse of the Planet) shows how those connections change as day turns to night across the planet. The third (World Inside New York) zooms into New York’s five boroughs and explores how the global connections vary from neighborhood to neighborhood.
