PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Researchers create first image-recognition software that greatly improves web searches

2014-11-18
(Press-News.org) HANOVER, N.H. - Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues have created an artificial intelligence software that uses photos to locate documents on the Internet with far greater accuracy than ever before.

The new system, which was tested on photos and is now being applied to videos, shows for the first time that a machine learning algorithm for image recognition and retrieval is accurate and efficient enough to improve large-scale document searches online. The system uses pixel data in images and potentially video - rather than just text -- to locate documents. It learns to recognize the pixels associated with a search phrase by studying the results from text-based image search engines. The knowledge gleaned from those results can then be applied to other photos without tags or captions, making for more accurate document search results.

The findings appear in the journal PAMI (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence).

"Images abound on the Internet and our approach means they'll no longer be ignored during document retrieval," says Associate Professor Lorenzo Torresani, a co-author of the study. "Over the last 30 years, the Web has evolved from a small collection of mostly text documents to a modern, gigantic, fast-growing multimedia dataset, where nearly every page includes multiple pictures or videos. When a person looks at a Web page, she immediately gets the gist of it by looking at the pictures in it. Yet, surprisingly, all existing popular search engines, such as Google or Bing, strip away the information contained in the photos and use exclusively the text of Web pages to perform the document retrieval. Our study is the first to show that modern machine vision systems are accurate and efficient enough to make effective use of the information contained in image pixels to improve document search."

The researchers designed and tested a machine vision system - a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn without being explicitly programmed -- that extracts semantic information from the pixels of photos in Web pages. This information is used to enrich the description of the HTML page used by search engines for document retrieval. The researchers tested their approach using more than 600 search queries on a database of 50 million Web pages. They selected the text-retrieval search engine with the best performance and modified it to make use of the additional semantic information extracted by their method from the pictures of the Web pages. They found that this produced a 30 percent improvement in precision over the original search engine purely based on text. The new system was developed by researchers at Dartmouth College, Tecnalia Research & Innovation and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

INFORMATION:

Professor Lorenzo Torresani is available to comment at lt@dartmouth.edu

Broadcast studios: Dartmouth has TV and radio studios available for interviews. For more information, visit: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~opa/radio-tv-studios/



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Jurassic climate of large swath of western US was more complex than previously known

Jurassic climate of large swath of western US was more complex than previously known
2014-11-18
The climate 150 million years ago of a large swath of the western United States was more complex than previously known, according to new research from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. It's been thought that the climate during the Jurassic was fairly dry in New Mexico, then gradually transitioned to a wetter climate northward to Montana. But based on new evidence, the theory of a gradual transition from a dry climate to a wetter one during the Jurassic doesn't tell the whole story, says SMU paleontologist Timothy S. Myers, lead author on the study. Geochemical ...

A global surge in ADHD diagnosis has more to do with marketing than medicine

2014-11-18
You can't catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Yet the diagnosis and treatment of this behavioral condition is spreading like a contagion -- surging as much as tenfold in some countries. Call it an economic and cultural plague, but not necessarily a medical one, says Brandeis professor Peter Conrad. In a recent paper in the journal Social Science and Medicine, Conrad and coauthor Meredith Bergey examined the growth of ADHD in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Brazil. Until recently, North America tallied by far the most ADHD diagnoses, ...

As elephants go, so go the trees

2014-11-18
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Overhunting has been disastrous for elephants, but their forest habitats have also been caught in the crossfire. A first-of-its-kind study led by researchers at the University of Florida shows that the dramatic loss of elephants, which disperse seeds after eating vegetation, is leading to the local extinction of a dominant tree species, with likely cascading effects for other forest life. Their work shows that loss of animal seed dispersers increases the probability of tree extinction by more than tenfold over a 100-year period. "The entire ...

Cardiac stem cell therapy may heal heart damage caused by Duchenne muscular dystrophy

2014-11-18
LOS ANGELES (NOV. 17, 2014) - Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute have found that injections of cardiac stem cells might help reverse heart damage caused by Duchenne muscular dystrophy, potentially resulting in a longer life expectancy for patients with the chronic muscle-wasting disease. The study results were presented today at a Breaking Basic Science presentation during the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago. After laboratory mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy were infused with cardiac stem cells, the mice showed steady, marked ...

Heart muscle inflammation and swelling peak twice after heart attack

2014-11-18
Results of a new study challenge the current consensus in cardiology that peak myocardial edema, or heart muscle swelling, only occurs just after a myocardial infarction, or heart attack. In the study, presented as a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2014 and published simultaneously in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), scientists discovered a second wave of swelling and inflammation occurs within a week of a heart attack. The researchers from the Mount Sinai Heart at Icahn School of Medicine ...

New genetic cause for rare form of epilepsy identified

2014-11-18
The findings of this international collaboration have been published today in Nature Genetics. Progressive myoclonus epilepsies (PME) are rare, inherited, and usually childhood-onset neurodegenerative diseases whose core symptoms are epileptic seizures and debilitating involuntary muscle twitching (myoclonus). Professor Berkovic said this finding of a new gene underlying progressive myoclonus epilepsy is one of the most devastating forms of epilepsy. "For the study, we used modern DNA sequencing technologies, which have revolutionised genetic research of rare, severe ...

Stanford biologists explore link between memory deficit and misfiring circadian clock

Stanford biologists explore link between memory deficit and misfiring circadian clock
2014-11-18
Anyone who has struggled with a foggy brain while adjusting to daylight saving time knows first-hand how an out-of-sync circadian clock can impair brain function. Now, by manipulating the circadian clocks of Siberian hamsters, Stanford scientists may have identified a brain structure that disrupts memory when circadian rhythms fall apart, as they often do in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "What we've been able to show is that the part of the brain that we absolutely know contains the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), ...

Spice up your memory

2014-11-18
Adding just one gram of turmeric to breakfast could help improve the memory of people who are in the very early stages of diabetes and at risk of cognitive impairment. The finding has particular significance given that the world's ageing population means a rising incidence of conditions that predispose people to diabetes, which in turn is connected to dementia. Early intervention could help to reduce the burden, whether by halting the disease or reducing its impact, said Emeritus Professor Mark Wahlqvist, from the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University. Professor ...

Age matters: Young larvae boost pollen foraging in honey bees

2014-11-18
Toddlers and tweens have very different needs, which influence how parents provide for them. The same is true in honey bees, but instead of communicating their needs via language, honey bee larvae emit chemical signals called pheromones that influence the behavior of their caregivers. As larvae age, the diet they're fed changes. So too do the pheromone signals they emit. In a paper published in the advanced online edition of the journal Animal Behaviour, ASU alumna Kirsten Traynor, a research associate with the University of Maryland, Robert E. Page Jr., ASU university ...

Cocaine users experience abnormal blood flow, risk heart disease

2014-11-18
Cocaine users complaining of chest pain may have abnormal blood flow in the heart's smallest blood vessels that may not be detected in regular testing, putting these patients at risk for heart complications or death, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014. "Cocaine use is unfortunately very common, and we see many emergency room admissions because patients experience chest pain following cocaine use," said Varun Kumar, M.D., lead study author and an internist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago. "But there can be a ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Eindhoven University of Technology and JMIR Publications announce unlimited open access publishing agreement

Orphan nuclear receptors in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease development

A technological breakthrough for ultra-fast and greener AI

Pusan National University researchers identify key barriers hindering data-driven smart manufacturing adoption

Inking heterometallic nanosheets: A scalable breakthrough for coating, electronics, and electrocatalyst applications

Adults with autism show similar brain mapping of body parts as typically developing adults

Uncovering behavioral clues to childhood maltreatment

Premenstrual symptoms linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease

Newly discovered remains of ancient river landscapes control ice flow in East Antarctica

Newly discovered interstellar object 'may be oldest comet ever seen'

Animal-inspired AI robot learns to navigate unfamiliar terrain

Underserved youth less likely to visit emergency department for concussion in Ontario, study finds

‘Molecular shield’ placed in the nose may soon treat common hay fever trigger

Beetles under climate stress lay larger male eggs: Wolbachia infection drives adaptive reproduction strategy in response to rising temperature and CO₂

Groundbreaking quantum study puts wave-particle duality to work

Weekly injection could be life changing for Parkinson’s patients

Toxic metals linked to impaired growth in infants in Guatemala

Being consistently physically active in adulthood linked to 30–40% lower risk of death

Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment risks

Children’s social care involvement common to nearly third of UK mums who died during perinatal period

‘Support, not judgement’: Study explores links between children’s social care involvement and maternal deaths

Ethnic minority and poorer children more likely to die in intensive care

Major progress in fertility preservation after treatment for cancer of the lymphatic system

Fewer complications after additional ultrasound in pregnant women who feel less fetal movement

Environmental impact of common pesticides seriously underestimated

The Milky Way could be teeming with more satellite galaxies than previously thought

New study reveals surprising reproductive secrets of a cricket-hunting parasitoid fly

Media Tip Sheet: Symposia at ESA2025

NSF CAREER Award will power UVA engineer’s research to improve drug purification

Tiny parasitoid flies show how early-life competition shapes adult success

[Press-News.org] Researchers create first image-recognition software that greatly improves web searches