Cue "The browser is the new operating system"...
Standards group W3C wins support from all major players to get AI working in the browser
Intel's Web Standards tech lead, Anssi Kostiainen, has said the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Machine Learning for the Web Community Group now has "all major browsers – Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla – on board along with the broader AI & web ecosystem." The purpose of the group is to develop web APIs for hardware- …
COMMENTS
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Monday 20th May 2019 10:33 GMT Andy The Hat
Re: Feature creep
Perhaps the use is obvious - so that data returned and trawled by "carefully selected partners" is already fully analysed - faces, number plates, equipment, activity logs etc. Imagine the work involved having to process millions of hours of subpoenaed video to see if anyone had recorded a vehicle - simply ask all devices (or interrogate a master database or uploaded data) whether a device has seen vehicle XXXX ... or face YYYY ....
If this became a 'feature' I feel cameras would become a massive Big Brother privacy hole ...
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Monday 20th May 2019 11:13 GMT TJ1
Great for people with sensory impairment
I work with people with visual and sensory impairment. One of the major problems for these people is that the technology aids designed and made for them are extremely expensive due to high R&D costs and low volume.
The advent of powerful PDAs (you may call them 'smart'phones) has lowered the cost dramatically for many aids (no more need for dedicated devices) and there is work ongoing in university labs and elsewhere to use machine learning to describe the scene the camera can see, including recognising objects, reading labels and signs, and more [0].
Some of this technology is available in dedicated devices that are very expensive, e.g. the Orcam MyEye 2 [1].
If the same technology could be enabled in the browser it would reduce the cost dramatically and expand the areas where it can usefully aid users.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/soundscape/
[1] https://www.orcam.com/en/myeye2/
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Saturday 18th May 2019 09:04 GMT JassMan
Re: Yet more security holes
Totally agree we don't need even more security holes. Especially since they are talking about giving direct access to all processing power in your computer.
The other problem is GDPR. I use a browser to browse the internet - I don't want the internet browsing everything about me that can be seen through my phones' cameras. This is a wet dream for anyone from the NSA or GCHQ, not to mention everyone hoping to steal my identity.
This will end up killing the web. Just like more and more sites won't let you view content without disabling adblock, sites will stop giving access if your camera only sees black and your mic is silent.
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Friday 17th May 2019 23:01 GMT Martin Gregorie
Re: It could also...
Humph!
Every camera I've owned, regardless of whether it used film or digital technology, has recorded images that are wider than they're tall, i.e. landscape mode, when held normally.
This makes it obvious that you don't own a camera and, instead, are mistaking a phone for one.
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Saturday 18th May 2019 00:32 GMT jake
Re: It could also...
Now you've done it, Martin.
Some fone fanboi is going to set all it's buddies on you, trying to convince the planet that their cute little fone snapshots are fine photography.
One of Apple's biggest sins is brainwashing hoi poloi that if they will just shell out the big bucks for Apple hardware, it'll instantly turn them into a professional artist ...
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Saturday 18th May 2019 20:07 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: It could also...
"Teach you to hold the camera the other way to shoot in landscape rather than portrait if you are going to use the footage anywhere."
There's a "media art" exhibition designed around portrait mode video. There's a TV designed to be rotated so people can watch their phone videos "the proper way". Yuck!
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Sunday 19th May 2019 01:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Would that me the dynamic JS-laden "proper" interface? I always made it kick down to standard HTML and it's not bad, for GMail anyway. For years I did the same thing on Yahoo and only bookmarked the entry point that always loaded old-school static pages-- until they deliberately and unashamedly made that stop working.
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Sunday 19th May 2019 15:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sorry I mean "basic HTML" GMail interface. "Standard" is the bad one with "Chat/Spell checker/Keyboard shortcuts/Adding or importing contacts/Custom from addresses/Rich formatting", none of which I want or need. I hit F12 then Memory then Take Snapshot, the basic iface apparently uses around 1.3MB to show first 100 messages of Inbox. I forgot to mention JS is utterly blocked and basic HTML still works, always appreciated... even if it's Google. Too bad they're also reading all the receipts and populating https://myaccount.google.com/purchases with things I bought from anyone I gave the address to, and never told me about it, or showed me where the kill switch was, if there even was one.
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Saturday 18th May 2019 17:08 GMT takno
I'm certainly excited that bitcoin miners will finally have all the access to my compute capacity they could ever need. The massive increase in leccy bills and complete death of performance from accidentally leaving a single background tab open are a small price to pay for keeping the internet free.