Greg Morga's Profile

Currently, the smartest object-recognition software can detect and categorize a few dozen common visual forms. It can search through Flickr photos and highlight the images that contain a dog, a cat, a bicycle, a bottle, an airplane, etc. It can distinguish between a chair and sofa, and it doesn’t identify a bus as a car. But each additional new object to be recognized means the software has to be trained with hundreds of samples of that image. Still, at current rates of improvement, a rudimentary visual search for images is probably only a few years away.

Viewdle is an experimental Web site that can automatically identify select celebrity faces in video.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

Some popular Web sites with huge selections of movies (like porn sites) have devised a way for users to scan through the content of full movies quickly in a few seconds. When a user clicks the title frame of a movie, the window skips from one key frame to the next, making a rapid slide show, like a flip book of the movie. The abbreviated slide show visually summarizes a few-hour film in a few seconds. Expert software can be used to identify the key frames in a film in order to maximize the effectiveness of the summary.