20 October 2017

Twitter bans ‘Hateful Display Names’ and shares Safety road map


 Twitter has committed to a specific timeline for rolling out changes to its Safety features, and announced new policies, including a ban on hateful display names, and improvements for second-hand “witness reporting” of abuse. By January, Twitter plans to have implemented all the abuse changes outlined in the internal email published by Wired earlier this week, as well as the new… Read More

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Twitter bans “Hateful Display Names” and shares Safety roadmap


 Twitter has comitted to a specific timeline for rolling out changes to its Safety features and announced new policies including a ban on hateful display names, and improvements for second-hand “witness reporting” of abuse. By January Twitter plans to have implemented all the abuse changes outlined in the internal email published by Wired earlier this week, as well as the new… Read More
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What washing dishes, driving a truck and working in a cemetery taught me about the power of ‘blue-collar’ software


 I work in VC. But it wasn’t long ago that I stocked shelves, drove a truck, washed dishes, waited tables and even hauled dirt at a cemetery. This isn’t the usual route to a job in tech and VC, but it opened my eyes to a corner of the tech world I think has the chance to create the next Salesforce, Oracle or LinkedIn: software targeting those who do their jobs outside corporate offices. Read More

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Sony Launches a PS4 Controller for Younger Gamers


Sony has a new PlayStation 4 controller coming out in time for the holidays. And this one has been designed with younger gamers in mind. It’s called the Mini Wired Gamepad, and it’s a very different proposition than its full-sized cousin, the Dualshock 4. It’s a lot cuter, for starters. PlayStation controllers have split opinion over the years, and have been compared unfavorably to Xbox controllers. However, the Dualshock 4 that is standard on the PlayStation 4 has proved popular with everyone. Everyone except people with smaller hands. Or children, as I believe they’re called. Designed to Fit Smaller Hands...

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Facebook attacks Pinterest with “Sets” of posts


 Identity is prismatic. You show different sides of yourself to different friends in your life. Now Facebook wants to let you share the niches of your interests while stealing thunder from Pinterest’s boards. Facebook is now testing a feature called Sets that lets you select several status updates, photos, or videos and share them as a themed collection to everyone or specific… Read More
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Facebook attacks Pinterest with “Sets” of posts


 Identity is prismatic. You show different sides of yourself to different friends in your life. Now Facebook wants to let you share the niches of your interests while stealing thunder from Pinterest’s boards. Facebook is now testing a feature called Sets that lets you select several status updates, photos, or videos and share them as a themed collection to everyone or specific… Read More

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Nintendo nabs two-thirds of monthly game hardware sales thanks to Switch


 Nintendo has managed to lead the industry in video game hardware sales – by a wide margin – for September, which is a very promising sign going into the holiday shopping season. The Nintendo Switch helped this immensely, leading the industry as the top-selling console for the third straight month, and the fifth month overall that Switch has led sales since its introduction seven… Read More

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Amazon’s original Echo gets a much-needed upgrade


 It’s been nearly two full years since the first Echo was made available to Amazon Prime subscribers. In that time, the company added six new members to the Echo family (seven if you count the Tap, which Amazon kind of, sort of does) — and in the case of the Echo Dot, did one full product refresh. Google entered the space in a big way with Home, and both Apple and Microsoft have… Read More

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Google looks to prove VR is more than a toy with updated Daydream View headset


 Google’s latest Daydream View build is by no means a major departure from the previous iteration. While it’s sturdier, more thought-out and a bit more expensive, it encapsulates much of the same features of the headset from last year. This View looks almost identical to its previous iteration but the changes to its build materials are substantial and give the device a feeling that… Read More
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Why Google Assistant Is a Better Smart AI Than Apple’s Siri


personal-ai-assistant

Apple’s Siri may have been the pioneering voice assistant on a smartphone, but it’s been years since most of us took her very seriously. Over the years, she’s often been accused of not being able to understand what we’re saying. More importantly, after the arrival of the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, Siri appears to be not as smart when it comes to answering our queries. Let’s deep dive into why that perception exists and why other voice assistants seem to be faring better. Siri’s Back Story We’ve visualized intelligent, talking computers in science fiction movies and literature for decades...

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Apple’s enterprise strategy begins to take shape


 When Apple announced its partnership with GE this week, it would have been easy to dismiss it as another random collaboration from a company people don’t generally associate with the enterprise. After all, Apple killed off their enterprise server product years ago. You might rightly ask, what exactly do they have to do with the enterprise these days? But if you consider the notion of… Read More

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Ubuntu: A Beginner’s Guide


So you’re curious about Linux, and you heard Ubuntu is a great place to start? Maybe you’ve heard of Ubuntu and have no idea about this thing called Linux? Either way, you’ve come to the right place. This guide will teach you everything you need to know about Ubuntu in easy-to-understand language. Ubuntu is a free and open-source operating system with millions of users. It’s also an ethos, a collaborative project and, first and foremost, a community. If you’re reading this guide, you’re probably interested in moving away from proprietary operating systems such as Windows and macOS. Perhaps you’ve already installed Ubuntu and are...

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Romeo Power unveils its first consumer power packs


 Romeo Power has just released what looks to be the mobile charging device of my dreams. Its wand-shaped “Saber,” using the company’s proprietary power management technology, is a compact little charger that seems ideal for keeping my three-year-old, busted-up MacBook running when I’m on the go. Read More

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These Hidden Halloween Screamer Videos Are the Perfect Pranks


halloween-screamer-videos

Halloween is fast approaching, and it only means one thing — it’s that time of the year when every one of your friends is going to try and come up with a new way to be a jerk to you to scare you. But not if you get to them first! Tired of letting your friends get away with it? Looking for a neat and simple way to have your revenge without having to spend lots of money and/or time on a prank? Look no further. We’ve got what you need, and we’re ready to share our Halloween wisdom with...

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Announcing AVA: A Finely Labeled Video Dataset for Human Action Understanding




Teaching machines to understand human actions in videos is a fundamental research problem in Computer Vision, essential to applications such as personal video search and discovery, sports analysis, and gesture interfaces. Despite exciting breakthroughs made over the past years in classifying and finding objects in images, recognizing human actions still remains a big challenge. This is due to the fact that actions are, by nature, less well-defined than objects in videos, making it difficult to construct a finely labeled action video dataset. And while many benchmarking datasets, e.g., UCF101, ActivityNet and DeepMind’s Kinetics, adopt the labeling scheme of image classification and assign one label to each video or video clip in the dataset, no dataset exists for complex scenes containing multiple people who could be performing different actions.

In order to facilitate further research into human action recognition, we have released AVA, coined from “atomic visual actions”, a new dataset that provides multiple action labels for each person in extended video sequences. AVA consists of URLs for publicly available videos from YouTube, annotated with a set of 80 atomic actions (e.g. “walk”, “kick (an object)”, “shake hands”) that are spatial-temporally localized, resulting in 57.6k video segments, 96k labeled humans performing actions, and a total of 210k action labels. You can browse the website to explore the dataset and download annotations, and read our arXiv paper that describes the design and development of the dataset.

Compared with other action datasets, AVA possesses the following key characteristics:
  • Person-centric annotation. Each action label is associated with a person rather than a video or clip. Hence, we are able to assign different labels to multiple people performing different actions in the same scene, which is quite common.
  • Atomic visual actions. We limit our action labels to fine temporal scales (3 seconds), where actions are physical in nature and have clear visual signatures.
  • Realistic video material. We use movies as the source of AVA, drawing from a variety of genres and countries of origin. As a result, a wide range of human behaviors appear in the data.
Examples of 3-second video segments (from Video Source) with their bounding box annotations in the middle frame of each segment. (For clarity, only one bounding box is shown for each example.)

To create AVA, we first collected a diverse set of long form content from YouTube, focusing on the “film” and “television” categories, featuring professional actors of many different nationalities. We analyzed a 15 minute clip from each video, and uniformly partitioned it into 300 non-overlapping 3-second segments. The sampling strategy preserved sequences of actions in a coherent temporal context.

Next, we manually labeled all bounding boxes of persons in the middle frame of each 3-second segment. For each person in the bounding box, annotators selected a variable number of labels from a pre-defined atomic action vocabulary (with 80 classes) that describe the person’s actions within the segment. These actions were divided into three groups: pose/movement actions, person-object interactions, and person-person interactions. Because we exhaustively labeled all people performing all actions, the frequencies of AVA’s labels followed a long-tail distribution, as summarized below.
Distribution of AVA’s atomic action labels. Labels displayed in the x-axis are only a partial set of our vocabulary.

The unique design of AVA allows us to derive some interesting statistics that are not available in other existing datasets. For example, given the large number of persons with at least two labels, we can measure the co-occurrence patterns of action labels. The figure below shows the top co-occurring action pairs in AVA with their co-occurrence scores. We confirm expected patterns such as people frequently play instruments while singing, lift a person while playing with kids, and hug while kissing.
Top co-occurring action pairs in AVA.

To evaluate the effectiveness of human action recognition systems on the AVA dataset, we implemented an existing baseline deep learning model that obtains highly competitive performance on the much smaller JHMDB dataset. Due to challenging variations in zoom, background clutter, cinematography, and appearance variation, this model achieves a relatively modest performance when correctly identifying actions on AVA (18.4% mAP). This suggests that AVA will be a useful testbed for developing and evaluating new action recognition architectures and algorithms for years to come.

We hope that the release of AVA will help improve the development of human action recognition systems, and provide opportunities to model complex activities based on labels with fine spatio-temporal granularity at the level of individual person’s actions. We will continue to expand and improve AVA, and are eager to hear feedback from the community to help us guide future directions. Please join the AVA users mailing list to receive dataset updates as well as to send us emails for feedback.

Acknowledgements
The core team behind AVA includes Chunhui Gu, Chen Sun, David Ross, Caroline Pantofaru, Yeqing Li, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, George Toderici, Susanna Ricco, Rahul Sukthankar, Cordelia Schmid, and Jitendra Malik. We thank many Google colleagues and annotators for their dedicated support on this project.

Bipartisan bill seeks to regulate political ads on Facebook, Twitter and Google


 A new bipartisan bill known as the Honest Ads Act is the first major attempt to regulate online platforms that sell ads with rules akin to those that apply to more traditional advertising on TV, radio and in print. The bill, introduced today by Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar with a bipartisan boost from Republican Senator John McCain, imposes regulations on social… Read More
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19 October 2017

How to Shorten Man Pages Into Readable Explanations on Linux and macOS


shorten-man-pages

When all else fails, read the manual. Command line users on Linux and Mac know they can type “man” followed by a command name to see a long, detailed explanation of that command. These man pages are useful but verbose. Sometimes all you need is a short, concise explanation of a command to refresh your memory. Here’s an easy way to get concise, practical explanations of commands used on the command line on Linux and Mac. It’s a command line app called “tldr”, after the abbreviation for “too long; didn’t read”. The tl;dr abbreviation is used to write or request...

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Facebook Messenger lets games monetize with purchases and ads


 Facebook is finally giving developers a reason to build games for Messenger while also opening a new revenue stream for the chat app. After launching HTML5 ‘Instant Games’ inside Messenger like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Words With Friends Frenzy in November 2016, today Facebook is allowing developers to add in-app purchases as well as interstitial and rewarded video ads. Players… Read More
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Facebook is now testing paywalls and subscriptions for Instant Articles


 A few months ago we reported that Facebook may begin testing paywalls and subscriptions for Instant Articles beginning in October. Well now it’s October, and surprise – Facebook has started testing subscription support for instant articles! Here’s how it will work: Facebook will start with two paywalled options for publishers to choose from: The first option is a metered… Read More
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