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Underground > Laboratory >

Google in the future: Just Hum a Few Bars....

17:27 / 30.01.02

...and we can find that song.

The guy who helped devise MP3s has come out with MPEG-7 -- an example of what he calls "metadata," or files which contain information about their content.

The gist of the article: soon, information will organize itself in easier, clearer ways.

So you'll be able to find that song without knowing any of the words.

07:44 / 07.02.02

That is the logical step for a search engine move away from text and into different forms of input. Graphics, sound, ideas.
In the future we will have search engines that act like thesauri connected one likely work, image, sound idea to similar others. I suppose we have an example at online bookshops like Amazon which link to other items you might like. It would be useful to develop that in a non-commercial way. Build simulated intuition into a machine.

14:15 / 08.02.02

It'd probably be quite cool to find loads of people who look a bit like you, like that 'Separated from Birth' software the police used in William Gibson's Virtual Light.
Well, it would probably make for an amusing afternoon, anyway -sigh
< goes back to throwing playing cards in top hat >

The big buzz-phrase in electronics r&d labs at the minute, from what I've heard, is 'ambient intelligence' - which is what MPEG-7 seems to be aimed at. The hallmarks are things like ubiquitous computing, natural interaction and intelligence.
Companies like Philips have loads of info on their sites about it.