They can do that?! - Information Trends

Information Outlook, Oct, 2002 by Stephen Abram

As a child spawned in the '50s, I still wait for the robot that will clean my house and cook my food, the jetpack that will lift my earthbound body to the skies and the teleporter that will make my travel independent of vehicles, space and time. But wait, there's hope.

* In 1999, Lene Hau rode a bicycle at the speed of light. She's not a racer; she's a physicist at Harvard University. She accomplished this by slowing light down--to an incredible 60 kilometers (37 miles) an hour. And in 2002, she stopped light dead in its tracks-from 300 million meters (186,000 miles) per second to a dead stop.

* Indeed, in August 2001, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry performed an experiment where a living organism's biological neurons were directly linked and communicated bi-directionally with a silicon chip for the first time. It opens the door for those advanced bionics we imagined on TV shows and links between real and artificial intelligence.

The line between imagination and reality blurs further every day. My plan for this column is to highlight some of the whiz-bang innovations that are arriving on our near-term horizon, of which may or may not make a difference in our professional lives.

As a profession we've nailed a few things-print, text, word-based content. We're still challenged by a few others like pictures, sound and video. Non-print content is emerging as a hot issue because sounds have left the world of physical objects like tapes and CDs and became nearly virtual as MP3's; static pictures have mutated into a variety of formats like JPEG, TIFF and GIF; while movies, slide shows, DVDs and videotape have escaped their physical chains into a multitude of MPEG and other digital formats. This is exciting and challenging for information professionals who set their stock in trade at being able to find and deliver the best of everything, from the past and present.

One very interesting company is LTU Technologies (http://www.ltutech.com/). Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation, named Dr. Chahab Nastar, LTU's CEO and co-founder to the TR100, as one of the "World's Top Innovators Under Age 35." The TR100 consists of 100 young individuals whose innovative work in business and technology has a profound impact on today's world. Nastar was selected for his pioneering work in the field of digital image recognition. There is no doubt our world communicates knowledge, learning and information in more ways than through print and that these other modes have definitely increased in importance over the past century due to radio, television and the Internet. It is also clear that our tools, services, colleagues and libraries have generally lagged in their ability to store, access and deliver this content. To fully comprehend what LTU's innovations do, imagine products that:

* Automatically index and classify digital content contained in still images. Users can index images in real-time. First, the system analyzes an image or video dataflow based on its visual features (shape, color, texture, etc.). This dataflow is then translated into a digital signature of the image, which is used to identify and categorize its contents (people, sports, etc.) and a variety of its graphical attributes (dominant hue, orientation, etc.). Each image is then indexed with an appropriate keyword or score.

* Effectively search and navigate large digital collections of images. Indeed, categorization thresholds can be customized in the indexing process according to company-specific annotation/classification processes and a user can add higher-level contextual and perceptual keywords for further customization.

* Automatically index and segment digital videos and also automate content clipping and integration into digital archives and other content management or publishing workflows. The tool adds metadata to video by identifying content elements from the pixels.

* Using the LTU tool set, you can create digital asset management solutions that will automatically analyze the content of and filter out unwanted images or video (e.g., X-rated) or traffic them into specific collections.

* Search and scrape digital repositories, like the Web, using the LTU image comparison engine that can integrate with monitoring and text-based tools to produce a complete solution for market intelligence, brand protection or copyright and trademark infringements.

Products mentioned are not endorsed by Stephen Abram, Micromedia ProQuest or SLA and are used here for illustrative purposes to highlight the types of technology opportunities that are coming to the market.

Stephen Abram is vice president of Micromedia ProQuest in Canada.

He can be reached at sabram@micromedia.ca.