Random thoughts

Just remembered an old incident. It would be good to document it.
There was a military guy doing his masters in my department. Once we had an argument at tea board on the need of research and the useless algorithms that we are working on. The discussion waivered to content based image searching. And he said, "who would want to search images except in some highly specialized environment. And its pretty much an unnecessary wastage of resources which can be utilized to achieve some better results". I was my usual abstract and confused self but I stuck to my point. Anyways the discussion was over after sometime and we talked about many other things.

Then when we were walking back to the department, he was talking to another friend who had been in the group all time. They were discussing about the collection of movies that they had got and had to clean some of them due to space crunch on the hard drive. He just mentioned that there was a movie which they earlier copied from a pirated CD for which they have a better print now and he could not recall the name of the movie. So it would save them some space if they delete the older version.

I just had an idea and said, "This is where we use content based image search". There were no further comments on the topic and I felt good for having made a point. I do not know when will this kind of resource intensive research be available to common man, but I guess someone in some research lab will be working on this.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment

"In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it. Elbert Green Hubbard (1865-1915)"