Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Multimedia search engine

One more abstract useless thought.
Till date the search engines that we use on the internet are also text-based search engines. These search engines will typically have a box to put your text followed by a neat button to click on to begin with the search. On submission of your search request you will get a well formatted page containing all the search results. Usually a bunch of links following different websites are presented. In case it's an image or video search links to the image/video resources are listed.
Computers are intended to become close to human brain with the ability to interact using all the sense organs like human beings. Will you recognize my face from a group photo taken while I was in school? tough :) If you can I must say you have a good eye-sight and power of pattern recognition, that's human brain. I hope someday we will have search engines to upload the image of my face and find out a group photo posted somewhere on the net. Exciting, aint it!! we can do this with many media patterns such as

# image
# video
# sound/music

I could have added more to the list if we had smell, taste and touch :) but we don't have input/output devices for them yet. ooops!! sorry it's not my concept (well every computer user might have thought this way while seeing a lovely photo of a food S/he likes) but has been patented recently (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7562816/description.html). I would hope we will see it commercially available in the market soon. Even there are touch printers in the market too (http://www.gizmag.com/sense-taste-smell-touch-printer/13689/).

Image pattern recognition will help greatly in finding out photos from the internet for the purpose of research, investigation.
Sound patterns would track down the copied or pirated music ;) and videos will help in tracking down piracy.

Friday, February 12, 2010

I don't see my words in your design

It has always been a long and tough session to make the business people understand the thought process behind attaining a particular design model. In my career as a software designer I faced several categories of stakeholders for my design such as the IT-managers from the client's side, technical IT people, business people, end-users etc.
Usually we go and meet these users to grab the requirement of the system/application they are looking for and then try to draw a mapping between the requirement and the software logical constructs such as classes, objects, services, components etc. During the process some new terms pop up based on the abstraction of the designer which might not surface the exact word specified in the requirement. Designers try to map the features/requirement of the application with the logical software constructs which is sometimes beyond the understanding of some of the stakeholders.
Based on the technical knowledge on software design of the stakeholder it becomes harder or easier to bridge the gap and make them happy. I am sure all the designers have experienced these kinds of sessions where the audience is shouting at you syaing "I don't see my words in your design, make me understand how are you arriving at this model of yours..". It will be followed by a long discussion of why I did it.
For example, a person who drives a car might not be very familier with the internal structure or mechanism of a chasis or gear box, but you have to make him/her understand how is it related to the process of driving else S/he will not buy the car... I just had this kind of session today :)