PUBLIC MARKS with search kansas-nebraska(kn)method

t work we have to manage a ton of Django based sites. Just for our World Company sites, we have over 50 different settings files, and this doesn't take into account the sites that we host for other clients. At this size it becomes basically impossible to test each site in a browser when you push things to production. To solve this problem I have written a very basic server description tool. This allows you to describe sites (settings file, python path, url, etc.) and servers.

Minidetector is a Django reusable app that allows you to know if a request is being viewed on a mobile device. It provides a middleware and a view decorator that sets a request.mobile variable to True if the request is coming from a mobile device. It's method of figuring out if a device is mobile is simple; It first checks for a special Opera Mini header, then for WAP support, then finally checks the User Agent against a list of known mobile strings.

A RESTful, hypertext-driven system needs to enable clients to create a new resource that depends on three or more resources of different types. What's the best method to expose this capability?

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Michael Goodchild’s notion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the emergence of geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals, to discuss the greater presence of unvoluntarily generated geographic data. In the talk “Not So Volunteered Geographic Information“, I present my method to analysis these new kinds of citizen generated data, and use my work to discuss the induced opportunities, limitations and concerns.

Color-Structured Image Search

Jingdong Wang, Xian-Sheng Hua, and Yinghai Zhao

6 July 2009

In this paper, we propose a novel interactive image ranking technique, color-structured image search, by exploiting color spatial relation information, and demonstrate it in image research results refinement. This technique enables users to draw a few color strokes, called target color structure, to indicate the intent. Beyond the conventional image retrieval methods based on query by image content that simply view the target color structure as an image and compute the similarity merely according to the spatial correspondence criterion, the proposed method represents the target color structure using a set of spatially relational colors, and evaluates the similarities between target color structure and image color structure by exploiting their spatial correspondence information, and an extra novel criterion, the consistency of spatial relation of colors implied in target color structure, and even offering a scheme to handle the uncertainty of target color structure. This similarity evaluation process can be accomplished efficiently. Moreover, a convenient interactive interface is presented to allow users to specify target color structure flexibly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.