Articles by Alex Kamburov

" Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision (adjectival form: visual, optical, or ocular)."  Visual perception , Wikipedia We have had optical character recognition (OCR) for years now. Reading can be perceived as an important ability of our visual perception and we have more or less cracked it. What we don't have is the ability to acquire 3D models from a simple 2D camera, just like our eyes can. Or at least I thought so. An article that I read recently has pushed me to google for such type of software. Interestingly enough just a few weeks ago I was thinking about such a system and its (big) importance to AI development. Google provided an article immediately, and it dated from 2009! Creating 3D models with a simple webcam (w/ Video) described a system just like the one that I envisioned and provided a nice vid...

I just watched the movie Transcendent Man . In general it was a good documentary packing Ray Kurzweil's reflections on the exponential growth of evolution. Apart from talking about scientific predictions, there were a lot of human desires that were portrayed. Like Ray's obsession with  resurrecting some part of his father. At the end of the movie, as a conclusion, Ray was speaking about the explosion of intelligence in the Universe. I stayed for a couple of minutes, reiterating on what I have thought before and synchronizing it with what I saw in the film. I stopped at the idea of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and its relevance to the Universe. All that evolution (or the Universe) has created up until now, we are gradually trying to compact it in our brains so that we can make predictions on what will happen next. We are, to our knowledge, the most flexible form of existence in our Universe. Being a bit limited though, we're looking for help to be able to do our...

Rendering of the introduction of the Taare Zameen Par 's Wikipedia article as a graph (click to enlarge):

Recently it was brought to my attention that the user agent string of the mobile version of Google AdsBot caused problems on a .NET site running Sitecore CMS. The exception is:      Stack trace:    at System.Number.StringToNumber(String str, NumberStyles options, NumberBuffer& number, NumberFormatInfo info, Boolean parseDecimal)    at System.Number.ParseInt32(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info)    at System.Web.Configuration.HttpCapabilitiesBase.get_MajorVersion()    at Sitecore.UIUtil.SupportsInlineEditing()    at Sitecore.Sites.SiteContext.SetDisableWebEditEditing(String value)    at Sitecore.Sites.SiteContext.ProcessQueryString()    at Sitecore.Sites.SiteContext..ctor(SiteInfo info, Boolean processQueryString)    at Sitecore.Sites.SiteContextFactory.GetSiteContext(String hostName, String fullPath, Int32 portNumber)    at Sitecore.Pipelines....