Thursday 29 October 2009
So, who are the players?
If you want to know who are the most important 150 Cloud Computing players, just click here. It is an exhaustive list offered by Cloud Computing Journal.
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Google Über Alles
Los Angeles becomes now the first city in the world that has decided to move the email system for all its 30.000 employees to the Google Cloud by using Gmail, based on a contract of $7.25 million dollars. The fear for the data privacy in the Cloud was finally beaten, but some concerns still exists, regarding the fact that the security of the Cloud wasn't strongly proved yet .
Google had fought against another very powerful competitor, Microsoft Corp., but the city concil unanimely approved their plan with a score of 12-0.
Google had fought against another very powerful competitor, Microsoft Corp., but the city concil unanimely approved their plan with a score of 12-0.
Tuesday 27 October 2009
Image to GPS
Today, surfing the net for some material related to Cloud Computing, I've landed on the one of the coolest algorithm of computer vision website I've heard. It is called IMG2GPS and it was developed at the Carnegie Mellon University, by James Hays and Alexei Efros.
What did those guys do?
They have developed an algorithm that is able to extract some geographically information from pictures taken wherever the world, by leveraging the huge GPS tagged images database contained by Flickr. The location is determined taking into account some matches with color histogram, some textures, geometrical contexts and others, and not by considering people's skin color or clothes or other individualities related to humans. The algorithm is exemplified with three pictures, one representing the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, one showing a street (probably a mediteranean landscape) and one representing an island, and after executing the algorithm, the proposed results are displayed, indicating the most probable, or even the exact location.
Why is this algorithm interesting from the Cloud Computing point of view? Because it is a typically problem of iterating and processing huge quantities of data, a problem of parallelization of tasks and the current Cloud architectures offer the power and the tools for solving it.
The tests were made using Flickr's images, but they are also a lot of other image providers, some of them hosting their databases in Cloud architectures and I am sure that soon we'll be able to determine ourselves the location of our interesting pictures. This is just the beginning in this branch of geographical computer vision, as the two authors named this research direction.
The entire material could be found here.
What did those guys do?
They have developed an algorithm that is able to extract some geographically information from pictures taken wherever the world, by leveraging the huge GPS tagged images database contained by Flickr. The location is determined taking into account some matches with color histogram, some textures, geometrical contexts and others, and not by considering people's skin color or clothes or other individualities related to humans. The algorithm is exemplified with three pictures, one representing the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, one showing a street (probably a mediteranean landscape) and one representing an island, and after executing the algorithm, the proposed results are displayed, indicating the most probable, or even the exact location.
Why is this algorithm interesting from the Cloud Computing point of view? Because it is a typically problem of iterating and processing huge quantities of data, a problem of parallelization of tasks and the current Cloud architectures offer the power and the tools for solving it.
The tests were made using Flickr's images, but they are also a lot of other image providers, some of them hosting their databases in Cloud architectures and I am sure that soon we'll be able to determine ourselves the location of our interesting pictures. This is just the beginning in this branch of geographical computer vision, as the two authors named this research direction.
The entire material could be found here.
Friday 23 October 2009
Thursday 22 October 2009
This is the beginning...
This is my very first blog and my very first post. Ever.
Why was this blog born?
Because I want to share my knowledge with people interested in Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing. I want to change ideas with all of you, guys, that have the same preocupation as I have, that want to make more to develop this idea, and maybe, one day, we'll have computing utility as easier as we have now electricity, gas, water and telephony.
Why was this blog born?
Because I want to share my knowledge with people interested in Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing. I want to change ideas with all of you, guys, that have the same preocupation as I have, that want to make more to develop this idea, and maybe, one day, we'll have computing utility as easier as we have now electricity, gas, water and telephony.
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