Searching photos with Riya
by Esther Schindler
Nominally, this is a conflict of interest since I'm pointing to an article/video on my own site. But maybe if I disclose that first, it'll be okay.
DevSource.com has had a whole bunch of video interviews over the last few months. The last one is only vaguely related to software development, but it's interesting simply because the technology discussed is innovative.
I saw the CEO of Riya demo his stuff at the DEMO conference in February, and he certainly deserved the accolades. Riya lets you search inside photos, and its indexing is context based. For example, I take two photos of, say, Vowe at a bar. The first one is head-on; in the second, he's turned away from the camera, or he's moving, or the beer mug is in front of his face. An ordinary online search might figure out the first image but it wouldn't get the second. As a human, I'd recognize both photos as Vowe, in part because they were taken two minutes apart and he's wearing the same bright green shirt. That's what Riya does, too.
Anyway, the DevSource interview goes into a bunch more detail, and it's pretty cool. This link goes to an introductory article first, before you click to load up Windows media player.
Comments
Riya.com uses Browser sniffing
http://www.riya.com/browser.js
They need to change from
if( !(browser.isIE6x || browser.isFirefox || browser.isFlock || browser.isCamino || browser.isSafari) ) {
to
if( !(browser.isIE6x || browser.isGecko || browser.isSafari) ) {
