Tango (named Project Tango while in testing) was an augmented reality computing platform, developed and authored by the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), a skunkworks division of Google. It used computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. This allowed application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, environmental recognition, augmented reality, and windows into a virtual world. The first product to emerge from ATAP, Tango was developed by a team led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft's Kinect. In an interview in June 2015, Lee said, "We're developing the hardware and software technologies to help everything and everyone understand precisely where they are, anywhere." Google produced two devices to demonstrate the Tango technology: the Peanut phone and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. More than 3,000 of these devices had been sold as of June 2015, chiefly to researchers and software developers interested in building applications for the platform. In the summer of 2015, Qualcomm and Intel both announced that they were developing Tango reference devices as models for device manufacturers who use their mobile chipsets. At CES, in January 2016, Google announced a partnership with Lenovo to release a consumer smartphone during the summer of 2016 to feature Tango technology marketed at consumers, noting a less than $500 price-point and a small form factor below 6.5 inches. At the same time, both companies also announced an application incubator to get applications developed to be on the device on launch. On 15 December 2017, Google announced that they would be ending support for Tango on March 1, 2018, in favor of ARCore. == Overview == Tango was different from other contemporary 3D-sensing computer vision products, in that it was designed to run on a standalone mobile phone or tablet and was chiefly concerned with determining the device's position and orientation within the environment. The software worked by integrating three types of functionality: Motion-tracking: using visual features of the environment, in combination with accelerometer and gyroscope data, to closely track the device's movements in space Area learning: storing environment data in a map that can be re-used later, shared with other Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest Depth perception: detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment Together, these generate data about the device in "six degrees of freedom" (3 axes of orientation plus 3 axes of position) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment. Project Tango was also the first project to graduate from Google X in 2012 Applications on mobile devices use Tango's C and Java APIs to access this data in real time. In addition, an API was also provided for integrating Tango with the Unity game engine; this enabled the conversion or creation of games that allow the user to interact and navigate in the game space by moving and rotating a Tango device in real space. These APIs were documented on the Google developer website. == Applications == Tango enabled apps to track a device's position and orientation within a detailed 3D environment, and to recognize known environments. This allowed the creations of applications such as in-store navigation, visual measurement and mapping utilities, presentation and design tools, and a variety of immersive games. At Augmented World Expo 2015, Johnny Lee demonstrated a construction game that builds a virtual structure in real space, an AR showroom app that allows users to view a full-size virtual automobile and customize its features, a hybrid Nerf gun with mounted Tango screen for dodging and shooting AR monsters superimposed on reality, and a multiplayer VR app that lets multiple players converse in a virtual space where their avatar movements match their real-life movements. Tango apps are distributed through Play. Google has encouraged the development of more apps with hackathons, an app contest, and promotional discounts on the development tablet. == Devices == As a platform for software developers and a model for device manufacturers, Google created two Tango devices. === The Peanut phone === "Peanut" was the first production Tango device, released in the first quarter of 2014. It was a small Android phone with a Qualcomm MSM8974 quad-core processor and additional special hardware including a fisheye motion camera, "RGB-IR" camera for color image and infrared depth detection, and Movidius Vision processing units. A high-performance accelerometer and gyroscope were added after testing several competing models in the MARS lab at the University of Minnesota. Several hundred Peanut devices were distributed to early-access partners including university researchers in computer vision and robotics, as well as application developers and technology startups. Google stopped supporting the Peanut device in September 2015, as by then the Tango software stack had evolved beyond the versions of Android that run on the device. === The Yellowstone tablet === "Yellowstone" was a 7-inch tablet with full Tango functionality, released in June 2014, and sold as the Project Tango Tablet Development Kit. It featured a 2.3 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, 128GB flash memory, 1920x1200-pixel touchscreen, 4MP color camera, fisheye-lens (motion-tracking) camera, an IR projector with RGB-IR camera for integrated depth sensing, and 4G LTE connectivity. As of May 27, 2017, the Tango tablet is considered officially unsupported by Google. ==== Testing by NASA ==== In May 2014, two Peanut phones were delivered to the International Space Station to be part of a NASA project to develop autonomous robots that navigate in a variety of environments, including outer space. The soccer-ball-sized, 18-sided polyhedral SPHERES robots were developed at the NASA Ames Research Center, adjacent to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Andres Martinez, SPHERES manager at NASA, said "We are researching how effective [Tango's] vision-based navigation abilities are for performing localization and navigation of a mobile free flyer on ISS. === Intel RealSense smartphone === Announced at Intel's Developer Forum in August 2015, and offered to public through a Developer Kit since January 2016. It incorporated a RealSense ZR300 camera which had optical features required for Tango, such as the fisheye camera. === Lenovo Phab 2 Pro === Lenovo Phab 2 Pro was the first commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology, the device was announced at the beginning of 2016, launched in August, and available for purchase in the US in November. The Phab 2 Pro had a 6.4 inch screen, a Snapdragon 652 processor, and 64 GB of internal storage, with a rear facing 16 Megapixels camera and 8 MP front camera. === Asus Zenfone AR === Asus Zenfone AR, announced at CES 2017, was the second commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology. It ran Tango AR & Daydream VR on Snapdragon 821, with 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of internal memory depending on the configuration.
Tango (platform)
Tango (named Project Tango while in testing) was an augmented reality computing platform, developed and authored by the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), a skunkworks division of Google. It used computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. This allowed application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, environmental recognition, augmented reality, and windows into a virtual world. The first product to emerge from ATAP, Tango was developed by a team led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft's Kinect. In an interview in June 2015, Lee said, "We're developing the hardware and software technologies to help everything and everyone understand precisely where they are, anywhere." Google produced two devices to demonstrate the Tango technology: the Peanut phone and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. More than 3,000 of these devices had been sold as of June 2015, chiefly to researchers and software developers interested in building applications for the platform. In the summer of 2015, Qualcomm and Intel both announced that they were developing Tango reference devices as models for device manufacturers who use their mobile chipsets. At CES, in January 2016, Google announced a partnership with Lenovo to release a consumer smartphone during the summer of 2016 to feature Tango technology marketed at consumers, noting a less than $500 price-point and a small form factor below 6.5 inches. At the same time, both companies also announced an application incubator to get applications developed to be on the device on launch. On 15 December 2017, Google announced that they would be ending support for Tango on March 1, 2018, in favor of ARCore. == Overview == Tango was different from other contemporary 3D-sensing computer vision products, in that it was designed to run on a standalone mobile phone or tablet and was chiefly concerned with determining the device's position and orientation within the environment. The software worked by integrating three types of functionality: Motion-tracking: using visual features of the environment, in combination with accelerometer and gyroscope data, to closely track the device's movements in space Area learning: storing environment data in a map that can be re-used later, shared with other Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest Depth perception: detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment Together, these generate data about the device in "six degrees of freedom" (3 axes of orientation plus 3 axes of position) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment. Project Tango was also the first project to graduate from Google X in 2012 Applications on mobile devices use Tango's C and Java APIs to access this data in real time. In addition, an API was also provided for integrating Tango with the Unity game engine; this enabled the conversion or creation of games that allow the user to interact and navigate in the game space by moving and rotating a Tango device in real space. These APIs were documented on the Google developer website. == Applications == Tango enabled apps to track a device's position and orientation within a detailed 3D environment, and to recognize known environments. This allowed the creations of applications such as in-store navigation, visual measurement and mapping utilities, presentation and design tools, and a variety of immersive games. At Augmented World Expo 2015, Johnny Lee demonstrated a construction game that builds a virtual structure in real space, an AR showroom app that allows users to view a full-size virtual automobile and customize its features, a hybrid Nerf gun with mounted Tango screen for dodging and shooting AR monsters superimposed on reality, and a multiplayer VR app that lets multiple players converse in a virtual space where their avatar movements match their real-life movements. Tango apps are distributed through Play. Google has encouraged the development of more apps with hackathons, an app contest, and promotional discounts on the development tablet. == Devices == As a platform for software developers and a model for device manufacturers, Google created two Tango devices. === The Peanut phone === "Peanut" was the first production Tango device, released in the first quarter of 2014. It was a small Android phone with a Qualcomm MSM8974 quad-core processor and additional special hardware including a fisheye motion camera, "RGB-IR" camera for color image and infrared depth detection, and Movidius Vision processing units. A high-performance accelerometer and gyroscope were added after testing several competing models in the MARS lab at the University of Minnesota. Several hundred Peanut devices were distributed to early-access partners including university researchers in computer vision and robotics, as well as application developers and technology startups. Google stopped supporting the Peanut device in September 2015, as by then the Tango software stack had evolved beyond the versions of Android that run on the device. === The Yellowstone tablet === "Yellowstone" was a 7-inch tablet with full Tango functionality, released in June 2014, and sold as the Project Tango Tablet Development Kit. It featured a 2.3 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, 128GB flash memory, 1920x1200-pixel touchscreen, 4MP color camera, fisheye-lens (motion-tracking) camera, an IR projector with RGB-IR camera for integrated depth sensing, and 4G LTE connectivity. As of May 27, 2017, the Tango tablet is considered officially unsupported by Google. ==== Testing by NASA ==== In May 2014, two Peanut phones were delivered to the International Space Station to be part of a NASA project to develop autonomous robots that navigate in a variety of environments, including outer space. The soccer-ball-sized, 18-sided polyhedral SPHERES robots were developed at the NASA Ames Research Center, adjacent to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Andres Martinez, SPHERES manager at NASA, said "We are researching how effective [Tango's] vision-based navigation abilities are for performing localization and navigation of a mobile free flyer on ISS. === Intel RealSense smartphone === Announced at Intel's Developer Forum in August 2015, and offered to public through a Developer Kit since January 2016. It incorporated a RealSense ZR300 camera which had optical features required for Tango, such as the fisheye camera. === Lenovo Phab 2 Pro === Lenovo Phab 2 Pro was the first commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology, the device was announced at the beginning of 2016, launched in August, and available for purchase in the US in November. The Phab 2 Pro had a 6.4 inch screen, a Snapdragon 652 processor, and 64 GB of internal storage, with a rear facing 16 Megapixels camera and 8 MP front camera. === Asus Zenfone AR === Asus Zenfone AR, announced at CES 2017, was the second commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology. It ran Tango AR & Daydream VR on Snapdragon 821, with 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of internal memory depending on the configuration.
VIGRA
VIGRA is the abbreviation for "Vision with Generic Algorithms". It is a free open-source computer vision library which focuses on customizable algorithms and data structures. VIGRA component can be easily adapted to specific needs of target application without compromising execution speed, by using template techniques similar to those in the C++ Standard Template Library. == Features == VIGRA is cross-platform, with working builds on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and OpenBSD. Since version 1.7.1, VIGRA provides Python bindings based on numpy framework. == History == VIGRA was originally designed and implemented by scientists at University of Hamburg faculty of computer science; its core maintainers are now working at Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing (HCI) University of Heidelberg. In the meantime, many developers have contributed to the project. == Application == CellCognition and ilastik uses VIGRA computer vision library. OpenOffice.org uses VIGRA as part of its headless software rendering backend; LibreOffice does so until version 5.2.
GraphLab
Turi is a graph-based, high performance, distributed computation framework written in C++. The GraphLab project was started by Prof. Carlos Guestrin of Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. It is an open source project that uses the Apache License. While GraphLab was originally developed for machine learning tasks, it has also been developed for other data-mining tasks. == Motivation == As the amounts of collected data and computing power grow (multicore, GPUs, clusters, clouds), modern datasets no longer fit into one computing node. Efficient distributed parallel algorithms for handling large-scale data are required. The GraphLab framework is a parallel programming abstraction targeted for sparse iterative graph algorithms. GraphLab provides a programming interface, allowing deployment of distributed machine learning algorithms. The main design considerations behind the design of GraphLab are: Sparse data with local dependencies Iterative algorithms Potentially asynchronous execution == GraphLab toolkits == On top of GraphLab, several implemented libraries of algorithms: Topic modeling - contains applications like LDA, which can be used to cluster documents and extract topical representations. Graph analytics - contains applications like pagerank and triangle counting, which can be applied to general graphs to estimate community structure. Clustering - contains standard data clustering tools such as Kmeans Collaborative filtering - contains a collection of applications used to make predictions about users interests and factorize large matrices. Graphical models - contains tools for making joint predictions about collections of related random variables. Computer vision - contains a collection of tools for reasoning about images. == Turi == Turi (formerly called Dato and before that GraphLab Inc.) is a company that was founded by Prof. Carlos Guestrin from University of Washington in May 2013 to continue development support of the GraphLab open source project. Dato Inc. raised a $6.75M Series A from Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). They raised a $18.5M Series B from Vulcan Capital and Opus Capital, with participation from Madrona and NEA. On August 5, 2016, Turi was acquired by Apple Inc. for $200,000,000.
Minimum Population Search
In evolutionary computation, Minimum Population Search (MPS) is a computational method that optimizes a problem by iteratively trying to improve a set of candidate solutions with regard to a given measure of quality. It solves a problem by evolving a small population of candidate solutions by means of relatively simple arithmetical operations. MPS is a metaheuristic as it makes few or no assumptions about the problem being optimized and can search very large spaces of candidate solutions. For problems where finding the precise global optimum is less important than finding an acceptable local optimum in a fixed amount of time, using a metaheuristic such as MPS may be preferable to alternatives such as brute-force search or gradient descent. MPS is used for multidimensional real-valued functions but does not use the gradient of the problem being optimized, which means MPS does not require for the optimization problem to be differentiable as is required by classic optimization methods such as gradient descent and quasi-newton methods. MPS can therefore also be used on optimization problems that are not even continuous, are noisy, change over time, etc. == Background == In a similar way to Differential evolution, MPS uses difference vectors between the members of the population in order to generate new solutions. It attempts to provide an efficient use of function evaluations by maintaining a small population size. If the population size is smaller than the dimensionality of the search space, then the solutions generated through difference vectors will be constrained to the n − 1 {\displaystyle n-1} dimensional hyperplane. A smaller population size will lead to a more restricted subspace. With a population size equal to the dimensionality of the problem ( n = d ) {\displaystyle (n=d)} , the “line/hyperplane points” in MPS will be generated within a d − 1 {\displaystyle d-1} dimensional hyperplane. Taking a step orthogonal to this hyperplane will allow the search process to cover all the dimensions of the search space. Population size is a fundamental parameter in the performance of population-based heuristics. Larger populations promote exploration, but they also allow fewer generations, and this can reduce the chance of convergence. Searching with a small population can increase the chances of convergence and the efficient use of function evaluations, but it can also induce the risk of premature convergence. If the risk of premature convergence can be avoided, then a population-based heuristic could benefit from the efficiency and faster convergence rate of a smaller population. To avoid premature convergence, it is important to have a diversified population. By including techniques for explicitly increasing diversity and exploration, it is possible to have smaller populations with less risk of premature convergence. === Thresheld Convergence === Thresheld Convergence (TC) is a diversification technique which attempts to separate the processes of exploration and exploitation. TC uses a “threshold” function to establish a minimum search step, and managing this step makes it possible to influence the transition from exploration to exploitation, convergence is thus “held” back until the last stages of the search process. The goal of a controlled transition is to avoid an early concentration of the population around a few search regions and avoid the loss of diversity which can cause premature convergence. Thresheld Convergence has been successfully applied to several population-based metaheuristics such as Particle Swarm Optimization, Differential evolution, Evolution strategies, Simulated annealing and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms. The ideal case for Thresheld Convergence is to have one sample solution from each attraction basin, and for each sample solution to have the same relative fitness with respect to its local optimum. Enforcing a minimum step aims to achieve this ideal case. In MPS Thresheld Convergence is specifically used to preserve diversity and avoid premature convergence by establishing a minimum search step. By disallowing new solutions which are too close to members of the current population, TC forces a strong exploration during the early stages of the search while preserving the diversity of the (small) population. == Algorithm == A basic variant of the MPS algorithm works by having a population of size equal to the dimension of the problem. New solutions are generated by exploring the hyperplane defined by the current solutions (by means of difference vectors) and performing an additional orthogonal step in order to avoid getting caught in this hyperplane. The step sizes are controlled by the Thresheld Convergence technique, which gradually reduces step sizes as the search process advances. An outline for the algorithm is given below: Generate the first initial population. Allowing these solutions to lie near the bounds of the search space generally gives good results: s k = ( r s 1 ∗ b o u n d 1 / 2 , r s 2 ∗ b o u n d 2 / 2 , . . . , r s n ∗ b o u n d n / 2 ) {\displaystyle s_{k}=(rs_{1}bound_{1}/2,rs_{2}bound_{2}/2,...,rs_{n}bound_{n}/2)} where s k {\displaystyle s_{k}} is the k {\displaystyle k} -th population member, r s i {\displaystyle rs_{i}} are random numbers which can be −1 or 1, and the b o u n d i {\displaystyle bound_{i}} are the lower and upper bounds on each dimension. While a stop condition is not reached: Update threshold convergence values ( m i n _ s t e p {\displaystyle min\_step} and m a x _ s t e p {\displaystyle max\_step} ) Calculate the centroid of the current population ( x c {\displaystyle x_{c}} ) For each member of the population ( x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} ), generate a new offspring as follows: Uniformly generate a scaling factor ( F i {\displaystyle F_{i}} ) between − m a x _ s t e p {\displaystyle -max\_step} and m a x _ s t e p {\displaystyle max\_step} Generate a vector ( x o {\displaystyle x_{o}} ) orthogonal to the difference vector between x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} and x c {\displaystyle x_{c}} Calculate a scaling factor for the orthogonal vector: m i n _ o r t h = s q r t ( m a x ( m i n _ s t e p 2 − F i 2 , 0 ) ) {\displaystyle min\_orth=sqrt(max(min\_step^{2}-F_{i}^{2},0))} m a x _ o r t h = s q r t ( m a x ( m a x _ s t e p 2 − F i 2 , 0 ) ) {\displaystyle max\_orth=sqrt(max(max\_step^{2}-F_{i}^{2},0))} o r t h _ s t e p = u n i f o r m ( m i n _ o r t h , m a x _ o r t h ) {\displaystyle orth\_step=uniform(min\_orth,max\_orth)} Generate the new solution by adding the difference and the orthogonal vectors to the original solution n e w _ s o l u t i o n = x i + F i ∗ ( x i − x c ) ∗ o r t h _ s t e p ∗ x o {\displaystyle new\_solution=x_{i}+F_{i}(x_{i}-x_{c})orth\_stepx_{o}} Pick the best members between the old population and the new one by discarding the least fit members. Return the single best solution or the best population found as the final result.
Aldus PhotoStyler
Aldus PhotoStyler was a graphics software program developed by the Taiwanese company Ulead. Released in June 1991 as the first 24 bit image editor for Windows, it was bought the same year by the Aldus Prepress group. Its main competition was Adobe Photoshop. Version 2.0 (late 1993) introduced a new user interface and improved color calibration. PhotoStyler SE - lacking some features of the version 2.0 - was bundled with scanners like HP ScanJet. The product disappeared from the Adobe product line after Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994.
Time-aware long short-term memory
Time-aware LSTM (T-LSTM) is a long short-term memory (LSTM) unit capable of handling irregular time intervals in longitudinal patient records. T-LSTM was developed by researchers from Michigan State University, IBM Research, and Cornell University and was first presented in the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) conference. Experiments using real and synthetic data proved that T-LSTM auto-encoder outperformed widely used frameworks including LSTM and MF1-LSTM auto-encoders.