What would you choose

What would you choose
a winning ticket in the lottery
or your house on fire

That's not too difficult

But is this a free choice
or a mechanical path of a think-feel body
that we observe through the senses
of that same think-feel body

It is amazing to see
how the mind
pretends to make the choices
to search for happiness
and to avoid pain

But happiness
is not in the finding
but in the not-searching

And suffering
is not in the pain
but in the avoidance

No Escape

Sometimes we feel imprisoned and limited by our thoughts and views on ourselves and the world. Wouldn't it be nice to take a view outside of our mental framework and conditioning?



Actually, it is the other way round. We are outside our mental framework all the time! Because we are focusing and identifying with the personality so strongly it seems that we are imprisoned. This is a false perception of what we really are. We are the viewer of our mental activities, not the prisoner within. There is no escape because there is no prisoner and nothing to escape from!

Self Organizing Information

Every day we are overwhelmed by the amount of e-mails, documents, photos and other stuff that we receive on our computer. Most popular software tools such as Outlook and Windows Explorer expect us to handle incoming traffic ourselves and categorize them into maps or folders. As the incoming flow of information is growing, this processing by hand becomes a real burden. It is also often unclear how to categorize items because the item (for example, an e-mail) could be assigned to several categories. This makes it hard to retrieve the correct information when we need it, even using today's search functions. Although categorizing information definitely has its use, we need another approach to make our information really findable and usable.

I suggest that information should organize itself dynamically.



Each information item has content (e.g. text, image, sound) that can be expressed as a set of features (words, color, texture, frequencies etc.) and for each feature we can determine a small-sized signature. We can extract the 'essence' of each information item and use pattern recognition algorithms to calculate the similarity of information items such as e-mails, photos and documents. In my proposed self-organizing environment, e-mails and documents on the same subject will automatically cluster, and so will pictures with similar visual content.



In my Elastic Vision project I am developing algorithms to calculate the similarity of information items and also an algorithm to present information in an organic way to the end-user. In this approach items are not split up and put into buckets (categories), but dynamically shown within a relevant context. Much work is still required to build this approach into a product. For now, you can have a look at the Elastic Vision website for a demonstration of this technique in an image search tool.

Elastic Vision version 2.0 release

I have just uploaded a new version of my smart image searcher on the Elastic Vision website.

Now you will be able to load images from your desktop or network servers and match them against web search results.

I have added a new feature to specifically search for images on the web that are similar to the images you have selected in the tool. This enables you to search for better quality images than the one you already have found on the web or on your desktop.



For more details visit the site:

Goto Elastic Vision site