ReadWriteWeb

Last week a new site called Gwap was launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. The site offers an array of multi-player games that have a benefit beyond just that of momentary distraction or amusement. These games are helping improve image and audio searches, teaching computers to see, and enhancing AI. However, all that won't matter to the players because, as it turns out, these games are actually fun.

There are a bunch of companies trying to figure out how to get a machine to be correctly identify images just by looking at them. We've profiled a bunch on ReadWriteWeb before: Eyealike, Mugr, Riya/Like, and Pixsta. Generally the tech demos for these visual search technologies fall into two categories: shopping search or facial recognition. The latter is on display in a new Russian startup we came across this week called Picollator.