The Noisy Channel

Long-time readers know that I’m a great fan of visual search startup Modista, which was a victim of software patent abuse. To my delight, Modista is back from the dead. Check it out! Also see my previous coverage of Modista.

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Long-time readers may recall my post about visual search startup Modista last November, or this guest post by one of its principals. Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending. I hope that both this technology and its developers find a good home.

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Guest posts are always a pleasure, but today I’m particularly delight to have AJ Shankar of Modista share his thoughts about visual exploration. My friend Arlo and I co-founded Modista, a web site that uses computer vision algorithms and a novel user interface to enable product exploration and discovery on the web. The premise is […]

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Let me start with a disclaimer. My idea of “finding shoes” is finding the one pair of shoes I own in the closet. In general, I’m not much of a shopper, let alone a shoe shopper. That said, I really love what Arlo Faria and AJ Shankar, two Berkeley PhD students on leave, have done […]

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Given the controversial content of this post, I’d like to remind readers upfront that this post, like all of the contents of this blog, represents my personal opinions, and in particular does not represent the opinions of my present or former employers. I am not a lawyer, nor do I claim to have read any […]

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The following is a guest post by Rich Marr. Rich is the Director of Engineering at Pixsta, where he’s been working on Empora.com, a consumer-facing site that enables browsing of fashion products  according to image similarity (much like Modista).  Pixsta is a growing start-up focused on turning our R&D team’s ongoing search and image processing […]

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After my recent posts about Google’s similarity browsing for images, a colleague reached out to me to educate me about some of the recent advances in image retrieval. This colleague is involved with an image retrieval startup and felt uncomfortable posting comments publicly, so we agreed that I would paraphrase them in a post under […]

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I spend a fair amount of time critizing Google for not embracing exploratory search. But today’s launch of a similar images feature is all about exploration, and I’m impressed with what I see. One of the applications is clarification of ambiguous queries. Rather than using cliche examples like jaguar or apple, let’s try some original […]

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Search green, green, green!

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