Aspiring Computer Scientist | Samsung R&D Institute – Bangalore | M.Tech (CS), IIT Kharagpur
This week, Facebook India launched a new tool called the Profile Picture Guard, which is aimed at preventing misuse of profile pictures by third parties and thereby giving an enhanced sense of privacy and safety to the users. But how well can it actually protect user privacy? Continue reading “Facebook Profile Picture Guard: Completely Preventive or just a Deterrent?”
Image recognition, especially, facial recognition is nothing new to casual users of smartphones and social networks. Many social networks including Facebook has been using facial recognition to suggest the names of “friends” while tagging newly uploaded photos. With increasing confidence values provided by modified algorithms, apps like Facebook Moments now boldly suggests that you send photos to recognised friends who feature in them. Extensive research work is being carried out in the domain of image recognition by academics and companies to further this kind of applications. In a paper titled “DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification”, Taigman et. al. have proposed an approach for face recognition in unconstrained images which performs remarkably with an “accuracy of 97.35% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset”. That is almost at the brink of human level accuracy!
In this article, I am going to informally evaluate a new application Facebook is putting its algorithms into. A few months ago, Facebook announced that to aid the perception of photos by differently abled users who have impaired eyesight, it is going to add detected features in the alt-text of images which can then be used by text-to-speech applications to describe the image contents. Continue reading “Facebook employing Image Recognition in Accessibility: An Informal Evaluation”
“Batman v Superman”: The movie title had long foretold that the bat shall fight the alien!
Having already had low expectations from the storyline, going to watch this more for the iconic comic book characters was not a bad decision for me after all. Continue reading “Subjective Review – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”
Being the netizens that our generation is mostly comprised of, it may perhaps be safely assumed that you might have come across some news article or tweet or a Facebook trending notification about tech-giant Apple and the FBI fighting over a certain request by the authorities to bypass the security methods of a specific iPhone. Last December in San Bernardino, a couple went on a shooting spree which took the life of 14 people and died in a shootout with police after a car chase. The authorities seized their electronics in order to learn more about them. While most of their hard drives and phones were smashed, an iPhone 5C belonging to the male attacker was discovered. This is the central device to the Apple vs. FBI fight. Continue reading “The Making of a Master Key: An alternative take on the ongoing Apple vs. FBI battle over iPhone security bypass request”
This post follows the events of Our Luxurious Abode – Orchid 307. Adapted from my private journal entry on 10th March, 2015.
The day was the 4th of August, 2014. We woke up in the morning, completed our chores as soon as possible and rushed downstairs to catch the company bus. The bus took around 20-25 minutes to take us to the TCS Peepul Park office. The office had the resemblance of some temple. Tiles were more commonplace than rooftops even in the office premises. This was supposed to be one of the largest areas owned and operated by TCS, and it was the largest of its kind to be used for imparting training among new recruits all over the world. Continue reading “First Day of Corporate Life with The Sorting Hat”
This post follows the events of The Journey towards a New Beginning. Adapted from my private journal entry on 10th March, 2015.
As soon as the door was opened, all of us started rushing inside to scavenge for rooms. Although no one has ever admitted, each one of us was on the lookout for the best room at that moment. To claim the rooms that deemed us fit, we pushed in with our luggage and kept them inside the rooms. However, we were interrupted by Mr. Gopal who seemed to me a caretaker of some sorts for the apartments. He was there to give us a small prep-talk on what to do and what not to do. Continue reading “Our Luxurious Abode – Orchid 307”
Adapted from my private journal entry on 09th March, 2015.
Today, I am going to start writing about an experience that has probably never been such intense for me till date. The number of people who actually know how it was is very less. To be frank, perhaps there are only a few people who knows what I went through, and even they don’t know it entirely. Let me start from the beginning. Continue reading “The Journey towards a New Beginning”
Although the word “tagging” was not coined by social media, yet today it has become quite commonplace, thanks to the mass acceptance and popularity of sites like Facebook and Instagram. We take group photos, upload them on these sites, share them with out friends, but we don’t stop there. We tag the people in them!
Tagging ensures that our friends get to know that we have uploaded their photo, allows our own friends to recognise others and get to know whom we spent those awesome moments at the beach with. But it also serves another purpose – it gives us a larger audience who gets to see the photo on their news feed. And some of these strangers are sure to “like” and “comment”, aren’t they?
Continue reading “Photo tagging abuse : A chagrin of social media”
Last year around this time, based on my trips to Dehradun, Bangalore, Chennai and Puri, and getting to interact with so many interesting people and receiving awards from IT giants, I thought that 2013 had been the most eventful year. And, I was right…. until 2014! Continue reading “The Adventurous Chronicles of 2014”