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Microsoft Cognitive Services

projectoxford.ai

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Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#41

Post by ryuker16 »

PJDK wrote: post #24
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff. For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture. Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep…

Put it on fiver

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#42

Post by munin »

Jabbles wrote: post #33
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

Interestingly, Microsoft's ToS: You grant to Microsoft and will secure and maintain all rights in the Data necessary for us to: ... (iv) improve the Service Components and other Microsoft products and services http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/legal/CognitiveServic... Google Vision API: 5.2 Use of Customer Data. Google will not access or use Customer Data, except as necessary to provide the Services to Customer.…

Do you think that improving the model does not fall under "provide the Services to Customer?"

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#44

Post by umaar »

You can use the Google Cloud Vision Label Detection API (or the Microsoft Computer Vision API) to have a webpage recognise and audibly announce what it sees through the camera, all using web technologies.

I wrote a post on how I did this here: https://umaar.com/dev-tips/118-cloud-vision-image-detect-jav...

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#45

Post by usgroup »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

Presumably because they've got algos so awesome that you can't replicate the performance and that their training sets (by virtue of being a public service) are much larger than you'd be able to obtain yourself.

I share your scepticism though.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#46

Post by conjectures »

Computer vision API seems pretty shaky outside of very basic object recognition:

Royal Coat of Arms, "Two giraffes with a book."

Astronaut above earth, "A motorcycle mirror."

Twin towers behind statue of liberty: "A tall clock tower towering over the city of london."

Che Guevara: "A woman wearing a hat."

The emotion API doesn't seem as shaky. Presumably because its a better defined problem with a smaller search space.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#47

Post by alvarosm »

adrianN wrote: post #36
PJDK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff. For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture. Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep…

Face recognition is built into OpenCV. It should be very easy to implement this feature yourself without relying on any third party. http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/tutor...

Pre-processing and alignment are going to be way off. Even if it wasn't, then you have (for face recognition itself) eigenfaces or fisherfaces (bad) or maybe LBP(maybe barely acceptable). Your performance is going to be abysmal compared to serious face recognition technology.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#48

Post by kylebgorman »

botexpert wrote: post #13
pkd wrote: post #9

So I recently had a chance to use these APIs for a Microsoft hackathon project and wow are these APIs unstable right now. I was trying to use their Linguistic Analysis API for POS tagging some text, and even for text as short as 500 characters, the API took over a minute to respond. If I bumped it upto a 1000 characters, the API would just error out and give a 500 status code without any explanation after keeping me…

Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.

Anything that uses the standard decoding strategy (Viterbi) is quadratic in the number of "states" (i.e., tags), though, and that easily dominates.

(Nowadays, many people just use greedy---linear in the number of states---decoding because it rarely is much worse.)

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#49

Post by alvarosm »

fourneau wrote: post #38
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

There are a ton of reasons. For example, it could just be that ML is not your business. If you're a image hosting platform, you don't necessarily want to build your own NSFW image checker. There's no harm in leveraging something else out there that works great, assuming that you can bankroll it. Alternatively it can be used as a stop-gap. You're in the middle of implementing your own ML system (or planning to), but y…

Yeah, the main reason, assuming you're a "ML-based business", is you want to validate your market and not spend a ton of money creating something that's not profitable.

Anyway, there are many more obvious use cases. Other apps/games/services that need to detect faces or filter out porn and so on. Imagine a dating site that estimates age and more based on photos, while also filtering out NSFW images.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#50

Post by trapperkeeper79 »

alvarosm wrote: post #47
adrianN wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face recognition is built into OpenCV. It should be very easy to implement this feature yourself without relying on any third party. http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/tutor...

Pre-processing and alignment are going to be way off. Even if it wasn't, then you have (for face recognition itself) eigenfaces or fisherfaces (bad) or maybe LBP(maybe barely acceptable). Your performance is going to be abysmal compared to serious face recognition technology.

My experience is that OpenCV face detection works relatively well if you are facing the camera directly. We used an opensource face rec built on top of it, and it was okay to classify between a small number of known faces.

I saw some demos of M$FT's apis at a recent tech event and it wasn't obvious that the results with their system were significantly better. The biggest hole seemed to be that camera frames were being sent to the cloud, and there were issues with the presenter's quota (forget the exact problem).

But overall, I think the Cognitive Services are a step in the right direction. They generally make sense for businesses who don't have a full-time team of ML/CV experts.

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