Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Porn and computer science research


It's not likely to be on his business card, but David A. Forsyth is an expert in web pornography, having served on the NRC committee for this topic. It is evident from his web page that he has a sense of humour, which explains the superbly descriptive title for his 1996 paper, Finding Naked People. Forsyth was one of the first researchers to study the problem of identifying objectionable content.

From Steve Honov's post: Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science.

On the other hand, Carnegie Mellon's CS professor Luis von Ahn suggests a website called Porn or Not dot com:

Here’s an idea I’ve had for many years but have not been brave enough to launch. (a) Computers cannot perfectly tell whether an image is pornographic or not; (b) sites such as image search engines need to block pornography; (c) many people like looking at porn. Everything aligns perfectly: Why not let people who like looking at porn tell us which images are pornographic? As a reward, the more accurate they are, the better pornography they see.

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    I've taken a class with David and apart from being a very knowledgeable in computer vision, he is a fun professor. The cool thing about this paper though is that it is co-authored by his wife. :)

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