Earlier this week, Google announced plans to restructure under a new parent company called Alphabet.Īnd digital pranksters aren’t Google’s only worries. The news comes in a busy month for the tech giant. Google will reintroduce Map Maker in other countries over the coming weeks. Map Maker is a browser-based editing feature that lets Google crowdsource a staggering amount of hard-to-get information, including details about remote locations like North Korea and street-by-street data for major cities. The company has also put a moratorium on adding geometric shapes to the maps. This will slow the upload process, but allow Google to weed out any errant-shaped parkland. Google has put in place new quality controls, including designating “regional leads,” who will moderate edits in their area. Now, Map Maker is back in Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, India, Philippines and Ukraine, according to a Monday post by Kanakarajan.
“The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate.” “We have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months,” wrote Google Map Maker team member Pavithra Kanakarajan in a product forum post after the prank. The tech giant suspended the map service in May. The post made the rounds on the Internet to great amusement, but Google found the prank less entertaining.
One user drew a park in the shape of the Android cartoon droid peeing on the Apple logo. "Right now, advances in technology have really helped the deaf community - video chat is huge there, for instance.Google’s map editing feature is back online in some countries, months after rogue users hacked the service for a few colorful pranks.
"That's far off, but it could happen," Brashear told TechNewsDaily.
In the long run, sensors like the Kinect could lead to ways for computers to understand sign language and translate it to English or other languages. "Ninety-five percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, very few of whom are fluent in sign, so we want to support these children as much as possible," Brashear explained. The scientists are working on a game called Copycat aimed at helping deaf children practice sign language. In the future, the scientists also hope that an improved Kinect sensor with even higher-resolution imaging comes out. "What we're doing now is working on computer vision algorithms to get more information on hand shapes from the Kinect," said researcher Helene Brashear, a computer scientist and president of Georgia Tech spinoff company Tin Min Labs in Austin, Texas. The scientists initially only used a limited vocabulary of six signs - those for "alligator," "spider," "box," "wall," "behind" and "in" - all signs that involve broad gestures with the arms and body.
Now researchers at Georgia Tech are pairing up the Kinect device with custom software that can interpret a very limited American Sign Language vocabulary with greater than 98 percent accuracy. The Kinect drew the attention not just of gamers but of programmers as well, with a thriving community of hackers now testing the limits of what the sensor can be used for, such as helping mobile robots respond to gestural commands. The Kinect has proven very popular, with 8 million sensors sold worldwide within 60 days of its launch. The add-on, which is essentially a motion-sensing webcam, uses an infrared scanner to create 3-D models of people as they move, allowing users to play games by swimming their arms, shimmying their bodies or performing other so-called natural interactions. The Kinect, which debuted in November, offered a revolutionary way to interact with computers without pushing any buttons or holding any device whatsoever, using only body motions to control Microsoft's Xbox game console. RELATED: The 10 weirdest uses for a smartphone The real-world feat is reminiscent of Google’s April Fools’ Day prank this year, in which the company falsely debuted a featured called Gmail Motion that allowed users to translate bodily gestures into words and email commands. Scientists have hacked Microsoft's Xbox Kinect motion control sensor to read ASL. Soon, you may not necessarily need to be fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) in order to interpret it.