Know Your Age : Computer Software Turns Age-teller

The woes of misreading someone's age may soon be over, if you go according to a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of Illinois, with the help of a software.

The professor, Thomas S. Huang says,"Age-estimation software is useful in applications where you don't need to specifically identify someone but would like to know their age."

After a wide and comprehensive research, the software engineers have come up with this pathbreaking software.









Definitely, not only it will be a sort of fun for adventure seekers, the inherent age-forecasting ability of this software will help to maintain law and order too. Seems bizarre!

Amazingly enough, this software will help to keep the teenagers away from porn sites and other adult contents found online or on computers. The computer will simply read the various facial patterns of a particular user and based on the data collected, it will decide the authenticity of a user. If a teenager found, the computers will resist browsing porn.

Moreover, using the same process, it will also keep in check, the illegal purchasing of drinks and tobacco products by minors from vending machines. Also, this software will help to stop the unlawful entry of teenagers to a pub or a bar.

It is equipped with age-recognition algorithms. This algorithms will trace the age of someone facing the computer.

The software includes a database of 1,600 faces based on three modules- face detection, discriminative manifold learning and multiple linear regression. This huge database comprised of the minute details of so many faces makes it efficient to predict someone's age with somewhat stunning accuracy.

The age-range it uses for the predictions is also quite wide as it tells the age of someone who is anywhere between one year to 93. The prediction accuracy of this software is good, near about 50 percent, when it is given an assignment to predict within a band of five years.

While it gives stunning results with 80 percent accuracy rate, when given an age-band within 10 years.

Though it may be unable to give 100 percent result as far as accuracy is concerned, it is still a great innovation in itself keeping in view how tough it is to predict someone's age. According to Eurekalerts, “Estimating someone's age is not an easy task, even for a computer. That's partly because the ageing process is determined not only by a person's genetic makeup, but by many other factors as well, including health, location and living conditions.”

However, flagbearers of moral-policing may ask why a commoner's age should be revealed against his/her will. For this Huang says, “All of this can be done without violating anyone's privacy. Our software does not identify specific individuals. It just estimates their ages."

Further, it may also help to prepare a survey report about the consumer concentration on a particular product at a particular store. For example, it may tell us which music CD was liked by teenagers out of many releases during a specified period or what are the gadgets they are running after.

Unified Communications – Helping to Integrate

A company, especially a small one, suffers a lot spending too much of money on its basic communication system. They are always supposed to use separate PBXs, various phone equipments, a number of trunk lines. This leads to extra expenditures on an already low-running organization.

However, they could get a great solution in form of unified communications. This communication software helps to save not only money but a lot of time too.

The installation of unified communications ensures enough to combine and integrate the company's whole data, videos and voice transactions, that too on a single network.


Needs no additional experts: As the whole of the data processing and other electronic activities can be done on a same network, it needs no additional experts of telecommunication. The existing workforce will suffice.

Uses existing hardwares for security: Though it becomes vulnerable to hackers, still its security can be tightened using certain tools. The existing hardwares like network switches and routers can be used for further enhancement of security. Interestingly, the security installation doesn't demand extra money.

Multi-functionality: It can be used for various functions like fax transaction, e-mailing, voice messaging etc. that too from a single mail box.

Multimedia active: A user can send and receive a series of photos, video clips etc with minimum errors.

Interaction efficient: It allows the work personals working in the same company to interact easily. This easy mode of interaction enables them to make schedules, planning etc. of upcoming and urgent activities.

Quick communication: The users can use it for other quick communication purposes such as paging, instant messaging, conferencing etc.

Minimizing Errors: Its ultra-efficiency in handling data transaction prevents it from committing too much of errors.

Futuristic approach: The unified communications is always flexible and are made keeping in view the future. In case latest technologies come in, the software only needs simple upgradings.

China has the largest number of Netizens

The home of world's largest population, China, has now the most number of Netizens too. According to the figures released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China has currently 253 million people using the net thus surging ahead of United States, which currently has 223 million Internet users.

The number of Internet users in US constitutes 71 percent of its entire population while the Chinese netizens constitutes only 19 percent of entire population. The figures itself indicates that China will hugely outnumber US in near future. CNNIC, China's official net monitoring body, told BBC, "This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one". Since last year the number of net users have shown 56 percent increase and it is predicted that it will continue to increase by around 18 percent per year.

The Internet market is booming in China and so is the Web advertising. According to the investment firm Morgan Stanley, on-line advertising market in China is growing by 60 to 70 percent a year. By the end of this year it could touch a $1.7 billion market. “The Internet market is the fastest-growing consumer market sector in China. We are still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still going to see hyper-growth in this market.”, said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley.

China’s topmost Internet companies, including Tencent, Baidu, Sina and Alibaba, are flourishing and are outperforming the China-based operations of American Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and eBay. The upcoming Beijing Olympics has partly helped the advertising sales. Riding on this wave the Chinese search engine, Baidu showed an 87 percent increase in profits in the second quarter of 2008. Baidu is currently holding a market share of 63 % in the Chinese search market. Its closest rivals, Google holds 26% of the Chinese search market, while Yahoo holds only 8 percent.

Though China tops in the race of the number of Internet users but it has yet to catch the US in terms of total revenue generated. The figures released by Analysys International states that China's Internet firms made total revenues of $5.9billion in 2007. For the same period US combined Internet revenue was around $21.2billion.

Cuil: Claiming to be the coolest search engine

The list of search engines is growing and the latest addition is Cuil, pronounced as cool. The first and foremost thing I want to tell about Cuil is that it is founded by a team of ex Google alumni, including Anna Patterson chief architect of the company’s Tera Google search index. So its comparison with Google is inevitable.

Layout is simple and effective

The homepage of Cuil search engine is quite simple. It has a black background, the Cuil's logo, and the search box. The search form return typing suggestions. The search result display of Cuil is quite different and unique compared to other search engines. Instead of displaying the searches in a list, it displays in three columns. It also includes related images along with the searches. Cuil shows the related searches in the box on the top right, and also in a bar right underneath the search box. However unlike Google and others, Cuil neither check your spelling nor suggest you the correct search terms.

Comparison with Google

People have started considering Cuil as the biggest threat to Google. But it is just the starting time for Cuil and it would be foolish to compare it with Google. According to the Cuil VP of communications, Vince Sollitto, "We are trying to give people different results. Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same”.

Google is far ahead of its peers, Yahoo and Microsoft, in terms of paid search business. In 2007, Google’s paid search business made up 40% of all online search dollars. Yahoo and Microsoft have tried and tested a lot of measures and spent billions trying to figure out how to narrow the gap on Google in the lucrative paid search market.

It will not be an easy way for Cuil to make a mark in the search engines market and that too in near future. Only time will tell that how far it goes in this race.

World record downloading for firefox 3.0

Within the first day of the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 , an unique world record was created. A record breaking 8,002,530 downloads took place for web browser Firefox 3.0. Mozilla officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

According to the Marketing head Paul Kim, "The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen". He told the BBC News: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world." It was called an extremely impressive accomplishment by Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records.

Some security firms claimed to found flaws in the software on the very first day of its release. Within few hours of Firefox 3.0 debut, DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw that potentially let an attacker take over a personal computer if a user clicked on a booby-trapped link. Mr Kim told the BBC News: "Firefox users are safe. We have a patch in the works and hope to release it very soon."

It seems happy timing for the Firefox as its market share reached to more than 19%, second best to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to the statistics firm Net Applications, a substantial part of the gain came from rival IE and predicted that it would break the 20% share bar very soon. Mr Kim said: "We offer the best browsing experience and this shows people are getting the message and voting with their browser choice."

World of Insecure browsing

If you are surfing the web through a browser that isn't up to date then you fall under the pool of those 40% internet surfers who are more prone to malicious attack. Almost 59% people use the latest version of their internet browsers and they are safer compared to the above mentioned 40%. The numbers are disturbingly high for anyone working in IT security.

These figures are revealed as the result of a comprehensive study conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM Internet Security Services. The researchers performed their analysis using Google's database of user information. The data between January 2007 and June 2008 was gathered for the analysis.


It was found during the research that although software vendors provide patches for security problems, users take days, weeks or months for updating their applications. However it was concluded that it's not solely the fault of users since the vendors haven't exactly made patching easy. Mozilla's Firefox was declared the best due to its auto-update feature, which tells users about the availability of a new patch and offers a one-click way to upgrade. According to the study, most Firefox users are up to date within three days. The updating features and installation wasn't found quick and easy for other browsers, such as Opera and Safari.


Who stays where?
IE7 is the oldest browser taken in the study but only 52.5 percent of the users surfing the web with Internet Explorer were using IE7. In spite of Microsoft's repeated and emphatic pleas to upgrade, 47.5 % IE users were still presumably using IE6. Firefox users were considered the best in upgrading, with 92.2 percent of Firefox users now using version 2 (Firefox 3.0 was not taken into account since the data gathered was between January 2007 and June 2008). 90.1 % of Opera users were using Opera 9 while 70.2 % of all Safari users currently running Safari 3.


Threats and recommendations
Web browsers are considered a weak link in the IT security chain. It becomes easy for hackers to gain control of a personal computer due to the software vulnerabilities. In the cases of hacking, hackers can perform malicious acts such as stealing personal data or turning PCs into spam-spewing drones.


The group suggested that auto-updates are a very good thing, and recommended that the feature be included in all browsers. The study recommended that corporate businesses should adopt URL Filters, or filters designed to prevent company employees from even touching websites carrying malicious content. One interesting recommendation is that the software industry follow the same type of labeling system as used by the food industry. If adopted, web browsers would be dated with a "Best before" label, and would automatically flag the user when the browser "expired."

Chart Source: SFIT