Google is so dominant in the search engine market at large that it becomes hard to launch anything that remotly looks like a search tool. A team of Russian developers decided to still give it a go and focus on a niche market: image search. The team's objective seems very ambitious, create an artificial intelligence based image search engine to help designers find inspiration or resources in an easier way. They promise that SlashPixels will understand each image that it indexes, thus giving it a big advantage when it comes to sort the pictures. Unfortunatly, all this doesn't exist yet, but you can support the team's IndieGogo campaign to help them build this new tool.

At Facebook's recent annual developer conference, Marc Zuckerberg outlined the social network's artificial intelligence (AI) plans to "build systems that are better than people in perception." He then demonstrated an impressive image recognition technology for the blind that can "see" what's going on in a picture and explain it out loud. From programs that help the visually impaired and safety features in cars that detect large animals to auto-organizing untagged photo collections and extracting business insights from socially shared pictures, the benefits of image recognition, or computer vision, are only just beginning to make their way into the world -- but they're doing so with increasing frequency and depth. It's busy enough that the upcoming LDV Vision Summit, an annual conference dedicated to all things visual tech, from VR and cameras to medical imaging and content analysis, is already in its third year. "The advancements in computer vision these days are creating tremendous new opportunities in analyzing images that are exponentially impacting every business vertical, from automotive to advertising to augmented reality," says Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, which organizes the summit.

Like the iOS version, it also works on saved images, but it should be noted that Windows Phones have had image translation since 2010. This is powered by Microsoft's proprietary Deep Learning engine it uses for Bing's and Skype's translation options, something more advanced than Google Translate's statistical models and crowdsourcing. That said, Google Translate's Android app has had image translation since at least August 2012. So this is nothing really groundbreaking. The Android app also gets Inline Translation, which lets users hover over text phrases to quickly convert them into any of the 50 languages in the app's online library.

Online GIF clearinghouse Giphy debuted a new means of finding and sharing animated GIFs using Android on Tuesday. The Giphy app now empowers users to search the entirety of Giphy's library and share them on multiple platforms -- from Gmail and Messenger to SMS and Twitter. The updated app will hit the Play Store immediately and will finish rolling out to existing users by the end of April.

Matching two texts is a fundamental problem in many natural language processing tasks. An effective way is to extract meaningful matching patterns from words, phrases, and sentences to produce the matching score. Inspired by the success of convolutional neural network in image recognition, where neurons can capture many complicated patterns based on the extracted elementary visual patterns such as oriented edges and corners, we propose to model text matching as the problem of image recognition. Firstly, a matching matrix whose entries represent the similarities between words is constructed and viewed as an image. Then a convolutional neural network is utilized to capture rich matching patterns in a layer-by-layer way. We show that by resembling the compositional hierarchies of patterns in image recognition, our model can successfully identify salient signals such as n-gram and n-term matchings. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority against the baselines.

We have seen the birth to a generation of enterprises that are data-rich and analytically driven, eagerly following trends in big data and analytics. Let's take a closer look as I provide some use cases demonstrating how IBM is helping clients find innovative big data solutions. Enterprises that use data and sophisticated analytics turn insight into innovation, creating efficient new business processes, informing strategic decision making and outpacing their peers on a variety of fronts. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), rich media (video, audio, images) analytics will at least triple in 2015 to emerge as a key driver for big data and analytics technology investment. And such data requires sophisticated analytics tools.

This week Stephen Wolfram, founder and chief executive of Wolfram Research, announced a new component of the Wolfram Language for programming called ImageIdentify. Wolfram also introduced a new website, dubbed The Wolfram Language Image Identification Project, that demonstrates the language's new capabilities. The new site lets you upload images and get inferences and definitions in response. You can provide feedback, which should help it become more accurate. You can hit buttons like "Great!," "Could be better," "Missed the point," and "What the heck?!" After you choose one, the service offers a few more guesses, and a text box where you can type in a tag.

Late last year e-commerce giant, Amazon, added another emerging firm to its list of acquisitions, keeping this information relatively low profile until Bloomberg reported on the move this week. The company in question is Orbeus, which focuses its operations on creating artificial intelligence that is capable of determining what items and objects are present in a picture or photo. This kind of image recognition means that computers are capable of perceiving the world in a similar way to humans and could have obvious applications in terms of safe shopping online. While the takeover has not been officially confirmed, sources claim that it was completed in the autumn of 2015, according to Business Insider. And with recent reports of Amazon working towards introducing selfie-based payment authentication, imaging is clearly an area in which it holds a significant interest.

Shutterstock is flexing its AI muscles with the news that the stock photo giant is introducing new computer-vision search smarts to its platform. The company, which is headquartered in New York's Empire State Building, went public back in 2012 and now offers more than 70 million images for bloggers and media outlets -- which can make searching for specific assets challenging. Of course, the trusty old keyword search tool is effective to an extent, but what if you want to find images that are similar to one you have in your possession? Or what if you want alternative images based on color schemes, mood, or shapes? This is where Shutterstock's new reverse image search comes into play.

Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will automatically describe the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called automatic alternative text, the feature uses artificial intelligence to identify visual content and provide a description for people using screen readers. While scrolling through Facebook, blind and visually impaired users will hear the name of the person followed by the word "photo" when they scroll past an image post by a user. Automatic alt text will then describe a list of themes of the image, such as "three people, smiling, outdoors" or "two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, tree, outdoor". According to Facebook, more than two million photos are shared on social media every day, yet as content becomes more visual, many blind and visually impaired users are left feeling excluded.