$100k challenge for a new search engine
A contest has been launched by a Singapore research agency to design a next-generation search engine capable of organising multimedia content.
The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) is offering a $100,000 USD reward for engineers who can create a search engine able to identify keywords not only within text, but also hidden inside audio and video content.
Named The Star Challenge 2008, the competition is open to anyone in the world and hopes to attract the talents of some of the world’s leading software engineers and researchers.
“Developing such search capabilities will radically change the way people interact with multi-media information, creating seamless and accessible platforms for people across different online communities,” commented A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh.
Although search engines are working on technologies that will expand text-based technologies, with Google patenting a technique for reading text from images, organising rich media is still reliant on the data being tagged with information about its content.
A new form of search
“Simply put, how successful you are in your search now depends on how extensively the information for which you are searching has been tagged by creators or users,” says A*Star’s executive director, Professor Chong Tow Chong.
The agency hopes that future search technology will, for example, allow users to search songs for mentions of certain lyrics not by them being transcribed but by the search engine recognising the sound of the words themselves.
With the proliferation of rich media being shared on the web, fueled by sites like YouTube and Facebook, a search engine capable of interpreting this information would be a massive leap forward.
Applicants, who have until February 29th 2008 to register, will have eight months to come up with their designs, though perfecting the technology is likely to take considerably longer.
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