For some time Facebook has studied your Likes, comments, and clicks
to help create better ads and new products, but soon, the company might
also track the location of your cursor on screen. Facebook analytics
chief Ken Rudin told The Wall Street Journal about several new measures
the company is testing meant to help improve its user-tracking, like
seeing how long you hover your cursor over an ad (and if you click it),
and evaluating if certain elements on screen are within view or are off
the page. New data gathered using these methods could help Facebook
create more engaging News Feed layouts and ads.
The Journal notes that
this kind of tracking is hardly uncommon, but until now, Facebook hadn't
gone this deep in its behavioral data measurement. Sites like
Shutterstock, for example, track how long users hover their cursors over
an image before deciding to buy it. Facebook is famous for its liberal use of A/B testing
to try out new products on consumers, but it's using the same method to
judge the efficacy of its new testing methods. "Facebook should know
within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data
collection into the business," reports the Journal.
Assuming Facebook's tests go
well, it shouldn't be long before our every flinch is tracked on the
site. So what might come next? Our eyeballs.
15.10.13 - Two EPFL
spin-offs, senseFly and Pix4D, have modeled the Matterhorn in 3D, at a
level of detail never before achieved. It took senseFly’s ultralight
drones just six hours to snap the high altitude photographs that were
needed to build the model.
They weigh less than a kilo each, but they’re as agile as eagles
in the high mountain air. These “ebees” flying robots developed by
senseFly, a spin-off of EPFL’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory (LIS),
took off in September to photograph the Matterhorn from every
conceivable angle. The drones are completely autonomous, requiring
nothing more than a computer-conceived flight plan before being launched
by hand into the air to complete their mission.
Three
of them were launched from a 3,000m “base camp,” and the fourth made
the final assault from the summit of the stereotypical Swiss landmark,
at 4,478m above sea level. In their six-hour flights, the completely
autonomous flying machines took more than 2,000 high-resolution
photographs. The only remaining task was for software developed by
Pix4D, another EPFL spin-off from the Computer Vision Lab (CVLab), to
assemble them into an impressive 300-million-point 3D model. The model
was presented last weekend to participants of the Drone and Aerial
Robots Conference (DARC), in New York, by Henri Seydoux, CEO of the
French company Parrot, majority shareholder in senseFly.
All-terrain and even in swarms
“We want above all to demonstrate what our devices are capable of
achieving in the extreme conditions that are found at high altitudes,”
explains Jean-Christophe Zufferey, head of senseFly. In addition to the
challenges of altitude and atmospheric turbulence, the drones also had
to take into consideration, for the first time, the volume of the object
being photographed. Up to this point they had only been used to survey
relatively flat terrain.
Last week the dynamic Swiss company –
which has just moved into new, larger quarters in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne –
also announced that it had made software improvements enabling drones
to avoid colliding with each other in flight; now a swarm of drones can
be launched simultaneously to undertake even more rapid and precise
mapping missions.