Where’s the API that can tell me that this photo contains a puppy and a can of Coke?

Posted: November 5, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | 8 Comments »

Photo by Ahmad van der Breggen on Flickr.

We’ve gotten very good at extracting and disambiguation entities from text data. You can license a commodity system, and there are API and even open source tools that work fairly well.

However, a large percentage of content that people share is not primarily text (a back-of-the-envelope guess says around 18%), and we currently have very little automated insight into that content.

I know this is a very hard problem, but I’m continuously surprised by how few people seem to be working on it. Any ideas?