Labs

Many companies have 'Labs' pages where they present projects they consider cool or innovative. My labs page is a selection of my projects and blog postings that I hope you find interesting.

Automatic copy/move image forgery detection

Detecting images that have been forged by covering up part of the image by copy/pasting blocks of pixels is possible using an algorithm that I implemented. Details by clicking the image below (which shows copying of a bunch of foliage to cover the presence of a military vehicle):

Getting an apology for the treatment of Alan Turing

In August/September 2009 I worked to get the British Government to apologize for the prosecution and persecution of Alan Turing. On September 10, 2009 (much to my surprise) the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, issued a long and detailed apology. The full story can be read here.

Calibrating a machine learning spam filter

One problem often encountered with machine learning based spam filters is what to do with the region around 0.5. i.e. how do we intepret a message that's scores as being right in the middle between spam and ham. This post shows how calibrating the filter can help.

Building a temperature probe for the OLPC XO-1

The OLPC XO-1 has a handy Measure application that can measure a signal sent in through the microphone socket.
Here I hack Measure to measure temperature and detail the hardware necessary to build the probe.

The Ikea Lillabo Train Set

After staring at an Ikea train set for a while I wondered how many possible layouts could be made with it. A few hours programming later and I had the answer. And the answer to a followup question: how many more layouts could be made with a few more pieces?

POPFile - Automatic email sorting

Back in 2001 I needed a solution to email overload. After research I created POPFile which was the first widely usable "Bayesian" email sorter (its parents include iFile for exmh and SwiftFile for Lotus Notes) as a POP3 proxy. It's still going strong today but now supports IMAP and other protocols.