It’s always nice to get a little reminder that no matter how clever computers get, they still need us every now and again.

C3Vision is a project that uses the human intellect to supplement computers processing speed. In this case, the task is to sort through satellite images in search of surface-to-air missiles.

The idea is that while computers are incredibly good and doing calculations quickly, they aren’t all that great at recognizing complex patterns (say picking out a missile from a potentially grainy satellite image). By tapping into the brain, a machine that is quite proficient at pattern recognition tasks, you can do these search and find operations at much higher rates of efficiency and speed.

When I think about the future of computer-human interfaces, it’s things like this I see becoming more and more common. Why make a computer that thinks like a human when you can make one that helps a human think?

Most brain-computer interfaces are designed to help disabled people communicate or move around. A new project is using this type of interface to help computers perform tasks they can’t manage on their own. In experiments, researchers used the interface to sort through satellite images for surface-to-air missiles faster than any machine or human analyst could manage alone.

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Sajda’s device, called C3Vision (cortically coupled computer vision), uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap to monitor brain activity as the person wearing it is shown about 10 images per second. Machine-learning algorithms trained to detect the neurological signals that signify interest in an image are used to analyze this brain activity. By monitoring these signals, the system rapidly ranks the images in terms of how interesting they appear to the viewer. The search is then refined by retrieving other images that are similar to those with the highest rank. “It’s a search tool that allows you to find images that are very similar to those that have grabbed your attention,” says Sajda.

Read Computers Get Help from the Human Brain (Via Technology Review) (Images)

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