excellent analogy by Marc Davis

Marc Davis of Yahoo Research gave an excellent talk at UW today on mobile phones and social media. During the talk, he gave the following analogy (paraphrased):

You are at a bar.
You get drunk.
You get even more drunk.
Someone hits you in the back of the head and you go unconscious.
While you're out cold, they take you to the airport and fly you to another country.
They drive you to an unknown location and leave you lying in the street.
You wake up and open your eyes.

That's what it's like to be a computer vision system.

The lesson, of course, is that context from our lifestream is incredibly useful for solving problems that are not easily tackled by vision alone.