Author: Jeff Barr

Image processing (and its cousin, machine vision) both entail designing algorithms to process pixel-based images and to extract recognizable information from them. Earlier today I saw the following request on the Ask Metafilter site: i need an algorithm to extract statistics about the diameters (in pixels) of some roughly-circular objects from an image file. Having […]

Last week I did an AWS presentation at Westminster University. The audience was very lively and asked a number of great questions. They also wrote some nice blog posts. One of the audience members asked if anyone had integrated Amazon S3 into a Linux live CD distribution. I’d thought about this a couple of times, […]

It’s VHS vs. Beta, all over again! Back when I was young, there were two main consumer video tape formats, VHS and Beta. Both had their advantages and disadvantages, and it took years for the market to decide which one was best. VHS ultimately prevailed, to the extent that many of today’s youngest consumers don’t […]

We are pleased and proud to announce that the Amazon Mechanical Turk was the winner of a 2006 Software Industry Association Codie award in the category of “Best Web Services Solution.” For those of you who are keeping score at home, this is our second Codie in as many years. — Jeff; Modified 10/23/2020 – […]

People more persistent and clever than I have managed to find the Werner Vogels interview in the current issue of ACM Queue. Werner is Amazon’s CTO and the author of the All Things Distributed blog. Werner goes into considerable detail on the inner workings of the Amazon site, scalability issues, our internal services architecture, and […]

Thom Wetzel sent me information about his new site, the Wishlist Buddy. As Thom notes: I’ve noticed that a lot of the times with books, DVDs and video games, the prices usually start out high and work their way down to less than half price over time. I used to add items to my Amazon […]

GuruLib uses a bookshelf metaphor to implement a cataloging system for books, DVDs, and CDs. After creating an account and entering your collection, you can view it in 4 different ways — All, Books, Movies, or Music. You can then further organize your collection by shelf. As the author notes in his blog, he built […]

The newest issue of the ACM Queue contains an article that I co-wrote with Felipe Cabrera (VP of Software Development at Amazon). The article, “AI Gets a Brain”, covers the fundamental concepts behind the Amazon Mechanical Turk. We start off with a historic review of the original Mechanical Turk (covered in depth in Tom Standage’s […]