A 27-year-old who recently completed his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Ottawa will soon be working with the school’s tech transfer staff to bring a new type of Internet search engine for images to the commercial market. Kris Woodbeck’s invention recently won him the university’s “Innovator of the Year” award, and his next challenge will be taking on web giants Yahoo and Google, both of which offer image search engines that he says are inferior to his. Those and most other available search engines look for images by text, not by the shape and visual cues of the item, he explained. “They look at the ‘url’ of an image and associated text, but they are not searching the actual image,” Woodbeck said. “So that’s the problem we are solving.” Combining the latest in high-powered graphics processors with an understanding of how the human brain processes a large quantity of visual data, the search technology seeks out images based on the characteristics of the images themselves rather than the text describing them. With help from the university’s Technology Transfer and Business Enterprise office, he is applying for a patent and taking the first steps toward establishing a start-up company. The next step will be to build a prototype, in partnership with the University of Ottawa. Woodbeck hopes to have a search engine running and open to the public by next summer. Revenue would be generated by paid advertisements which would appear in response to the specifics of an image search, much like Google’s revenue model. Go to: http://www.canada.com/topics/technology…

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