I'm having a very hard time believing that this is real. If it is, they have just made breakthroughs in multiple domains in computer graphics, recognition, and composition at the same time. Here's hoping it's real.
Edit: I'll also believe it if anyone on this site claims to have seen same.
Reminds me of a company I worked for they were working on a video compression and the video source the developers had was a security camera.
The compression was optimized for bookshelves and hand waving.
These are the best two conferences in computer graphics, and the bar to get in is extremely high -- reviewers are very very tough and submitted papers have to not only be technically accurate, but also very polished in writing and presentation (and video).
That being said, a lot of these kind of systems have been coming out in the past few years, and it's a little hard to judge how successful they are due to the enormous amount of work required to reproduce results (their releasing a binary is commendable).
My own personal feeling is that this system probably works quite well for "common" things in their database, but there might be many small artifacts in generated images. Also, if you start trying to include stuff that's not well represented in the database, then the artifacts probably become quite severe.
A few times in the past few months the question of whether "all the good stuff" has been discovered or whether there's no progress left to be made came up, and computer vision has been one of my go-to examples of a field that has just been booming lately. Interestingly, digging in shows that it's still not "AI", just as you don't see any "AI" here, but there's still been a qualitative sea change in the past few years. I think the fact that a $1000 machine is now unbelievably powerful has been a real boon for the field.
But there is a similar disconnect that looms between the rudimentary intelligence of simple organisms and the more sophisticated intelligence higher mammals. Many researchers have noted this taken the insight that with a simple set of rules you can get complex behavior. This has lead to something of a revolution in ML, robotics and neuromorphic engineering. If this analogy holds, then it may be that the distance between weak and strong AI will be bridged in the same way that the distance between single celled organisms and primates appears to be bridged: by iteratively building complex systems on top of simpler building blocks. There simply won't be a secret sauce to be found, but each layer of complexity will allow for increasingly sophisticated behavior.
So technically, it was a Data Mining class I guess.
There are existing projects that pair an image composition function with a tagged image database (like this one: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/photoclipart/). This project sounds like it adds a fitness function so that it can find an output image that looks good.
Now, as hard as what's been done on the algorithms side, someone has to figure out a usable user interface for these tools, so that regular people can play with them.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://cg.cs.tsinghua.ed...
It does include 5 executables totaling ~140k. I am not quite brave enough to run them but I did run them through strings, and a cursory inspection suggests either that they're either attempting to do what they're claimed to do or they're the best disguised malware in history.
World domination is in our sights <evil laugh>
Image processing is full of things that sort-of work, that are impressive but not fully reliable.
Edit
The official site of the plugin is definitely down. Its probably overloaded by all the people who are interested in checking it out. ;)