... The hybrid AIFF, hosted by Expo City Dubai with a dedicated website to enable virtual visitors to explore the festival remotely, will be the region's premier event to celebrate and propel the convergence of cinema and AI, underlining the symbiotic relationship between human creativity and technology. ...
AIFF will span almost six months of dynamic experiences, including a global competition, innovative film screenings, engaging panel discussions featuring renowned AI experts and filmmakers, and hands-on workshops offering insights into AI integration in film production – all showcasing how AI can be used to enhance the filmmaking process.
The competition opens on Tuesday, with professional and amateur film creators worldwide invited to submit a short film that includes AI-generated content. The winning entries will be showcased at an awards ceremony on 29th February 2024. ...
The Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) by NIST
When engaging with AI and AI-based solutions, it's important to understand AI's limitations, risks and vulnerabilities. The Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) by NIST is a set of guidelines and best practices designed to help organizations identify, assess and manage the risks associated with the deployment and use of artificial intelligence technologies.
The framework consists of six elements:
Valid and Reliable - AI can provide the wrong information, which is also known in GenAI as "hallucinations". It's important that companies can validate the AI they're adopting is accurate and reliable.
Safe - Ensuring that the prompted information isn't shared with other users, like in the infamous Samsung case.
Secure and Resilient - Attackers are using AI for cyber attacks. Organizations should ensure the AI system is protected and safe from attacks and can successfully thwart attempts to exploit it or use it for assisting with attacks.
Accountable and Transparent - It's important to be able to explain the AI supply chain and to ensure there is an open conversation about how it works. AI is not magic.
Privacy-enhanced - Ensuring the prompted information is protected and anonymized in the data lake and when used.
Fair - This is one of the most important elements. It means managing harmful bias. For example, there is often bias in AI facial recognition, with light-skinned males being more accurately identified compared to women and darker skin colors. When using AI for law enforcement, for example, this could have severe implications.
Teachers should look to their students for guidance.
The students in general are way ahead of the faculty. They’ve grown up in a world where new technologies are coming and going, and they’re trying things out. And of course, ChatGPT is the latest thing, so they’re using it. They want to use it responsibly. They’re asking “What’s allowed? Look at all these things I could do. Am I allowed to do that?”
So the advice that I gave to faculty was that you need to be trying this out. You need to at least be conversant in what your students are able to do, and think about your assignments and what this tool enables. What policies or what guidance are you gonna give students in terms of whether they are allowed to use it? In what way would you be allowed to use it?
You don’t have to do this by yourself. You can have a conversation with your students. You can co-create something, because why not draw on the experience in your classroom?
I really think that if you’re teaching, you need to realize that the world has AI now. And so students need to be prepared for a world where this is going to be integrated in industries in different ways. We do need to prepare them.
My top 17 personal favorites from Venice Immersive 2023:
LETTERS FROM DRANCY: For excellence in mixing showing and telling aspects of spatial storytelling. I was moved the most by this piece. Lots of interesting mixtures of styles and forms ground in 360 video, but adding in layers of projection mapping techniques, animation all to have a great balance between showing and telling this story that really sticks the landing in the end.
EMPEREUR (EMPEROR)
A very high-level of technical polish in terms of spatial storytelling, solid story, and the best embodied interactions that are directly tied into advancing the narrative
FLOATING WITH SPIRITS
Very rich elaboration of Indigenous philosophy through the four elements using point cloud abstractions, and also really touching anthropological capture of Day of the Dead death rituals and connections to ancestors. ...
... X said the biometrics are for premium users and will give them the option to provide their government ID and a picture, to add a verification layer. Biometric data may be extracted from both for matching purposes. “This will additionally help us tie, for those that choose, an account to a real person by processing their government issued ID,” X said in a statement. “This will also help X fight impersonation attempts and make the platform more secure.” ...
... Based on Jim Henson’s 1987 live-action/puppet folk tale series and narrated by Neil Gaiman (creator of Coralineand The Sandman), The Storyteller‘s tale follows a courageous young girl as she sets out on an adventure to save her seven brothers from a curse that turned them into ravens. Bringing this intriguing immersive project to life were Felix & Paul co-founders Félix Lajeunesse (Chief Creative Officer), Stéphane Rituit (Executive Producer/CEO) and Paul Raphaël (Chief Innovation Officer), who took us behind the AR visions to answer a few questions. ...
Overall, 52% of Americans say they feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned, while 36% say they feel an equal mix of these emotions. ...
Concern about AI outweighs excitement across all major demographic groups. Still, there are some notable differences, particularly by age. About six-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (61%) are mostly concerned about the growing use of AI in daily life, while 4% are mostly excited. That gap is much smaller among those ages 18 to 29: 42% are more concerned and 17% are more excited. ...
Despite growing public concern over the use of artificial intelligence in daily life, opinions about its impact in specific areas are more mixed. There are several uses of AI where the public sees a more positive than negative impact. ...
... AI researchers Maggie Harrison and Jathan Sadowski have each drawn attention to what the latter cleverly termed “Habsburg AI,” which appears when AI-generated information is fed back into another AI program on a loop. What results is a sort of information “inbreeding” that drives the AI mad, causing it to spew abominations of data. Yet even absent these conditions, human influence on the information filtering process creates opportunities for additional forms of distortion. ...
Earlier this month, I published a study describing how disinformation made its way into trusted sources and shaped the consensus to invade Iraq in 2003. If available at the time, AI-powered news filters could have further reinforced that narrative and stifled or altogether silenced opposition. Such a predicament emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, as social media platforms banned what they considered suspect reports that wound up being true. Society’s insatiable demand for rapid and continuous information access has also become a lucrative market that large language models are perfectly suited to exploit. ...
AI’s threat to society therefore looks less like James Cameron’s vision of a cyborg Armageddon and more like a hopelessly polluted information environment in which everything is disputed and meaningful communication is impossible. ...
If Washington and Silicon Valley wade into the age of artificial truth without a clear strategy for managing its risks, America could end up drowning in a sea of incoherence.
This cyberpunk headset keeps you in touch with actual reality
Meta’s latest prototype headset, Flamera, looks ripped straight from a sci-fi action flick—and it quickly turned heads at SIGGRAPH 2023, where Flamera won the coveted Best in Show award.
The Flamera headset, bug-eyed and glowing ominous red, is an intimidating piece of kit that looks radically different from its peers. And the look is not just for show. The headset debuts a new lens design that could solve augmented reality’s most pressing problem: “passthrough,” or the use of external cameras to provide a headset user with a view of the world around them. ...
Meta’s bug-eyed Flamera presents a novel solution. It ditches the array of external cameras favored by current headsets for a unique “lightfield passthrough” design that pairs image sensors with apertures that physically control the light reaching the sensors. Light that would contribute an incorrect perspective is blocked, while light that provides an accurate perspective is allowed to reach the sensors.
The result is strange when viewed directly through the lens: It’s a bit like watching the world through holes poked through paper. The headset rearranges the raw image to remove gaps and reposition the sensor data. Once complete, the headset delivers an accurate view of the world around the user. ...
“There was no latency, and no differences between what my eyes would see and where my hand was positioned, verses where my hand was really located.” ...
But that’s not to say Meta has cracked passthrough AR wide open. Flamera’s technology is a long way from shipping in a headset available for purchase, and currently suffers some drawbacks relative to traditional passthrough AR. ...
PhilNote: given how many years heads-up windshield displays have been discussed, it is hard to imagine what is original and non-obvious to this patent.
... Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to what's beyond the CarPlay instrument cluster system.Apple is working on a next-generation augmented reality display system included in a vehicle that generates information unto an augmented reality display such as a windshield (or on other windows in the vehicle).
The augmented reality display can include display elements which simulate one or more particular environmental objects in the environment, based on monitoring manual driving performance of the vehicle by a driver.
Apple notes in their patent application that in many situations, a graphical overlay can be provided on an environment that is perceived through a transparent surface, including a window or windshield of a vehicle. A graphical overlay can provide information to an observer, including information which is relevant to one or more portions of the perceived environment. ...
FaceTime Calls on the AR Display
Another feature buried in the patent filing under patent point #092 we learn that Apple is working on involves FaceTime between vehicle occupants and another vehicle. Apple specifically notes that "In some embodiments, an augmented reality display system included in a vehicle enables visual communication between an occupant of the vehicle and a remotely located user, including an occupant of a separate vehicle." ...
