philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Just nine out of 116 AI professionals in films are women, study finds

... “Given that male engineers have repeatedly been shown to engineer products that are most suitable for and adapted to male users, employing more women is essential for addressing the encoding of bias and pejorative stereotypes into AI technologies,” the report’s authors write. ...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge reviewed more than 1,400 films released between 1920 and 2020 and whittled them down to the 142 most influential movies featuring artificial intelligence. Their analysis identified 116 AI professionals. Only nine of these were women, of which five worked for a man or were the child or partner of a more senior male AI engineer. ...

Dr Kanta Dihal, a co-author on the study and a senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, said part of the male bias was an “art-mimicking life” spiral whereby film-makers portray AI professionals as men to reflect the male dominance of the industry. But about one in five AI engineers are women, compared with less than one in 10 of those portrayed in cinema. “They are exacerbating the stereotype they see,” she said. ...

Prof Dame Wendy Hall, a regius professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, said there was an urgent need for a campaign to increase diversity in AI. Hall wrote her first paper on the lack of women in computing in 1987, and said the situation was worse with AI because the potential impact on society was so great.

See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/13/just-nine-out-of-116-ai-professionals-in-films-are-women-study-finds

Mice Explore Virtual Reality Through a Pi-Powered Headset

A research team at the University of Leicester has developed a Raspberry Pi-powered VR headset for mice, allowing the little critters to explore virtual worlds. 

The headset was created as part of a study exploring the effects of virtual reality on the brain and behavior of mice, and the results showed that the mice became more familiar with their virtual surroundings over time and showed reduced anxiety levels. 

The teams says this research has potential implications for studies involving brain mapping, animal behavior, and virtual reality therapy. ...

See the full story here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/02/11/mice-explore-virtual-reality-through-a-pi-powered-headset/

Bill Gates Reveals the Next Big Thing [AI]

... ChatGPT will improve office efficiency, drafting invoices and letters, Gates said. He sees many possibilities for the next generation of chatbots, including in the health care and education spaces.

"The easiest way to understand it is that AI has got very good at speech recognition and visual recognition, but they essentially couldn’t read,” he praised. 

Gates, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, believes that new robots like ChatGPT are capable of training, improving, and reading and writing through new knowledge. He said that AI will improve messaging software like Microsoft's Team. AI would, for example, be able to keep track of the conversation to produce relevant information based on a meeting. ...

What is innovative is the fact that this artificial-intelligence interface is perfectly at ease in a conversational mode: You can ask a lot of questions one after the other and expect clear answers. It is a generalist robot: You can ask ChatGPT to write a film script, the plan for a thesis, or a computer code. 

One of ChatGPT's skills is its ability to break down a complex task into several small elementary tasks, as a computer program would do, to facilitate solutions for human users.

See the full story here: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/bill-gates-reveals-the-next-big-thing

Inside the Academy’s Quest to Help Filmmakers Preserve Digital Titles

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science has set up the Academy Digital Preservation Forum, a website inviting filmmakers and others to address the challenges facing digital preservation. ...

Heading the project is Andrea Kalas, SVP Asset Management at Paramount Pictures. Her career has been long devoted to the world of preservation, having worked at the British Film Insititute, Dreamworks SKG and Discovery Communications. ...

During that time, they shared concerns for digital preservation — such as which assets should be preserved, the costs of preservation, how to preserve digitally, and consumerism. ...

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/digital-film-preservation-academy-forum-1235516076/

Global Amusement and Theme Parks Strategic Market Report 2023: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Present New Opportunities

....

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

• Key Trends in the Global Amusement and Theme Parks Market
• Changing Business Models
• Adoption of Dynamic Pricing
• Use of Artificial Intelligence & Touchless Technology
• Changing Way Customers & Staff Interact
• Rising Use of VR & AR for Enhancing Guest Experience
• Changing Food Experiences
• Growing Development of IoT Infrastructure
• Rise in Use of Virtual Assistants
• Blockchain Comes to the Fore
• Players Focus on Environmental Impact
• Technology Adoption Witnesses Rapid Growth in Theme Parks
• Urbanization & Tourism Trends Impact Dynamics of Theme Park Market
• Sustainability: An Important Aspect for Amusement Parks of the Future
• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Present New Opportunities for Theme Parks Market
• Virtual Reality-based Theme Parks Grow in Popularity
• Technology Trends in Amusement & Theme Park
• 5G: Potential to Transform Theme Park Experiences
• Consumer Incomes and Desire for Recreational & Adventurous Activities Spur Market Prospects
• Innovative, Adventurous Rides Present Growth Opportunities
• Ensuring Profitability of Thrill Rides: A Major Machine Design Challenge
• Threat of Accidents at Amusement & Theme Parks: A Major Challenge

See the full pr here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-amusement-and-theme-parks-strategic-market-report-2023-artificial-intelligence--machine-learning-present-new-opportunities-301742353.html

Google Maps Brings A New Level Of Interactivity To Your Journey

... Immersive view, which allows you to explore a place virtually, is rolling out now in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo. ...

Search With Live View

Live View is a search feature in Google Maps that uses AI and augmented reality to help you find nearby locations, such as restaurants, parks, transit stations, and ATMs, simply by holding up your phone while walking.

It provides information like operating hours, the current level of activity, and ratings, allowing you to make informed decisions and save time. ...

New Maps Features For Electric Vehicle Drivers

New Google Maps updates for EV drivers include adding charging stops to shorter trips, which Maps will suggest based on factors like current traffic, charge level, and energy consumption, as well as high-speed charging stations, which can fill up your car in less than 40 minutes. ...

See the full story here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-maps-brings-a-new-level-of-interactivity-to-your-journey/478858/#close

Squid Game Virtual Reality Experience Announced by Netflix and Sandbox VR

Netflix is working with a VR company on a Squid Game experience. The company announced that their Squid Game project is in the works with Sandbox VR. Basically, fans can look forward to participating in the challenges from the Netflix program. It's said to be "fully immersive" by Bothe the streamer and tech company. Later this year, viewers can try out the challenges for themselves if they haven't gotten enough of the franchise from the live-action show and multitude of parodies by then. As an added bonus, users can also make highlight reels of their own in-game reactions and share their experiences with social media followers. (Which to be honest is the aim of something like this in all reality.)...

"It took 12 years to bring the first season of Squid Game to life last year. But it took 12 days for Squid Game to become the most popular Netflix series ever," Hwang explained. ...

See the full story here: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/squid-game-virtual-reality-netflix-experience-announced-sandbox-vr/

Light Field Lab Raises $50M To Bring SolidLight Holograms Into The Real World

... Their SolidLight displays are a completely new method of creating 3D objects that appear to be real and placing them in the physical world. They look real to the eye, but are formed with nothing but light. No glasses are required to see them, which is why their SolidLight naked-eye holograms were named one of the Best Inventions of 2022 by TIME. ...

If I wasn’t visiting a company that makes holographic technology, I would have thought I was speaking with a person wearing a mask— it looked that real. What I witnessed was the first of Light Field Lab’s Defy™ experiences. The team later revealed that I was interacting with a SolidLight hologram being computationally rendered in real-time by a game engine. The hologram’s eyes seemed to be following me around the room. After getting to know me, his deity-ness invited me to touch his face, and when I did, my hand passed right through the hologram. ...

The hologram was formed using LFL’s latest SolidLight panel modulating over 2.5 Billion pixels. Unlike my last meeting, this demonstration leveraged their new WaveTracing™ engine that performs billions of wavefront computations in real-time to form the interactive holographic objects. The WaveTracer is seamlessly integrated into industry standard 3D engines, like Unreal and Unity. ...

See the full story here; https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2023/02/08/light-field-lab-raises-50m-to-bring-solidlight-holograms-into-the-real-world/?sh=46009ead7070

How fast is AI evolving? It’s now doing generative video

... It wasn't that long ago that games programmers started exploring with procedurally-generated cityscapes. These relied on algorithms built on basic parametric information about cities, using unchanging routines that could take a load of statistics about what buildings, roads and street furniture tended to be like, and create not particularly realistic "cities" based on those essential elements. This wasn't AI. It relied on fixed routines, almost certainly with an element of randomness built in. Randomness is arguably the opposite of intelligence, but it can give the appearance of design if it's applied to elements that are essentially random in the real world. ...

Today, AI techniques can generate photorealistic cities that seemingly go on forever. These don't rely on a fixed set of parameters but on extensive training and, ultimately, a "knowledge" of what a city is like. ...

And now - generative video. Just this week, Stable Diffusion developer Runway announced its generative video model: "Introducing Gen-1: a new AI model that uses language and images to generate new videos out of existing ones.” ...

So when will we achieve AGI? The answer is somewhere in between never and sooner than you think. ...

See the full story here; https://www.redsharknews.com/how-fast-is-ai-evolving-its-now-doing-generative-video

... In another section written by ChatGPT, Hill warned about “the potential for job loss”, that artificial general intelligence “could perpetuate existing biases and discrimination” and “could be used for malicious purposes, such as cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns”.

ChatGPT also supplied possible benefits, such as AI’s “potential to revolutionise many industries, including healthcare, transportation and finance by increasing efficiency, reducing costs and improving decision-making”. ...

Hill, Australia’s most prominent politician on the TikTok social media app, gently trolled the Liberal opposition by suggesting they ask ChatGPT “is climate change real?” and “what do we stand for?”. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/06/labor-mp-julian-hill-australia-parliament-speech-ai-part-written-by-chatgpt