Creating digital renderings and editing images can take hours, but researchers from MIT and IBM want to change that. They've trained AI to generate photographic images from scratch and to intelligently edit objects inside them. While this could be beneficial for artists and designers, it also offers insight into how neural networks learn context, and the team hopes to leverage the tool to spot fake or altered images.
17Jul/19Off
AI Development Accelerates, Chips Speed Model Training
A Lopez Research survey revealed that 86 percent of companies believe AI will be strategic to their business, but only 36 percent of them report having made “meaningful progress.” Khosrowshahi pointed out that more companies than ever have access to the necessary data, tools and training.
VentureBeat reports that Khosrowshahi’s point of view is validated by a Gartner report in January showing that “AI implementation grew a whopping 270 percent in the past four years and 37 percent in the past year alone … up from 10 percent in 2015.” Some experts predict that the enterprise AI market will be valued at $6.14 billion by 2022.
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/ai-development-accelerates-chips-speed-model-training/#more-142008
15Jul/19Off
‘The Town Hall of Hollywood.’ Welcome to the Netflix Lobby.
Dolly Parton recently held court there, big wig and all. Leonardo DiCaprio and John Kerry arrived at the same time last month. Cindy Crawford on the left, David Letterman on the right. And isn’t that Beyoncé by the espresso bar?
Welcome to the hottest see-and-be-seen spot in Hollywood: Netflix’s first-floor waiting room.
Scratch that. It’s a “lobby experience” and “creative gateway,” according to a design firm that worked on the space.
Netflix declined to comment for this article, but insiders say that about 300 guests come through the lobby for meetings on an average day: agents, publicists, writers, producers, directors, stars — many hoping for a piece of the roughly $8 billion the streaming service spends on original content annually, some with projects already in the works.
The new lobby has multiple showpieces. Rows of Emmy and Oscar statuettes glisten in glass cabinets at its center. There is an installation involving 110 individually programmed video screens of different sizes (iPad, iPhone, laptop). But the pièce de résistance is the 80-foot video screen. Mr. Sarandos came up with the idea.
The Netflix video wall, 46 million pixels in two layers, was designed to make footage of sets appear hyper-real, as if guests stepped inside the film or show. To accomplish the visual trick, one layer of pixels creates the environment — the prison cafeteria from “Orange is the New Black,” for instance — and a second layer adds subtle and periodic movements called “sprites,” like steam rising from the cafeteria’s soup pots.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/business/media/netflix-lobby-hollywood.html
15Jul/19Off
Augmented reality helps transform minimally invasive surgery
A team from a leading London facility has used an augmented reality (AR) headset to examine CT images alongside an endoscopic video of patient anatomy while simulating minimally invasive surgery. The technology led to improved operating times and surgical proficiency.
For minimally invasive surgeries such as ureteroscopy, operating clinicians generally examine a live endoscopic video of the patient for guidance during the procedure. A downside with this technique is that it requires clinicians to switch their gaze between the surgical site and a computer monitor displaying the endoscopic view. This disruption to the visual-motor axis during surgery has been associated with a variety of problems, from restricting surgical performance to increasing the risk of injuries, the authors note.
In the current study, Al Janabi and colleagues tested the effectiveness of using augmented reality to address the limitations of standard ureteroscopy. They specifically evaluated the capacity of an AR headset (HoloLens, Microsoft) to facilitate ureteroscopy simulations for 72 participants of varying expertise – including medical students (novice), urological residents or trainees (intermediate), and endourology specialists (expert).
See the full article here: https://physicsworld.com/a/augmented-reality-helps-transform-minimally-invasive-surgery/
15Jul/19Off
Samsung may develop foldable augmented reality glasses
While the final product could end up being vastly different, the current design is an eyepiece that automatically switches on whenever it's unfolded.
So long as one of the pair's temples is unfolded, the glasses' projector (mounted on the temple) would beam images on the small display placed over the wearer's field of view. To make sure the device doesn't accidentally switch off if the user turns their head wrong, it looks like the company is thinking of using magnetic sensors to make sure it remains in the unfolded position until the wearer deliberately folds it.
Since it's just a patent application that may never come to fruition,
See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/12/samsung-foldable-augmented-reality-glasses-patent-app/
14Jul/19Off
How one deepfake prankster is changing cinema history
“I’m not a coder, just a user,” said Ctrl Shift Face’s creator. “I don’t know the details about exactly how the software works. The workflow works like this: You add source and destination videos, then one neural network will detect and extract faces. Some data cleanup and manual extraction is needed. Next, the software analyzes and learns these faces. This step can sometimes take a few days. The more the network learns, the more detailed the result will be. In the final step, you combine these two and the result is your deepfake. There’s sometimes a bit of post-process needed as well.”
Things could be about to get even more convincing, too. While the attempt to replace Arnie’s audio on Terminator 2 didn’t work as planned, there are efforts afoot in research labs to pioneer the audio equivalent of deepfakes. That means that, in the near future, it’ll be feasible to realistically recreate an actor’s speech using similar training data.
“That’s out of my expertise,” Ctrl Shift Face’s creator said. “But I may collaborate with people that can do these types of AI voices in the future.”
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ctrl-shift-face-deepfake-changing-hollywood-history/
10Jul/19Off
Facebook’s digital currency has put China’s central bank on high alert
The People’s Bank of China is paying close attention to Libra, the digital currency Facebook has created. And it may inspire the bank to accelerate its plans to speed up its own project to develop a digital currency.
China’s central bank was one of the first central banks to begin studying digital currencies, back in 2014. Few details about the ongoing project have been revealed publicly. But if Libra takes off, we might see central banks across the world issue their own digital currencies to compete, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see China out in front. “We had an early start ... but lots of work is needed to consolidate our lead,” said Wang.