Group items tagged

sad series of images ...

You erase it, AI reconstructs it.

A nice merger of different AI technologies. System teaches itself to derive concepts from images and some Q/A-pairs.

An interesting project that can teach you something about AI training bias. While the system can generate marvelous portraits, it was trained on images displaying not a smiling expression, so it will most likely fail on smiling photos.

impressive

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

Apophis is back! You can watch its close approach live. Announcement: http://images.slooh.com/files/press_release/asteroid_apophis2013.pdf

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Implementation of the deep learning-based image classifier (online). Try making a picture with your phone and upload it there. Pretty impressive results. EDIT: Okay, it works the best with well exposed simple objects (pen, mug).

so what about a space sensor for measuring thermal efficiency of buildings? Can you have a look ?

"Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the eyes and brains of 27 astronauts who have spent prolonged periods of time in space revealed optical abnormalities similar to those that can occur in intracranial hypertension of unknown cause, a potentially serious condition in which pressure builds within the skull."

Basis for after next generation processors?

nice images...

On time for new year ... Ambitious China!

full text available at http://images.spaceref.com/china/ChinaSpaceActivitiesin2011.pdf

wow impressive. Could be super useful for astronauts !

Nice animation...

Has this not been underway for quite some time now? Not sure if this 'new era' is coming any day soon. Thoughts?

If they want to give the computers "senses" they should also go ahead and give them a body slightly taller than humans ...and guns. So once they reach a critical level of consciousness they can really go to town... http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/tg/image/1385/54/1385549501025.jpg

Neural networks!!! However, indeed, "senses" will not make any sense towards human-like computing without bodies that physically interact with the world. That's where most of these things are going wrong. Perception and cognition are for action. Without action coming from the machine side all these ideas simply fail.