Pacific Ocean
jcjohnson/neural-style
This is a torch implementation of the paper A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, and Matthias Bethge. The paper presents an algorithm for combining the content of one image with the style of another image using convolutional neural networks. Applying the style of different images to the same content image gives interesting results. The algorithm allows the user to trade-off the relative weight of the style and content reconstruction terms, as shown in this example where we port the style of Picasso's 1907 self-portrait onto Brad Pitt: By resizing the style image before extracting style features, we can control the types of artistic features that are transfered from the style image; you can control this behavior with the -style_scale flag. Below we see three examples of rendering the Golden Gate Bridge in the style of The Starry Night.
The Rise of the Virtual Assistant
On May 10, the world-class admin behind John Chambers's success was honored with one of the top awards in her field: Debbie Gross received the Colleen Barrett Award for Administrative Excellence. Clearly, Debbie is a force. This CNBC story gives us a peek into her life keeping John at the top of his game. People are rightly saying she's a role model for next-generation administrators. But what people aren't saying is that some next-gen admins are made not of flesh and blood like Debbie but of compute cycles.
Siri successor Viv promises to be most intelligent assistant yet
Two engineers who helped build Siri, the famous voice assistant built into every iPhone, have claimed to have gone one step better with an all new digital assistant nicknamed Viv. Unlike her predecessor promiscuous Viv flirt will not be locked down to one ecosystem – an advantage which is likely to set it apart from the likes Facebook's M, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now and Siri itself by Apple. Anyone familiar with existing voice assistants will feel instantly at home with the latest version, which relies on users clicking on a'Viv' button before posing it a question or voice command. Unlike prior iterations however Viv promises to be a whole lot more advanced; as Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of Viv demonstrated by querying: "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 pm on the day after tomorrow?" For which he received a detailed answer within 10 milliseconds.
Pakistani Researcher Solves One of the Most Important Maths Problems of 20th Century
Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering's (IEEE) published "AI's 10 to Watch" – a list of 10 people who are doing phenomenal work in the field of artificial intelligence. A Pakistani researcher Haris Aziz, who had graduated from LUMS, had his name published in this prestigious list for his work in the field related to computational social choice, an intersection between artificial intelligence and economics. Its seems that was just the beginning of the road for Haris Aziz, who is now back in the news for solving an'unsolvable' mathematical situation. Who will get the larger share of the profit from a business? Shall it be equally allocated or otherwise? Perhaps its your child's birthday and its time to cut and divide the cake in a way that none of the children gets sad by his/her share?
China planning base station for Spratly advanced rescue vessel
BEIJING – A Chinese government bureau is planning a base station for an advanced rescue ship in the disputed Spratly Islands, state media reported on Monday, as China continues its push to develop civilian and military infrastructure in the contentious region. The ship, which would carry drones and underwater robots, is set to be deployed in the second half of the year, said Chen Xingguang, political commissar of the ship, which is under the South China Sea Rescue Bureau of the Ministry of Transport, according to the official China Daily. The civilian bureau has 31 ships and four helicopters conducting rescue missions in the South China Sea, and officials from the department told the China Daily they work with the military on such efforts. Officials said the rescue ship base station would enable rescue forces to aid fishing boats in trouble, and shorten the distance they need to travel. It is unclear on which island the ship will be based, but China has carried out land reclamation and construction on several islands in the Spratly Archipelago, parts of which are also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.
Inside Vicarious, the Secretive AI Startup Bringing Imagination to Computers
Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.
Video shows octopus plays tug of war with underwater robot to defend a cable
If a giant robotic arm swooped in to destroy your home, you would probably be pretty angry. So it is hardly surprising that an octopus living off the Canadian coast in the Pacific Ocean jumped to the defence of the coil of cable it had been living under when a robot came to take it away. A video captured while the underwater robot tried to carry out maintenance work, shows the cephalopod playing tug of war with the robotic arm. The dispute was filmed by Nautilus Live while engineers were using a submarine's robotic arm to repair a cable which was part of the Ocean Networks Canada underwater observatory. Sadly, the fight was only going to end one way, and despite the octopuses valiant efforts to protect its home by hanging onto cord holding the cable coil together, it ultimately lost.
A Pocket Guide to Data Science
In a previous post I advised data scientists in training to build stuff. This post gets more specific. Here's what I mean when I say I'm doing data science. The raw stuff of data science is a collection of numbers and names. Measurements, prices, dates, times, products, titles, actions--everything is fair game. You can use images, text, audio, video and other complex data too, as long as you have a way to reduce it to numbers and names.
Inside Vicarious, the Secretive AI Startup Bringing Imagination to Computers
Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.
Inside Vicarious, the Secretive AI Startup Bringing Imagination to Computers
Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.