Media
The Casual Marvel Fan's Guide to em WandaVision /em Episode 5
This article contains spoilers for the first five episodes of WandaVision. Let's start with the biggest question. What was the deal with "Pietro" at the end of the episode? That was Evan Peters reprising his role as the late Pietro Maximoff, Wanda's brother, but--and here's the twist--it's not the Pietro Maximoff we've seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU's Pietro, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, died in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
How To Read 43 Machine Learning Books in a Year
The Garrison (armies of militia) of libraries worldwide offer millions of books, such as the Library of Congress in D.C. has over 162 million books, and the New York Public library carries around 53 million books. A number of people have asked me through several of my channels and conferences -- how to find time to read books, and what can be done to read more books each month. Some audiences even feel that 43 machine learning books in a year are insufficient, and want more. I keep discovering new material every day on top of the antiquated books, which still offer good concepts. To get started, I would suggest disconnecting from Netflix, Amazon Video, and regular TV channels.
Bliss Is the Worst Kind of Open-Ended Sci-Fi Movie
Does Mike Cahill feel seen? The 41-year-old writer-director of science fiction has now made three films, each higher-profile than the last, about ways of seeing. This is literalized most literally in the second of these efforts, I Origins, which is also, not unrelatedly, the worst titled. Released in 2014, it's about vision scientists searching for the origin of the human eye--look, a pun--which, if you didn't know, is "the window," as one character literally says, "to the soul." They find it in the genes of a sightless worm, but not before Karen, played by Brit Marling, warns her lab partner that she, at least, has no interest in getting famous, in being seen: "Recognition makes me nauseous," she says.
Video Action Recognition Using spatio-temporal optical flow video frames
Nebisoy, Aytekin, Malekzadeh, Saber
Recognizing human actions based on videos has became one of the most popular areas of research in computer vision in recent years. This area has many applications such as surveillance, robotics, health care, video search and human-computer interaction. There are many problems associated with recognizing human actions in videos such as cluttered backgrounds, obstructions, viewpoints variation, execution speed and camera movement. A large number of methods have been proposed to solve the problems. This paper focus on spatial and temporal pattern recognition for the classification of videos using Deep Neural Networks. This model takes RGB images and Optical Flow as input data and outputs an action class number. The final recognition accuracy was about 94%.
Nooie's new smart cam offers 360 degrees of security for a steal
The Nooie Cam 360 has a rotating, high-def camera that automatically tracks you as you move about the room. Here are the Nooie Cam 360's specs: The Nooie Cam 360 is a budget-friendly indoor home security camera that features motion tracking and, as the name implies, 360-degree rotation. The camera is equipped with a 1080p high-def lens and two 940nm infrared LEDs. It has other smart camera features like two-way audio functionality, night vision, and a status light indicator that can be toggled on or off. Nooie smart alerts are sent when the camera detects sound or motion.
High-level Approaches to Detect Malicious Political Activity on Twitter
Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem remains, this is a fair assumption. We find concerning issues within the current literature and follow a diverging path. Notably, by placing emphasis on using data features that are less susceptible to malicious manipulation and also on looking for high-level approaches that avoid a granularity level that is biased towards easy-to-spot and low impact cases. We designed and implemented a framework -- Twitter Watch -- that performs structured Twitter data collection, applying it to the Portuguese Twittersphere. We investigate a data snapshot taken on May 2020, with around 5 million accounts and over 120 million tweets (this value has since increased to over 175 million). The analyzed time period stretches from August 2019 to May 2020, with a focus on the Portuguese elections of October 6th, 2019. However, the Covid-19 pandemic showed itself in our data, and we also delve into how it affected typical Twitter behavior. We performed three main approaches: content-oriented, metadata-oriented, and network interaction-oriented. We learn that Twitter's suspension patterns are not adequate to the type of political trolling found in the Portuguese Twittersphere -- identified by this work and by an independent peer - nor to fake news posting accounts. We also surmised that the different types of malicious accounts we independently gathered are very similar both in terms of content and interaction, through two distinct analysis, and are simultaneously very distinct from regular accounts.
Chord Embeddings: Analyzing What They Capture and Their Role for Next Chord Prediction and Artist Attribute Prediction
Lahnala, Allison, Kambhatla, Gauri, Peng, Jiajun, Whitehead, Matthew, Minnehan, Gillian, Guldan, Eric, Kummerfeld, Jonathan K., Çamcı, Anıl, Mihalcea, Rada
Natural language processing methods have been applied in a variety of music studies, drawing the connection between music and language. In this paper, we expand those approaches by investigating \textit{chord embeddings}, which we apply in two case studies to address two key questions: (1) what musical information do chord embeddings capture?; and (2) how might musical applications benefit from them? In our analysis, we show that they capture similarities between chords that adhere to important relationships described in music theory. In the first case study, we demonstrate that using chord embeddings in a next chord prediction task yields predictions that more closely match those by experienced musicians. In the second case study, we show the potential benefits of using the representations in tasks related to musical stylometrics.
Controlling Hallucinations at Word Level in Data-to-Text Generation
Rebuffel, Clément, Roberti, Marco, Soulier, Laure, Scoutheeten, Geoffrey, Cancelliere, Rossella, Gallinari, Patrick
Data-to-Text Generation (DTG) is a subfield of Natural Language Generation aiming at transcribing structured data in natural language descriptions. The field has been recently boosted by the use of neural-based generators which exhibit on one side great syntactic skills without the need of hand-crafted pipelines; on the other side, the quality of the generated text reflects the quality of the training data, which in realistic settings only offer imperfectly aligned structure-text pairs. Consequently, state-of-art neural models include misleading statements - usually called hallucinations - in their outputs. The control of this phenomenon is today a major challenge for DTG, and is the problem addressed in the paper. Previous work deal with this issue at the instance level: using an alignment score for each table-reference pair. In contrast, we propose a finer-grained approach, arguing that hallucinations should rather be treated at the word level. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Branch Decoder which is able to leverage word-level labels to learn the relevant parts of each training instance. These labels are obtained following a simple and efficient scoring procedure based on co-occurrence analysis and dependency parsing. Extensive evaluations, via automated metrics and human judgment on the standard WikiBio benchmark, show the accuracy of our alignment labels and the effectiveness of the proposed Multi-Branch Decoder. Our model is able to reduce and control hallucinations, while keeping fluency and coherence in generated texts. Further experiments on a degraded version of ToTTo show that our model could be successfully used on very noisy settings.