Q&A: Phillip Isola on the art and science of generative models

If you've ever wondered what a loaf of bread would look like as a cat, edges2cats is for you. The program that turns sketches into images of cats is one of many whimsical creations inspired by Phillip Isola's image-to-image translation software released in the early days of generative adversarial networks, or GANs. In a 2016 paper, Isola and his colleagues showed how a new type of GAN could transform a hand-drawn shoe into its fashion-photo equivalent, or turn an aerial photo into a grayscale map. Later, the researchers showed how landscape photos could be reimagined in the impressionist brushstrokes of Monet or Van Gogh. Now an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Isola continues to explore what GANs can do.