"What I cannot create, I do not understand," said the famous writing on Dr. Feynman's blackboard. The ability to create or to change objects requires us to understand their structure and factors of variation. For example, to draw a face an artist is required to know its composition and have a good command of drawing skills (the latter is particularly challenging for the presenter). The animation additionally requires the knowledge of rigid and non-rigid motion patterns of the object. This talk shows that generation, manipulation, and animation skills of deep generative models substantially benefit from such understanding.

Data analysis and modeling is a complex and demanding task. While a variety of software and tools exist to cope with this problem and tame big data operations, most of these tools are either not free, and when they are, they require large amount of configuration and steep learning curve. Moreover, they provide limited functionalities. In this paper we propose Polly, an online data analysis and modeling open-source tool that is intuitive to use and can be used with minimal or no configuration. Users can use Polly to rapidly integrate, analyze their data, prototype and test their novel methodologies. Polly can be used also as an educational tool. Users can use Polly to upload or connect to their structured data sources, load the required data into our system and perform various data processing tasks. Examples of such operations include data cleaning, data pre-processing, attribute encoding, regression and classification analysis.