Machine learning used to be an academic pursuit. If you wanted to work on it, you probably needed to be part of a lab or have a PhD. In early 2021, there was a shift. RiversHaveWings followed up with the VQGAN CLIP notebook. These notebooks turned text descriptions into images by guiding a GAN with CLIP.

Enter Your Project for a chance to win an Oscilloscope Grand Prize Package for the Most Creative Vision Thing Project! The theme this month is Vision Thing and it comes from suggestions from dougw, vimarsh_, and aabhas. There's a lot of variety with how you choose to implement your project. It's a great opportunity to do something creative that stretches the imagination of what hardware can do. Your project can be either a vision based project involving anything that is related to Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Camera Vision and AI based projects, Deep Learning, using hardware such as the Nvidia Jetson Nano, Pi with Intel Compute Stick, Edge TPU, etc. as vimarsh_ and aabhas suggested.

SURE, COMPUTER ALGORITHMS ARE TAKING over tech and science and medicine … but the creatives are still safe, right? A new program from software developer Autodesk called Dreamcatcher (rendering above) can use A.I. techniques to assist human designers as they go about their creative tasks. Already in use by companies including Airbus, Under Armour, and Stanley Black & Decker, the software is an example of the burgeoning field of generative design. The software then produces hundreds or even thousands of options. As the human designer winnows the choices, the software susses out preferences and helps iterate even better options.

Remember when all furniture was custom made? I'm as much of a fan of modernist Scandinavian design and cheap meatballs as anyone, but mass produced furniture is by definition a compromise: It's sort of okay for everyone, which means it's never exactly what you want. But custom made furniture that's perfect for your space and style is expensive, because it takes a substantial amount of skill and equipment to produce. At MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is presumably populated by researchers trying to afford furnishings for their overpriced and undersized Cambridge apartments, researchers have developed a system called AutoSaw that (nearly) solves the entire furniture problem. AutoSaw can help you pick out a piece of new furniture, customize it to the shape and size that you want, and then build it with a team of robots to your exact specifications.

Most college students relax over their winter break, eating good food and de-stressing from the previous semester. But when I first talked with Joshua Browder, a Stanford University sophomore, he was busy finishing up schoolwork. I was lucky he had time to talk in the middle of his busy schedule. He's the founder of DoNotPay, a chatbot that helps overturn traffic tickets, and in a few days would be flying to London to meet with government officials about using his technology. Then off to Munich to speak at an international design and innovation conference.

By 2034/35, almost 20% of Australians (6.2 million) are projected to be aged 65 or over. One sector already feeling the impact of the ageing population is construction. In Queensland, the number of construction workers aged 55 and over increased from 8% of full-time workers in 1992 to 14.2% in 2014. An ageing workforce is likely to increase the need for less physically demanding jobs or maybe technology might address this issue. Task automation and the industry's innovation culture are two of the greatest areas of uncertainty for the construction industry.