Dairy owners spend significant effort to keep their animals healthy. There is good reason to hope that technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) could reduce these costs, yet obstacles arise when adapting advanced tools to farming environments. In this work, we adapt AI tools to dairy cow teat localization, teat shape, and teat skin condition classifications. We also curate a data collection and analysis methodology for a Machine Learning (ML) pipeline. The resulting teat shape prediction model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.783, and the teat skin condition model achieves a mean average precision of 0.828. Our work leverages existing ML vision models to facilitate the individualized identification of teat health and skin conditions, applying AI to the dairy management industry.

On Wednesday, Midjourney announced version 5 of its commercial AI image synthesis service, which can produce photorealistic images at a quality level that some AI art fans are calling creepy and "too perfect." Midjourney v5 is available now as an alpha test for customers who subscribe to the Midjourney service, which is available through Discord. "MJ v5 currently feels to me like finally getting glasses after ignoring bad eyesight for a little bit too long," said Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares her Midjourney creations on Twitter. "Suddenly you see everything in 4k, it feels weirdly overwhelming but also amazing." Wieland shared some of her Midjourney v5 generations with Ars Technica (seen below in a gallery and in the main image above), and they certainly show a progression in image detail since Midjourney first arrived in March 2022.

The process of making a Disney park feel alive is most easily encapsulated in animatronic figures. These hydraulic, pneumatic and now electric figures have been a fixture at Disneyland since the 60s. Since then, massive advancements have been made in control systems, movement architecture and programming. The most advanced animatronic figures like the Na'Vi Shaman in Disney World's Na'vi River Journey are plain and simply robots. But not every animatronic in the parks can be a simple pneumatic connected to a bulky master system or a highly advanced and complex robotic masterwork.

Facebook today announced the launch of a feature called automatic alternative text. It's a big step forward in accessibility because it will allow people who use screen readers -- software that provides spoken descriptions of what's onscreen -- to receive summaries of what's contained in photos that people post on Facebook. Until this point, only the name of the person, the person's share text, and the word "photo" was declared by a screen reader's automated voice when a post with a photo appeared in the News Feed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), certain people with disabilities will be able to get a better understanding of what their friends are trying to communicate. The new captions are short and at times so simple that they're poetic.

Facebook today announced the launch of a feature called automatic alternative text. It's a big step forward in accessibility, because it will allow people who use screen readers -- software that provides spoken descriptions of what's onscreen -- to receive summaries of what's contained in photos that people post on Facebook. Until this point, only the name of the person, the person's share text, and the word "photo" was declared by a screen reader's automated voice when a post with a photo appeared in the News Feed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), certain people with disabilities will be able to get a better understanding of what their friends are trying to communicate. The new captions are short and at times so simple that they're poetic.