Great Concepts For #entrepreneurs, #martialartists, And #visionaries. #FeynmanTechnique #simplify #genius

Clara Mae’s brilliant thoughts on race, gender, and AI in film

Polish priest blessing a newly opened “Bitcoin embassy.” Warsaw, 2014.

THOPTER_02

“Free your mind”.

Only in Japan : Azuma, the First Hologram Communication Robot

disneyandmore reports:  Azuma is a cheerful young girl about twenty centimeters tall, with long blue hair, living under a glass bell. Lying near the sofa in the living room or on the night table, she welcomes her owner’s bachelor with a big smile when he comes home from work, then turns on the lights and informs him of the weather tomorrow. When her darling is not there, she sends him text messages to remind her that she thinks about him and is languishing. This kind of Tinkerbell is called Azuma Hikari, and it is a character in the manga style: diaphanous skin, interminable legs, huge eyes and childish voice. She is the first occupant of the Gatebox, the magic box launched in December 2016 by Japanese company Vinclu. Once activated, the translucent bubble, placed on a black base, lights up and Azuma appears inside, like a hologram, it’s the first “Hologram Communication Robot”, as they call her.

Azuma lives her life inside the transparent globe. She sleeps, brushes her teeth, takes a cup of tea sitting in an armchair, but rises as soon as her “master”, as named on the site of the apparatus, solicits her. Equipped with a camera and a microphone, she recognizes him, distinguishes his movements, understands a few words and interacts with him, like virtual assistants like Siri.

In a video of demonstration, she is seen under her dome, tiny and smiling, sitting next to her young master watching television. It looks like a couple would be lazing on a Sunday night. “It is a comforting character for those who live alone,” says Vinclu’s website, which defines this virtual girlfriend as gentle, considerate and playful. One understands the goal: this little fairy of the house is supposed to fight the loneliness in a country where the number of singles grows. With Azuma, promises the company, “you will finally want to go home early.”

Just created, its Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently only includes Japanese, and the Gatebox is only available in Japan and the United States. Only 300 copies have been sold to date - at the price of 298,000 yen (2,400 euros). Will this virtual girl become the miniature companion of men alone? But how does it works? Is it really a hologram? Well, not really, it is actually a projection on a glass plate and it uses the old and very famous “Pepper Ghost effect”, the same one that WDI Imagineers use in Disney’s Haunted Mansion since 50 years!

Things auto-tagged ‘Jungle Gym’ on Flickr

Flickr has introduced auto-tagging, aided by Machine Learning (I checked that it is with ML and found this Yahoo machine learning presentation). The user response has been quite negative so far, this Flickr forum post has a lot of angry pro users having to correct thousands of photographs for inexact tagging. Flickr openly say they want people to correct their tags because that will further help train their ML algorithms. 

Alex Hern of the Guardian wrote about some contentious cases such as when people have been auto-tagged ‘ape’ and when concentration camps get tagged ‘sport’ and ‘jungle gym’. In isolation these cases seem really outrageous so I did a search for ‘jungle gym’ and found many false positives, painting a much more systemic problem; it seems Flickr’s strategy is to auto-tag as much as possible, forcing their users, often not bothered about tags, to respond by curating a better set of tags for each image. So the bigger strategy seems to pitch machine learning against human labour in an attempt to make their algos smarter and their image service perfectly tagged. 

HV. Self-replicating artificial intelligence program named Dorothy.

Galerians: Ash (2002) PS2

[Patreon] Best of 2017 - Augmented Reality Photography

For Patreon backers, I have put together a brief look at some projects that creatively explores the potential of Augmented Reality, which has been brought into the mainstream via Apple’s ARKit technology.

More Here