Face Maker

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Game Creator

Last episode of the season from tocotocotv profiles developer responsible for many music-related video games, most famously recognized for Rez.

Remember to Click on “CC” to activate English subtitles:

Our last episode of the season features Tetsuya Mizuguchi, game creator and founder of the Enhance Games studio. Mizuguchi is the creator behind the iconic Rez, recently remastered as Rez Infinite, he also created Lumines, Child of Eden or Space Channel 5, which are all gaming experiences strongly influenced by music. Always ahead of his time, Mizuguchi will tell us more about his motivations behind Rez Infinite, and his pursuit of new forms of perception, supported by new technologies such as virtual reality, or through original concepts such as the Synesthesia Suit. Our day with Mizuguchi will take us to the heights of Mori Tower, then to the intimacy of the Restaurant Bohemian, where we will learn more about his philosophy and his work. 

Link

Doodle Studio 95

Project from Fernando Ramallo is a drawing and animation tool for Unity with simple interfaces to create assets for games and interactive experiences, a bit like Flash but in 2.5D:

DOODLE STUDIO 95 is a FUN drawing and animation tool for Unity.

Doodle an animation without leaving the Editor and turn your drawings into sprites, UI elements, particles or textures, with a single click.

Features

Draw inside the Unity Editor

Easy presets for backgrounds, characters and UI elements

Example scenes with 2.5D characters, foliage, speech bubbles and transitions, with reusable scripts

Draw and animate inside the Scene View (beta)

Shadow-casting shaders

Don’t think about materials or image formats, it Just Works.

Five Symmetry modes

Record mode adds frames as you draw

Record a sound with a single click! Boop!

Easy API for using animations with scripts

Convert to sprite sheets or GIFs

…and more

You can find out more here, and even try out a browser-based interactive tour here

Illustration for the current issue of @wireduk, in which Jürgen Schmidhuber explains why human-level AI is within our reach.

Vimeo pitch of the founders of Ethereum, who want to use the Bitcoin architecture to reinvent the rest of our political economy—smart contracts, distributed corporations, and even decentralized political parties

Death Mask

Programming project from Or Fleisher and Anastasis Germanidis combines Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, using a Neural Net trained for age prediction through mobile camera device:

‘Death-Mask’ predicts how long people have to live and overlays that in the form of a “clock” above they’re heads in augmented reality.  The project uses a machine learning model titled AgeNet for the prediction process. Once predicted it uses the average life expectancy in that location to try and estimate how long one has left.

The aesthetic inspiration derives from the concept of death masks. These are sculptures meant to symbolize the death of a person by casting his face into a sculpture (i.e mask).

The experiment uses ARKit to render the visual content in augmented reality on an iPad and CoreML to run the machine learning model in real-time. The project is by no means an accurate representation of one’s life expectancy and is more oriented towards the examination of public information in augmented reality in the age of deep learning.

Link

Supervised Machine Learning Trainer 3607A

Speculative Design video short from Benedict Hubener, Keyur Jain, and James Zhou of CIID imagines how the future of Smart City maintenence works, with on-site engineers handling Machine Learning equipment with surveillance infrastructure:

In the near future, cities are filled with smart infrastructure such as decentralized security cameras, self-sorting trashcans and intelligent street lights. But who do you call when smart things breaks? The future smart city is not a sci-fi dystopia made out of glass, concrete, and job stealing robots. It’s place much like our own and filled with the banality of everyday life and mundane jobs. Regardless of how you imagine the future smart city, someone needs to get in their white van, take out their ladder, and fix broken things.

The SMLT 3607A or Supervised Machine Learning Trainer is a tool for the future city maintenance worker. He/she can use the SMLT to interface with abnormally behaving smart infrastructure such as a surveillance camera identifying people as eggplants. He/she can retrain the smart camera by recording new examples in real time. The future maintenance worker will teach the camera what it’s seeing and curator the training dataset. He/she will help the camera learn the difference between people and objects and decide who should be classified as an upstanding citizen or a petty criminal.

Link

Automatic Sample Layout

Coding experiment from Kyle McDonald arranging samples for music production in a unique way using machine learning:

I’ve been thinking about new ways of making music and working with sound. I’m especially excited about machine learning augmenting our selection of sounds, analyzing and decomposing existing recordings, and making automatic suggestions for compositions.

This shows around 30k “drum samples” from a few different sample packs, organized in 2d (position) and 3d (color). All sounds are less than 4 seconds long, but I only analyze and play the first second while scrolling through. I used librosa to extract the constant-q transform of each sound with 84 bins and 11 time steps. I used t-SNE with perplexity 100 to layout the sounds from those 924 dimensional vectors.

Link

the clicking sound of the rack is oddly satisfying.

https://instagram.com/p/BQIDI5eh5_m/

Michael Conover: Information Visualization for Large-Scale Data Workflows

data geometry

memes

visual analysis of program structure

visual analysis of propaganda

compare last week’s analysis and share with colleagues

geom_bin2d rather than geom_point(alpha=...) in ggplot2

ggpairs

automated grading: in addition to unit testing, 1) parse syntax trees of submissions, 2) define edit distance between them, 3) induces a network structure, 4) identify clusters, 5) give feedback to a representative member of the cluster and cc: everyone else

Presented at SF Data Mining on Oct 9, 2013 The ability to instrument and interrogate data as it moves through a processing pipeline is fundamental to effecti… @vagabondjack reasonengine.wordpress.com

How Do Hurricanes Form?

Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur.

The scientific term for ALL of these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern and central Pacific Ocean are called “hurricanes.”

Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way.

Tropical cyclones are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel. That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator. This warm, moist air rises and condenses to form clouds and storms.

As this warmer, moister air rises, there’s less air left near the Earth’s surface. Essentially, as this warm air rises, this causes an area of lower air pressure below.

This starts the ‘engine’ of the storm. To fill in the low pressure area, air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in. That “new” air near the Earth’s surface also gets heated by the warm ocean water so it also gets warmer and moister and then it rises.

As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporating from the surface.

As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the center. It is vey calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure.

Tropical cyclones usually weaken when they hit land, because they are no longer being “fed” by the energy from the warm ocean waters. However, when they move inland, they can drop many inches of rain causing flooding as well as wind damage before they die out completely. 

There are five types, or categories, of hurricanes. The scale of categories is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale and they are based on wind speed.

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

Our satellites gather information from space that are made into pictures. Some satellite instruments measure cloud and ocean temperatures. Others measure the height of clouds and how fast rain is falling. Still others measure the speed and direction of winds.

We also fly airplanes into and above hurricanes. The instruments aboard planes gather details about the storm. Some parts are too dangerous for people to fly into. To study these parts, we use airplanes that operate without people. 

To learn more about how we study hurricanes, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/main/index.html

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.