We present a method and application for animating a human subject from a single photo. E.g., the character can walk out, run, sit, or jump in 3D. The key contributions of this paper are: 1) an application of viewing and animating humans in single photos in 3D, 2) a novel 2D warping method to deform a posable template body model to fit the person’s complex silhouette to create an animatable mesh, and 3) a method for handling partial self occlusions. We compare to state-of-the-art related methods and evaluate results with human studies. Further, we present an interactive interface that allows re-posing the person in 3D, and an augmented reality setup where the animated 3D person can emerge from the photo into the real world. We demonstrate the method on photos, posters, and art. The project page is at https://grail.cs. washington.edu/projects/wakeup/. Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2019
Photo Wake-Up: 3D Character Animation from a Single Photo
INSIDE AI: AI & Cyber with David Strom
Nvidia will support Arm hardware for high-performance computing
At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany this week, Santa Clara-based chipmaker Nvidia announced that it will support processors architected by British semiconductor design company Arm. Nvidia anticipates that the partnership will pave the way for supercomputers capable of “exascale” performance — in other words, of completing at least a quintillion floating point computations (“flops”) per second, where a flop equals two 15-digit numbers multiplied together.
Nvidia says that by 2020 it will contribute its full stack of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software to the Arm ecosystem, which by Nvidia’s estimation now accelerates over 600 HPC applications and machine learning frameworks. Among other resources and services, it will make available CUDA-X libraries, graphics-accelerated frameworks, software development kits, PGI compilers with OpenACC support, and profilers. Read More
Building An AI-First Organization
Digital technology is fundamentally transforming the way we interact with the world. People, machines, data, and processes are becoming increasingly connected, and the result is an explosion of information that can be used to understand customer needs. Yet the sheer volume of data and data sources required to get us where we need to go has exceeded the pace and scale of our human capacity to process it. Enter artificial intelligence. Poised to lead the next wave of exponential change disrupting health care, AI can mobilize analytics and automation to deliver moments that matter. The winners in the health care industry will be those organizations that not only empower patients to own their health data but use AI to generate actionable insights from data in real time to drive engagement and outcomes.
Establishing a gateway goal, an overarching plan fashioned as a mission statement, can bring a future-based project into focus and lay the groundwork to begin building the structure that supports the transformation initiative. Read More
Artificial Intelligence: Mankind’s Last Invention
Webinar Wrap-up: How to Build a Career in AI and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) made headlines recently when people started reporting that Alexa was laughing unexpectedly. Those news reports led to the usual jokes about computers taking over the world, but there’s nothing funny about considering AI as a career field. Just the fact that five out of six Americans use AI services in one form or another every day proves that this is a viable career option. Read More
The Key To Unlocking The Power Of AI: Data Trading
One of the major hurdles companies face in transforming to a Digital Supply Chain is their inability to get data from customers and suppliers—or even from other departments in their own company. Nothing new, right?
What is new is the idea of “trading data” to overcome that hurdle and use as a catalyst for Digital Supply Chain transformation. Let me explain.
Companies are aggressively turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to gain a competitive advantage. But for that strategy to succeed, companies must develop algorithms that rely on AI/ML technology to run their business. And what is the life force behind algorithms? Data. Lots of data. That makes data trading, internally and with customers and suppliers, essential to unlocking the power of AI/ML.
The critical management question is how to do it? Read More
Meet The World’s Most Valuable AI Startup: China’s SenseTime
In just four years, SenseTime went from being an academic project to become the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence (AI) company with a current valuation of $4.5 billion. Based in China, the company has a portfolio of 700 clients and partners, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Qualcomm, Honda, Alibaba, Weibo, and more. They use their proprietary artificial intelligence and machine vision technology to drive its success and “redefine human life as we know it.” With the number of core technologies, products, and services SenseTime offers, it’s hard to believe it’s such a young company. Here are just a few ways SenseTime uses artificial intelligence to “power the future.” Read More
Is The Future Of Artificial Intelligence Tied To The Future Of Blockchain?
Since the beginning of modern times, each industrial revolution was driven by different automation. While factory machines and fossil fuels drove the previous industrial revolutions, the on-going automation revolution is based on data-driven artificial intelligence (AI). Understanding its impact and what will be required to support the AI-driven automation revolution is a fundamental necessity.
So, as we evaluate the impact and the support needed to harness this automation revolution, it seems that at the center of this revolution is the growing need for computing power. There are indicators that raw computing power is on its way to replacing fossil fuels and will be the most valued fuel in the rapidly emerging intelligence age. From where we are to where we want to reach in our intelligence automation journey, further advances in artificial intelligence require enormous amounts of computational power. Read More
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