Monthly Archives: August 2021
Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing
I hate doing Google’s CAPTCHAs.
Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.
But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason:
The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing. Read More
Generating Master Faces for Dictionary Attacks with a Network-Assisted Latent Space Evolution
A master face is a face image that passes face based identity-authentication for a large portion of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high probability of success, any user, without having access to
any user-information. We optimize these faces, by using an evolutionary algorithm in the latent embedding space of the StyleGAN face generator. Multiple evolutionary strategies are compared, and we propose a novel approach that employs a neural network in order to direct the search in the direction of promising samples, without adding fitness evaluations. The results we present demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a high coverage of the population (over 40%) with less than 10 master faces, for three leading deep face recognition systems. Read More
‘Black Widow’: Breaking Down How VFX Helped Bring a New Level of Grit and Emotion to the Action
Marvel VFX supervisor Geoffrey Baumann connected embers with fireflies, and swapped in Taskmaster during the skydiving climax.
Director Cate Shortland (“Berlin Syndrome”) brought a grittier violence to the MCU, which impacted the visual effects involving Natasha/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her adopted family. This included holding on shots longer, keying on the color red, and using visual motifs to make emotional connections. The best example tied the embers during the destruction of the Red Room to the fireflies at the beginning.
“The fireflies was a kind of surreal moment that we often don’t have in the big MCU films,” said Marvel VFX supervisor Geoffrey Baumann (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”). “I think [Cate’s] vision with that was trying to maintain an innocence that was part of Natasha’s character, but also merge that with the grittiness that you might find in a ‘Bourne’ or a Bond or a ‘Mission’ type of film. The collaborative process was a learning experience that went both ways.” Read More
Pentagon Experimenting With AI To ‘Predict The Future’
The Pentagon is reportedly experimenting with AI and other cutting edge technology in the hope of being able to ‘predict the future’.
Turns out you don’t need a Tardis anymore to see into the future, as the US has come up with the possible technological solution to actually be able to ‘see days in advance’, reports suggest.
The Pentagon, headquarter building of the United States Department of Defence, is said to have conducted a series of tests in an attempt to ‘achieve information dominance’ and ‘decision-making superiority’. Read More
Facebook AI Open-Sources ‘Droidlet’, A Platform For Building Robots With Natural Language Processing And Computer Vision To Understand The World Around Them
Robots today have been programmed to vacuum the floor or perform a preset dance, but there is still much work to be done before they can achieve their full potential. This mainly has something to do with how robots are unable to recognize what is in their environment at a deep level and therefore cannot function properly without being told all of these details by humans. For instance, while it may seem like backup programming for when bumping into an object that would help prevent unwanted collisions from happening again, this idea isn’t actually based on understanding anything about chairs because the robot doesn’t know exactly what one is!
Facebook AI team just released Droidlet, a new platform that makes it easier for anyone to build their smart robot. It’s an open-source project explicitly designed with hobbyists and researchers in mind so you can quickly prototype your AI algorithms without having to spend countless hours coding everything from scratch. Read More
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