Some people are excited to see realistic avatars that look like them. Others worry it might make body image issues even worse.
In Facebook’s vision of the metaverse, we will all interact in a mashup of the digital and physical worlds. Digital representations of ourselves will eat, talk, date, shop, and more. That’s the picture Mark Zuckerberg painted as he rebranded his company Meta a couple of weeks ago.
The Facebook founder’s typically awkward presentation used a cartoon avatar of himself doing things like scuba diving or conducting meetings. But Zuckerberg ultimately expects the metaverse to include lifelike avatars whose features would be much more realistic, and which would engage in many of the same activities we do in the real world—just digitally.
“The goal here is to have both realistic and stylized avatars that create a deep feeling that we’re present with people,” Zuckerberg said at the rebranding. Read More
Daily Archives: December 7, 2021
The Beatles: Get Back Used High-Tech Machine Learning To Restore The Audio
If you live on Earth, you’ve probably heard the music of The Beatles at least once. Heck, there’s even a movie about what the world would look like if The Beatles had never existed, so they’ve clearly had a pretty massive pop culture impact. However, outside of their remastered album recordings, fans haven’t been able to hear much of the Fab Four in high definition.
Now, in “The Beatles: Get Back” on Disney+, director Peter Jackson has delivered audio and footage from The Beatles that’s higher quality than anything we’ve seen or heard before. In an interview with Variety, Jackson explained how they used technological magic to clean up the audio enough to make it sound like you were in the room with John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Read More
A Cartel of Influential Datasets Is Dominating Machine Learning Research, New Study Suggests
A new paper from the University of California and Google Research has found that a small number of ‘benchmark’ machine learning datasets, largely from influential western institutions, and frequently from government organizations, are increasingly dominating the AI research sector.
The researchers conclude that this tendency to ‘default’ to highly popular open source datasets, such as ImageNet, brings up a number of practical, ethical and even political causes for concern.
Among their findings – based on core data from the Facebook-led community project Papers With Code (PWC) – the authors contend that ‘widely-used datasets are introduced by only a handful of elite institutions’, and that this ‘consolidation’ has increased to 80% in recent years. Read More
The Paper
Your Decisions – and You Might be OK With That
A new study by UArizona law professor Derek Bambauer suggests that most people are content to let big data-produced algorithms decide many – but not all – of their day-to-day decisions.
Algorithms, which are essentially systems or processes that make a choice, have been around for ages. But they’re ubiquitous in the age of big data, and now typically exist as math formulas in the form of computer code.
….Bambauer, who studies internet censorship, cybersecurity and intellectual property, worked in the computer science field as a systems engineer before his legal career.
His new study, set to publish in the Arizona State Law Journal in early 2022, aims to help legal scholars and policymakers understand the public perception of decision-making algorithms so they can regulate those algorithms more in accordance with consumers’ views. Read More
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