Media Arts Watch Lab - www.arts-numeriques.info - laboratoire de veille Arts Numériques - twitter @arts_numeriques - @processing_org - @DigitalArt_be - by @jacquesurbanska @_Transcultures
Artificial intelligence has done it again. Now that Facebook, Uber and Co. are suffering from an increasingly bad public image, the reinvention of Virtual Reality has already lost its allure, and the Internet of Things doesn’t seem to be able to get beyond the self-replenishing refrigerator, the thrill engendered by futuristic super-machines is dominating the headlines.
So what are we to make of artificial intelligence? Gigantic job eliminator? Or the next step in evolution, the one in which technology finally asserts its mastery over us? Or maybe the source of redemptive systems that develop new medications for us and operate on us, that invest and multiply our capital, and that even make better business executives because the boss is finally a more rational decision-maker? Artificial intelligence has many faces and they’re sure to pay attention to us all.
Part of the momentum comes from breakthroughs in artificial neural networks, which loosely mimic the multi-layer structure of the human brain. But that’s where the similarity ends. While the brain can hum along on energy only enough to power a light bulb, AlphaGo’s neural network runs on a whopping 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs, with a total power consumption of roughly one million watts—50,000 times more than its biological counterpart.
Extrapolate those numbers, and it’s easy to see that artificial neural networks have a serious problem—even if scientists design powerfully intelligent machines, they may demand too much energy to be practical for everyday use.
Par définition, la logique du fou échappe à l'entendement de celui qui ne l'est pas. Ainsi, comment appréhender les troubles psychiatriques (hallucinations, paranoïa, confusion...) d'une personne atteinte de schizophrénie ? Voilà un défi parfois très perturbant pour l'entourage des personnes malades, qu'il s'agisse de la famille, des amis, des collègues ou même des soignants.
Pour tenter de sensibiliser au vécu d'une personne atteinte de schizophrénie, le laboratoire Janssen a développé une application de réalité virtuelle (VR) qui propose de se glisser dans la peau d'un schizophrène. En enfilant un casque de VR Oculus rift, le "spectateur" est immergé à la première personne dans un scénario qui suit un malade sujet à des hallucinations auditives et des sentiments paranoïaques...
How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.
Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.
Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami-style.” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent.”
The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine. ...
Qu'est-ce que la biologie participative ? Que permet-elle ?
« La science n’a pas de patrie, parce que le savoir est le patrimoine de l’humanité », disait Louis Pasteur. Il était bien loin de savoir que sa citation posait les bases de ce qui deviendra, près de 2 siècles plus tard, le biohacking, ou biologie participative en français, un mouvement qui veut s’affranchir des brevets, des grands laboratoires privés et rendre les sciences du vivant accessibles à tous jusque, dans certains cas extrêmes, chercher à modifier son propre corps pour le bien commun.
Biohacking, qui sont les nouveaux explorateurs du vivant ? C’est le problème que La Méthode scientifique va tenter de résoudre dans l’heure qui vient...
Back in the old days hardware manufacturers felt safe in the knowledge that no mere hardware hacker could attempt to recreate their inventions. From Sony to Philips to LG to Samsung, the consumer electronics industry was locked up and no one could crack the case. Until those meddling Arduino kids came along…
Now anyone can make cool hardware and, thanks to Arduino, it is easier than ever to connect your devices to the Internet and take in data from the outside world. The ESLOV IoT Invention Kit is an official Arduino product that adds Internet of Things capabilities to your hardware products...
In a dramatic departure, Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its online empire.
TECH PUNDIT TIM O’Reilly had just tried the new Google Photos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence.
O’Reilly was standing a few feet from Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page this past May, at a small cocktail reception for the press at the annual Google I/O conference—the centerpiece of the company’s year. Google had unveiled its personal photos app earlier in the day, and O’Reilly marveled that if he typed something like “gravestone” into the search box, the app could find a photo of his uncle’s grave, taken so long ago.
The app uses an increasingly powerful form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. By analyzing thousands of photos of gravestones, this AI technology can learn to identify a gravestone it has never seen before. The same goes for cats and dogs, trees and clouds, flowers and food...
… and what comes after self-driving cars and the internet of things?
While the world still has its hands full dealing with the Digital Revolution and the cultural and social transformations and challenges that it’s brought about, a young generation of scientists and creative engineers has set a course for new frontiers and is already at work amalgamating the disembodied world of digital data with the physical world of our bodies. They’re interconnecting bits and atoms in elementary form, fabricating new high-tech materials from natural substances. They’re teaming up with artists and designers, employing the neurosciences and biotechnology, digital hardware & software, and bringing together old handicrafts traditions with 3-D printers and laser cutters.
With their unorthodox approaches and highly inspiring projects, they’re not only blazing trails for new developments; they’re also opening up completely new ways of looking at the role of science in our society and the interplay of technology and nature...
Overcoming any borders, be they external borders or one's own, is invariably accompanied by a feeling of their other predestination. The matter seems to lie not even in the fact that man in himself is a creature implicating restrictions, and only through it and thanks to it he can overcome them - it is rather that while leaving a border one always approaches another border. In the long run, by repeatedly reproducing the border situation, the man rather ritually recreates the only verge, a reminder-verge, over which he - a being formed within the framework of his heredity flow - is initially denied possession of power. Namely, he cannot possess power over the borders set by his birth and death… Nothing can bring out this essentially simple speculation better than issues of time and technologies that claim abolishment and removal of time constraints. The pioneering direct manipulations in this field, performed via bio- and genetic technologies, definitely belong to the most significant milestones of the current era and are an important step forward in the development of the general theme of "borders" within European cultures, and a new subject in the exploration and realization of this theme. Never before, it seems, has the price of such research been so breathtakingly high: man begins to reshape himself according to his own conceptions. By decoding our biological structure and learning to alter it, we gain power over our own evolution. We start traveling into the unknown …
Vulkan is a next generation graphics API, and set to succeed OpenGL and GLES. It’s a much more explicit API. It is a fundamental shift in rendering, and it allows a level of control and performance previously only possible on games consoles. With its sister standard SPIR-V it can revolutionise drawing, shading and compute.
It was released on February 16 this year, and there is already fairly solid driver support from most manufacturers.
In terms of programming, it’s like switching from JavaScript to C++: potentially faster, more explicit — and there's a chance you end up with undefined behaviour.
In terms of motoring, it's like trading in a Toyota for an unlimited supply of Ferrari car parts. You could build something to put the A-Team to shame, but it might take a really long time to hit the road.
In terms of child’s play, its like moving from Duplo to Lego. You can build things with much more attention to detail, but you might miss how quickly you could have built a simple wall with cruder bricks.
Un réseau de neurones a réussi, après l'avoir vu six fois, à reconstituer image par image le film de Ridley Scott.
L’intégralité de Blade Runner, le film de Ridley Scott adapté du roman de Philip K. Dick (Les androïdes rêvent-ils de moutons électriques ?)est disponible sur la plateforme Vimeo. Enfin, il n’y a pas de son et l’image est étrange, un peu floue, ou approximative, plutôt. Un peu comme le souvenir brumeux qu’on pourrait avoir de ce film quelques semaines après l’avoir vu. Etonnant de trouver sur ce site normalement dédié aux créations originales ce qui pourrait s’apparenter au piratage d’une œuvre cinématographique. D’après Vox, la Warner a d’ailleurs fait une demande de retrait DMCA. Mais le film est toujours là, car il ne s’agit pas vraiment de Blade Runner, mais de la reconstruction fascinante, image par image, du film par un programme d’intelligence artificielle (IA) qui a appris à reconnaître l’œuvre de Ridley Scott. ...
Gatebox is the World First Holographic Communication Robot that allows you to live with your Loved One. The holographic projection technology brings the digital characters to communicate with you. Gatebox concept model was developed in dreaming of a world where she comes to see you from the other side of the screen.
Last week, Warner Bros. issued a DMCA takedown notice to the video streaming website Vimeo. The notice concerned a pretty standard list of illegally uploaded files from media properties Warner owns the copyright to — including episodes of Friends and Pretty Little Liars, as well as two uploads featuring footage from the Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner.
Just a routine example of copyright infringement, right? Not exactly. Warner Bros. had just made a fascinating mistake. Some of the Blade Runner footage — which Warner has since reinstated — wasn't actually Blade Runner footage. Or, rather, it was, but not in any form the world had ever seen...
For decades, futurists and science fiction writers predicted that smart machines would someday rival the intelligence of humans. Now, their forecasts seem to be coming true. Artificial intelligence, or AI, already exceeds human capability in certain fields. Machines can send and receive signals and analyze vast quantities of data faster than humans. They have learned to drive cars, manage stock portfolios and, through personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, talk to us. In the not-so-distant future, AI may even augment our own brain functions. But as with all revolutions, the potential of AI raises concerns. Among the biggest: Some worry that that its growing capability may trigger the largest labor displacement since the Great Depression. This panel will explore the many ways artificial intelligence will shape our workforce, culture and institutions in the years to come.
Moderator: James Cham, Partner, Bloomberg Beta / Speakers: Pascale Fung, Professor, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology ; Ben Goertzel, Chief Scientist, Hanson Robotics; Chief Scientist, Aidyia Ltd ; Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corp.; Chairman, Asia-Pacific R&D Group, Microsoft
Le Centre Pompidou présente Mutations / Créations, une nouvelle manifestation, tournée vers la prospective et l’interaction des technologies numériques avec la création ; un territoire partagé entre art, innovation et science. Transversale, aux croisements des disciplines, mêlant recherche, arts et ingénierie, cette manifestation annuelle convoque, pour sa première édition, la musique, le design et l’architecture. Elle propose deux expositions – « Imprimer le monde » et « Ross Lovegrove » –, le Forum Art-Innovation, intitulé « Vertigo », ainsi que des journées d’étude et des ateliers.
Chaque année, des expositions thématiques et monographiques s’articuleront à une programmation de rencontres et d’ateliers qui feront du Centre Pompidou un « incubateur », lieu de démonstrations de prototypes, d’expériences artistiques in vivo et d’échanges avec les créateurs. Cette plateforme sera aussi un observatoire critique et un outil d’analyse des impacts de la création sur la société. Comment les champs de création se sont-ils emparés des technologies numériques pour ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives industrielles ? Comment interrogent-ils les effets sociaux, économiques, politiques, les limites éthiques de ces développements industriels ? Quels enjeux pour les mutations formelles dans les domaines de la musique, de l’art, du design et de l’architecture au regard des avancées des technosciences ?
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan and designed ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners. The computer vision systems of driverless cars goggle maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vechicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it.
Plus performants, plus accessibles, les nouveaux casques 3D de réalité virtuelle débarquent. Que ce soit pour dessiner en 3 dimensions ou pour naviguer au milieu d'un fleuve infesté de crocodiles, l’immersion s’avère bluffante. Pour les industriels du numérique, la réalité virtuelle est l'avenir du divertissement, mais serait aussi celui du travail et des réseaux sociaux...
Des mondes numériques que l'on peut désormais explorer en mouvement comme dans la vraie vie et où l'on pourra même toucher et ressentir des objets virtuels. Des expériences d'immersion totale qui trompent nos sens à tel point que notre cerveau a bien du mal à faire la différence avec la réalité.
For robots to navigate the world, they need to be able to make reasonable assumptions about their surroundings and what might happen during a sequence of events.
One way that humans come to learn these things is through sound. For infants, poking and prodding objects is not just fun; some studies suggest that it’s actually how they develop an intuitive theory of physics. Could it be that we can get machines to learn the same way?
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have demonstrated an algorithm that has effectively learned how to predict sound: When shown a silent video clip of an object being hit, the algorithm can produce a sound for the hit that is realistic enough to fool human viewers...
When the World Wide Web first took off in the mid 1990s, the dream wasn’t just big, it was distributed: Everyone would have their own home page, everyone would post their thoughts – they weren’t called “blogs” until 1999 – and everyone would own their own data, for there was no one around offering to own it for us. The web consisted of nodes joined by links, with no center.
Oh, how times have changed.
Now a handful of companies own vast swaths of web activity – Facebook for social networking, Google for searching, eBay for auctions – and quite literally own the data their users have provided and generated. This gives these companies unprecedented power over us, and gives them such a competitive advantage that it’s pretty silly to think you’re going to start up a business that’s going to beat them at their own game.
Il apportera ses expertises et aura pour objectif :
de proposer ses lectures de l’évolution de l’écosystème numérique,
de fédérer un réseau de chercheurs au niveau international sur l’étude et l’observation des valeurs de l’humanisme numérique,
d’analyser plusieurs modèles (États-Unis, Europe, Asie,…), ou encore
de favoriser la communication entre les différents acteurs académiques, privés, institutionnels…
Le colloque #HN2016 traitera de différents sujets liés à la prospective technologique et présentera les scénarii de développement en particulier de grands opérateurs. Il abordera la réémergence d’une culture transhumaniste, les valeurs humanistes, les problématiques fondamentales philosophiques et sociologiques, les modèles économiques, et les questions juridiques et de politiques de développement et de régulation. Dans cet esprit, les notions de «république numérique» et de «droits de l’homme numérique» seront également interrogées.
.......
offering its vision of the developments in the digital ecosystem,
coordinating a network of researchers at international level on the study and observation of the values of digital humanism,
analysing several models (USA, Europe, Asia, etc.), or
encouraging communication between various academic, private and institutional stakeholders.
The #HN2016 symposium will deal with various subjects related to technological progress and will present various scenarios for development and notably major operators. It will deal with the re-emergence of a transhumanist culture, humanist values, fundamental philosophical and sociological issues, economic models and legal issues as well as development and regulation policies. In this perspective, the notions of “Digital Republic” and “Digital Hhuman Rights” will also be dealt with.
Spanish engineer Ramon Roca got tired of waiting for telecom companies to wire his town — so he did it himself.
You can see the snow-capped Pyrenees mountains from Gurb, about 75 kilometers north of Barcelona. It’s a quiet farming community of 2,500, and in most ways there’s nothing special to set it apart from many such towns across the Catalonia region of Spain.
So why do people like me eagerly journey to Gurb? Because it’s the birthplace of Guifi.net, one of the world’s most important experiments in télécommunications...
Kevin Kit Parker wants to build a human heart. His young daughter loves the New England Aquarium in Boston. In this Science report, father’s and daughter’s obsessions have combined in an unlikely creation: a nickel-sized artificial stingray whose swimming is guided by light and powered by rat heart muscle cells.
Incorporating advances in engineering, cell culture, genetics, and biomechanics, the “living” robot is “clearly a technical tour de force,” says Adam Summers, an integrative biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. And some think that by melding cells and artificial materials into a pulsating structure, the device brings Parker’s dream of engineering a human heart a step closer. “One can imagine that one day we can use this technology to rebuild parts of the human body,” says Kedi Xu, a neural engineer at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
Des chercheurs de Microsoft proposent de mettre au point des outils de débogage qui anticipent sur les erreurs réalisées par les développeurs, en analysant leur état d'esprit au moment de la rédaction du code source, grâce à la biométrie.
Faudra-t-il bientôt que les développeurs portent sur eux un ensemble de capteurs biométriques, pour permettre à leur employeur d'optimiser les ressources humaines ? Des chercheurs de Microsoft ont publié le mois dernier une étude (.pdf)intitulée "Utiliser des mesures psycho-physiologiques pour évaluer la difficulté d'une tâche dans le développement de logiciels", dans laquelle ils détaillent les résultats d'une expérience menée pour déterminer les endroits du code qui sont le plus susceptibles de contenir des bugs ou des erreurs de stratégie d'approche.
Text is a prevalent form of communication on Facebook. Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products, whether we're surfacing more of the content that people want to see or filtering out undesirable content like spam.
With this goal in mind, we built DeepText, a deep learning-based text understanding engine that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages.
DeepText leverages several deep neural network architectures, including convolutional and recurrent neural nets, and can perform word-level and character-level based learning. We use FbLearner Flow and Torch for model training. Trained models are served with a click of a button through the FBLearner Predictor platform, which provides a scalable and reliable model distribution infrastructure. Facebook engineers can easily build new DeepText models through the self-serve architecture that DeepText provides. ...
The first compendium on robotic art of its kind, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world shared with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative changes to society that are the consequence of robots taking on new roles alongside humans. It takes the reader on a journey into the world of the strange, the beautiful, the uncanny and the daring – and into the minds and works of some of the world’s most prolific creators of robotic art.
Offering an in-depth look at robotic art from the viewpoints of artists, engineers and scientists, it presents outstanding works of contemporary robotic art and brings together for the first time some of the most influential artists in this area in the last three decades. Starting from a historical review, this transdisciplinary work explores the nexus between robotic research and the arts and examines the diversity of robotic art, the encounter with robotic otherness, machine embodiment and human–robot interaction. Stories of difficulties, pitfalls and successes are recalled, characterising the multifaceted collaborations across the diverse disciplines required to create robotic art.
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