The first (documented) version of the famous ‘Duck-Rabbit’ illusion is an unattributed drawing from the 23 October 1892 issue of the German Humour Magazine Fliegende Blätter, Since 1892, many thousands of people have struggled to decide whether the image is a duck or a rabbit. Results are about 50/50, with viewers seeing either a duck […]
Tag: AI
Dead Salmon Spirit: Can You Not Tell Cats from Covid-19?
[NOTE: The paper was retracted, as described below—here is an updated link to a copy of it.] In the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning dead salmon study (and subsequent studies that went looking for fishy things) comes this new study about Covid-19, cat images, and some limitations of technology: “Can Your AI Differentiate Cats […]
Is This True? “The Liar’s Walk—Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture”
A new study about walking and liars and computers is bountiful for teachers who want their students to decide whether to believe bold claims. See if you can count the bold claims made in the study. “The Liar’s Walk—Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture,” Tanmay Randhavane, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Kyra Kapsaskis, Kurt Gray, Aniket Bera, Dinesh […]
Automatic Speech Balloon Detection and Segmentation for Comic Books
You might find that reading comic books is complex and confusing, if you are a machine. If both of those ifs afflict you, you might seek relief by reading this new study: “Deep CNN-based Speech Balloon Detection and Segmentation for Comic Books,” David Dubray, Jochen Laubrock, arXiv:1902.08137v1, 2019. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this […]
Computer-Learning-Driven Exercise Suggestions During Meetings
Yet another possible great advance in humanity’s pursuit of both artificial intelligence and meetings: “Machine learned optimizing of health activity for participants during meeting times,” US patent application 20180116599A1, Paul R. Bastide, Filiz Isabell Kiral-Kornek, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Susmita Saha, Arun Vishwanath, and Stefan von Cavallar, filed November 2, 2016, rights assigned to International Business Machines […]
Computerised gender classification (part 2, shoes etc)
The previous article in this series drew attention to the possibilities offered by eyebrows in the field of automated computerised gender classification. But eyebrows are by no means the only choice available to classifiers. For a recent (2015) roundup of the options on offer, see the work of Yingxiao Wu, Yan Zhuang, Xi Long, and […]
A generator of lyrics and music from academic papers
“This work attempts to create lyrics from academic papers and appropriate melodies to go with them. We believe this system can also be modified to use different initial data sources, be it text sources for the lyrics or music sources for the music style. We chose academic papers as input due to their diversity and […]
Ouroboros meets Artificial Intelligence
If you’ve examined The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld , you’ll know that the mythical creature Ouroboros was a snake-like being traditionally depicted in the act of swallowing its own tail. The inherent symbolism of Ouroboros’s circularity has recently been adopted by the Artificial Intelligence fraternity – specifically by Dr. Knud Thomsen of the Paul […]
Judging who, or what, judges people best
This week’s Gestalt Which-of-These-Alternatives-Do-You-See? Question asks you to look at a newly published study. The question is: What, exactly, is this study judging? The study is “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans“, Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski [pictured here], and David Stillwell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, epub January 12, 2015. The authors […]
Robots Ring the Doorbell
“Generally speaking, modeling the developmental trajectory for almost any intelligent task that a 2-year-old child can perform on a robot is a potential research topic for us.” – explains the website of the Developmental Robotics Lab at Iowa State University, US. As an example to help clarify the (somewhat ambiguous) statement above, see the lab’s […]