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manipulated/scanned images of books + processing languages of some websites i use.

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when will we have an algorithm to detect “beauty” ?

Algorithm detects nudity in images

An algorithm has been designed to tell if somebody in a color photo is naked. Isitnude.com launched earlier this month; its demo page invites you to try it out to test its power in nudity detection. You can choose from a selection of images at the bottom of the page, including pics of Vladimir Putin on horseback and Tiger Woods in golf mode. We tried it out, dragging and dropping a picture of Woods over into the box and the message promptly said “Not nude-G.” “You can probably post this.”

Other notes on the page include, “We apologize if we didn’t get it right, we are improving every day.” “Please note that we cannot detect black and white images.”

(Algorithmia does not retain images.)

The company behind this effort, Algorithmia, was founded in 2013 to advance algorithm development and use. “As developers ourselves we believe that given the right tools the possibilities for innovation and discovery are limitless.”

They said they are building “what we believe to be the next era of programming: a collaborative, always live and community driven approach to making the machines that we interact with better.” The community driven API exposes “the collective knowledge of algorithm developers across the globe.”

“We’re building a community around state-of-the-art algorithm development. Users can create, share, and build on other algorithms and then instantly make them available as a web service.”

Lucy Black in I Programmer noted the use advantage. “The idea behind Algorithmia is that where an algorithm already exists you don’t need to code your own, instead you can simply paste in its functionality using its cloud-based API.”

In his story about Algorithmia and the demo, Brian Barrett in Wired said, “His company is an algorithmic clearing house, taking computational solutions from academia and beyond and offering them to the world at large for a fee.”

Why the interest in detecting nudity in photographs?

“A customer came to us trying to run a site that needs to be kid-friendly,” said Algorithmia CTO Kenny Daniel in Wired. The customer wanted the ability to screen images with some confidence that they would not be pornographic. Daniel said, “Anybody who’s trying to run a community but wants to filter out objectionable content, or keep it kid-friendly, could benefitfrom this same algorithm.”

In the company blog this month, they also discussed the rationale in enabling artificial intelligence to detect nudity.

“If there’s one thing the internet is good for, it’s racy material,” said the blog. This is a headache for a number of reasons, including a) it tends to show up where you’d rather it wouldn’t, like forums, social media, etc. and b) while humans generally know it when we see it, computers don’t so much. We here at Algorithmia decided to give this one a shot.“

To give it a shot, they turned to various sources. For one, the result is based on an algorithm by Hideo Hattori and on a paper authored by Rigan Ap-apid, De La Salle University. In the latter’s paper, "An Algorithm for Nudity Detection,” he presented an algorithm for detecting nudity in color images.

He said, “A skin color distribution model based on the RGB, Normalized RGB, and HSV color spaces is constructed using correlation and linear regression. The skin color model is used to identify and locate skin regions in an image. These regions are analyzed for clues indicating nudity or non-nudity such as their sizes and relative distances from each other. Based on these clues and the percentage of skin in the image, an image is classified nude or non-nude.”

Meanwhile, plenty of images with lots of skin are “perfectly innocent,” said the blog. “You might say that leaning too much on just color leaves the method, well, tone-deaf. To do better, you need to combine skin detection with other tricks.”

Brian Barrett in Wired said “To help weed out false positives, Algorithmia added a few layers of intelligence.”

The blog stated that “Our contribution to this problem is to detect other features in the image and using these to make the previous method more fine-grained.”

To come up with the algorithm, they turned to the book Human Computer Interaction Using Hand Gestures by Prashan Premaratne, OpenCV’s nose detection algorithm and face detection algorithm.

As I Programmer said, the algorithm is still a work in progress. They are still interested in further improvements. “There are countless techniques that can be used in place of or combined with the ones we’ve used to make an even better solution. For instance, you could train a convolutional neural network on problematic images,” they said.

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btw “improving our process” is just code for teach our AI

Nudity removed on Pinterest

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I SPENT SO LONG WONDERING WHEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WOULD TAKE OVER ONLY TO REALISE THAT WE ARE ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT.

I’ve come to a point where I can’t spell without google or remember the dates of birthdays or the colour of my friends eyes without Facebook.

As touched on in The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, we’ve begun to store less and less in our own minds– rather relying on the internet to hold our answers. Our IQ drops considerably when not within reach of a phone or device with which to access the cloud brain.  With only a vague knowledge of information what would occur in a cyber-apocalypse?

Our raw memory has become a blurry archive and our connection to the world wide web has become the glasses needed to decipher this self-encrypted data. Which begs the question, at which point do we ourselves become the “EVIL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE” dystopian fables have us fearing? We live half our lives online, communicating more with megabytes than audio waves. We pay with our fingerprints (ala cardless phone payments, logged into with biometric print) and use crypto currencies to buy both physical and intangible goods or thrills. If all network based infrastructure were to collapse would we as a society also not fail to crumble?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I We’ve begun our “dissent” into human-tech hybrid with wearable technologies such as earbuds and smart watches. Visa MasterCard even released a waterproof wristband that’s tap and go enabled designed for festivals and events. Algorithms permeate every facet of our lives from your iPhone tracking and discerning your sleeping patterns to autocorrect learning how you speak. With our conscious mind uploaded and forever on the internet there is little more than organic flesh separating us from our machines.  However, it is hard to be afraid of the big bad robots when as opposed to Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s 13 year old reddit dorks and cat video mums who we are facing. 

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well humans write the algorithms behind google’s AI, thus embuing it with ideology

Real nice spread from Whole Earth Catalog (1968)

This magazine is a form pre-Google? It highlights information and tools and points the user to where to find them. A rudimentary search engine or content-encyclopedia. 

Information and access to tools has always been curated, how does this (perhaps idealogical curation) differ from current search engine behaviours (perhaps monetary curation).

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really really good word that i will try and use in general conversation tomorrow 4sure

Triggernommentary

A new word that describes someone who is triggered by an online argument, and then becomes involved.

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like getting stuck in a wall when you’re playing a digital game... you suddenly become aware/annoyed of the artifice (you are literally and figuritively breaking the “fourth wall”), but also, for a brief moment, you realise that you are seeing something special, like finding a way out from the matrix :)

E-book/digital scans of spreads at a gallery głïtçhîñg out when more than one finger is placed on it. Paper books don’t do that do they?

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In Japan, Hikikomori (ひきこもり or 引き籠り Hikikomori?, literally “pulling inward, being confined”, i.e., “acute social withdrawal”) are reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement. Hikikomori refers to both the phenomenon in general and the recluses themselves. Hikikomori have been described as loners or “modern-day hermits.”

wiki (via jasonholiday)

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Came across a sweet game called ‘Stories Untold: The House Abandon’ that is horror retake on old school text-based adventure games. I thought it was interesting how although it is a game with graphics, most of the story and visuals unfold in your head, similar to a choose your own adventure book, only with more options. It’s interesting how some of the original text-based games retain the look of codes, with the highlighted colours and font.

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a solid write-up of the seminar case-studies and concepts

Reflecting on class

The class began by looking at examples of typography and letterforms. We analysed the extension of type as an image, and how this can contribute to its meaning. The calligraphic letterforms echoed the movement of the bamboo. We also looked at very ornate letter forms, where the embellishment of the letterforms was their primary function. We continued to explore works of modernists, futurists and surrealists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, and his work ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). This work contrasted the earlier examples; the layout created meaning in the work - as opposed to the imagery. The work was cryptic, baffling mathematicians, philosophers and many more.

I found the preface to this book online (in English). Mallarme discusses the importance of the text’s subtleties; how the placement and pages interrupt the flow of text, creating silences. The empty space serves to puncture the poem create form. However, even in telling us that the layout is important - he reveals us nothing about the underlying secrets of the text. 

Andy then translated for use in the post digital context, using the essence of this book (the dynamic layout of its text), replacing the words with ‘Re-captcha’ images by using an algorithm. This online book kind of mimics the idea of chance (each time the page is re-loaded a new arrangement is formed). Like Mallarme’s work, Andy’s book also has it’s hidden message - though it can be read by us - the work cannot be read by a computer. 

A. S. Kline, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm, viewed April 17th 2017

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Algorithm workshop !

I really enjoyed this, as I have very little knowledge in this area. I’m excited to play around with this more, as I like the idea of reactive art.

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i mean srsly we could do a whole course just on twitterbots

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Important questions; perhaps we should be discussing “digital poetics” rather than “poetry” (because perhaps this last word still carries a lot of historical ‘baggage’)

Digital Poetry

Alinta Krauth - ‘Camberland’ interactive digital poetry co-authored with Jason Nelson

Through a classroom activity, digital poetry was discovered. Although I can appreciate that it makes use of the digital devices as a vehicle to communicate literature, I feel that it’s a little nonsensical and more like text-heavy artwork, which is not a bad thing but I have trouble connecting with it.

This discovery has also led me to question: what exactly constitutes digital poetry?

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yeah! why arent more books looking like this?

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i often notice how UX design ages poorly, like in the original Alien movie trilogy the GUIs are so clunky and awful compared to what you see on the screens in the Prometheus prequel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/67hems/the_50s_60s_70s_80s_and_90s_all_feel_like/

An interesting discussion on reddit. This redditor points out how technology develops trends, and how accessible they are via the internet.

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process towards the final

I had the idea of hand drawing spam pop ups and then converting them into digital images on the computer and having a naive quality to my publication. Using a loose illustrative technique of drawing allows me to incorporate a sense of my own style into this project. The first image shows my little mock up of the book in terms of how many pages it will have, I had decided on 48 pages (not including the front and back cover)- I chose this number because it is high enough to make the book look filled out, but it isn’t such an enormous work load for myself.