Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘software’

Kyle MacDonald and Arturo Castro, a pair of programmer/artists, have created a real-time video face tracking and modifying application, which can overlay a famous face from a photo onto a moving face in a video, dynamically, in creepy, creepy real time. Just watch.

The software is built on open-source tools, so we're hoping to compile a copy to run here in the office and distort ourselves at least as horribly as Kyle MacDonald does here, but until then, can't stop staring at the videos.

Here's another one, inspired by A Scanner Darkly.

What makes Narrative Science different than previous attempts at computer-generated news briefs is that this software has the ability to make inferences and actually provide an angle for a story, the New York Times reports. In the realm of sports, it learns the meaning of terms like “come from behind” and “team effort” and leads the article with the aspect of the game it deems most important. This keeps it from being a plug-and-chug fact regurgitator and actually adds some variety to the articles it's writing. The example article posted in the Times led with the sentence “Wisconsin jumped out to an early lead and never looked back in a 51-17 win over UNLV on Thursday at Camp Randall Stadium.” Not bad, for a computer.

Most of Narrative Science's 20 customers aren't talking, but the Times was able to confirm that the Big Ten Network has been using the software since the spring of 2010 to generate recaps of sports games. Use of the software helped grow their web traffic for football games by 40 percent between the 2009 and 2010 seasons. And it's cheap – each 500 word article currently only costs $10. If Narrative Science keeps improving their software, lowly human writers may have some competition.

[The New York Times]

Unlike existing applications that overlay virtual features onto real-world video, this program doesn't add any synthetic elements to the video feed. It creates a 3D model of the user's face, tracks their features, and then subtly warps the video. The user can then see how they would look with a smaller nose, wider mouth, or Powerpuff Girl eyes.

The software could be a valuable visualization tool for plastic surgeons. The creators are also considering adding in texture-based modifications that could allow the user to apply virtual makeup to their face. Check out the mirror at work in the video below:

[New Scientist]

Steve Carell might be leaving The Office, but this software can at least fill the void of "that's what she said" jokes

The software actually sounds pretty tricky to write--it's a natural language analyzer, sort of like a more specific and not so terrifying version of IBM's Watson. Created by Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun of the University of Washington (make sure to read their report if you want to see an NBC sitcom properly cited in an academic work), the system is named DEviaNT, which stands for Double Entendre via Noun Structure--a bit of a stretch, but we've seen worse.

Every Single -Thats what she said- from The Office by victoria36

To figure out if a seemingly innocuous sentence could have a second, more sexual meaning, Kiddon and Brun first analyzed lots of text from both erotic and non-erotic sources, then set the software to evaluate which nouns, adjectives, and verbs have a high "sexiness" possibility--words like "big," "meat," and "satisfy" would all qualify. They also fed it jokes from TWSS websites (yes, there are compendiums of TWSS jokes, of course there are compendiums of TWSS jokes).

At the moment, DEviaNT has about a 70% accuracy rate, which leads to some jokes that don't really make sense (that's what she said), but the researchers are confident that with more data, they can boost its abilities to near-Michael-Scottian levels.

[New Scientist]

The ICU is naturally an environment fraught with problems, but one of the most fundamental is an information glut--patients there are surrounded by equipment churning out streams of data about each one, yet there’s no way to distill all this data to its relevant meaning in real time (usually it’s broken down into notes by a nurse once an hour).

Meanwhile, all that meaningful data on blood oxygen levels, respiratory rates, heart rates, electrocardiogram, temperature, etc. is basically ignored because there’s no way to monitor everything for patterns or trends that might hide an underlying indicator. That’s what Artemis does. Grabbing data from both medical records and those real time sensors feeding data to the machine, Artemis’ algorithms look for signals that an infection might be taking root.

This is where Artemis begins to compute like Watson. The two are different in several ways, but Artemis was built on an analytics platform called InfoSphere that came out of IBM research just as Watson did. And both make decisions on the fly based on rapidly incoming data from multiple sources, no archiving necessary.

Conventional computers can hunt for trends or patterns in data just fine, but before they can do so the data needs to be written to hard drive and databased. Artemis, like Watson, takes its inputs on go. Information flows in, the software filters out the relevant bits (be they answers to questions or symptoms) and the rest of the data flows on downstream. In a world where data is being produced prodigiously, such a computing paradigm has great potential.

And in an ICU environment, it could be lifesaving. Artemis can handle multiple streams of data from multiple infants, monitoring for the telltale signs of an infection before it gets the chance to take root (it also helps doctors refrain from diagnosing false-positives). It could someday be deployed as a centralized, remote diagnosis system, accepting online data streams from faraway locations and serving ICUs around the world.

As such, Artemis is already going global; two Chinese neonatal ICUs will connect using the technology later this year.

[Technology Review]

The idea behind the software was to eliminate the need for other, more physical forms of tracking, like RFID (or, in the future, RFID's more powerful brother, NFC), but using artificial intelligence to supplement mid- or even low-end cameras. Simply recognizing a face from a security camera is no joke--people can look vastly different day to day, and there are all kinds of variables (angle, lighting, clothing, posture) that can throw off the effectiveness of that kind of software. But what if said software could make certain rational assumptions?

This system requires cameras--though not necessarily top-of-the-line cameras--be placed at building entrances or exits, a place where they can capture with reasonable quality a person's face, height, or gait. That information is fed to a central computer, which notes not only the appearance of that person but also their location. From there, the central computer cross-checks that person's scan with all the others currently in the building, thereby eliminating some of the troublesome variables. If Dr. ScrubStealer is in the supply closet on the fifth floor, she couldn't possibly also be the similar-looking Nurse SleepsALot, who is down in the second-floor lounge, napping in the middle of her shift.

That further reasoning allows the system to identify people with much higher accuracy than other systems using low-quality cameras, which can be a boon for struggling hospitals (hospitals being one of the prime candidates for the system) that are unable to pay for pricey HD security loops. The only possible foil: Twins.

[SUNY Buffalo]

The software has in its database 60 per-programmed models that have been made over by professional makeup artists. These model faces have been imaged in various lighting situations before and after makeup and are used as a baseline against which to measure a user's face. But the software goes deeper, taking into account the nuances of a particular face, like freckles or moles. It will even evaluate a user's existing makeup and determine whether a certain makeup combination suits a given face.

The system can even offer advice. Need something subdued and sober for that job interview? Or perhaps something a bit more sultry for an evening on the town? The software can be modified to provide situational cosmetics advice. More on how the system works below.

[PhysOrg]