Tag Archives: undecidability

A certain indeterminacy of color, neither cerise nor taupe nor burnt umber, nor gray either

Fragments from Eric Schwitzgebel’s Why did we think we dreamed in black and white? Prior to the rise of scientific psychology, scholars interested in dreaming generally stated or assumed that dreams have color. For example, Aristotle specifically includes colors among the remnants that sense-impressions may leave in the sense-organs and which thus appear to us […]

Detection of Face Morphing Attacks by Deep Learning

Identification by biometric features has become more popular in the last decade. High quality video and fingerprint sensors have become less expensive and are nowadays standard components in many mobile devices. Thus, many devices can be unlocked via fingerprint or face verification. The state of the art accuracy of biometric facial recognition systems prompted even […]

Machines to write with the hereafter

Machine à écrire avec l’au-delà, Jean Perdrizet, 1971. Oui-Ja électrique, Jean Perdrizet, 1971. Perdrizet drew the designs for several devices meant to communicate with the beyond. Ghosts and the dead would trigger electrical signals translated in the letters of the alphabet by Perdrizet’s inventions. As Perdrizet didn’t believe ghosts would speak a human language, he […]

A Brief History of ‘Pixel’

Figure 1. The first appearance of picture element, in a news item in Wireless World and Radio Review, about a demonstration by Ives at Bell Labs of a 50-by-50-element television system. A few RCA researchers, notably Albert Rose and Otto Schade, continued to use picture element to examine the theory of imaging, but with differing […]

A dilation of the soul-itself

Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 to the small-landowning Aurelii of Thagaste, an “obscure provincial city” in the uplands of Roman Numidia; and in the year of his birth the Christian emperor in Milan devised this new imperial epithet: “Eternity.” He died as Augustinus Hipponiensis, in the Vandal-besieged city of Hippo Regius —fronting […]

Green Mamba

Tensorflow, an open source library for Machine Learning developed by Google, comes with a demo program that labels images. The output of the program contains the labels (or class names) and their scores. The score represents the probability of the image to belong to a certain class. green mamba (score = 0.43074) vine snake (score […]

What would the world look like to someone with a bionic eye?

From a press release from the University of Washington: “Various sight recovery therapies are being developed by companies around the world, offering new hope for people who are blind. But little is known about what the world will look like to patients who undergo those procedures. A new University of Washington study seeks to answer […]

Computational linguistics as seen by Stanislaw Lem

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions […]

250 000 labels

This document, edited by Antonio Torralba, contains the notes written by Adela Barriuso describing her experience while using the LabelMe annotation tool. Mrs Barriuso has no training in computer vision. In 2007 she started to use LabelMe to systematically annotate the SUN database. The goal was to build a large database of images with all […]

The declassifiers

A declassified document is a document that ceases to be classified as secret. The process of declassification is not a simple publication of a once secret document. It leaves its traces on the document. When the document is released for public scrutiny, parts of it may still be removed. The classification of the paragraphs is […]