Tag Archives: category
There is no home like place
“Airbnb is a global hotel filled with the same recurring items. Bed, chair, potted plant, all catered to our cosmopolitan sensibilities. We end up in a place that’s completely interchangeable; a room is a room is a room. An algorithm finds these recurring items and replaces them with the same items from other listings. By […]
Don’t write down father
Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis, Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories, 1975.
all sieves are shadows of the substances they sort
[…] we apperceive through our sieves as much as we sieve through our apperception. We appersieve, if you will. Or, if you go back to Kant ([1781] 1965), who defined the ego as the transcendental unity of apperception (whatever that means), we are our sieves. Indeed, crucially, sieves have to take on (and not just […]
The cloudy days of machine learning
Once upon a time, the US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect camouflaged enemy tanks. The researchers trained a neural net on 50 photos of camouflaged tanks in trees, and 50 photos of trees without tanks. Using standard techniques for supervised learning, the researchers trained the neural network to a weighting that […]
Comparative Ways of Seeing
Your browser does not support the video tag. In the frame of Ways of Machine Seeing, a series of experiments in collaboration wit Geoff Cox on the the four episodes of the BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing. In this probe, the same algorithm runs an object detection script using two different training sets. For […]