Tag Archives: classification

Don’t write down father

Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis, Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories, 1975.

Database populism

Although early users of database technology were predominantly large institutions, the database was also a key technology in the populist vision of personal computing generated by microcomputer fans, researchers, hobbyists, and entrepreneurs in the 1970s and 1980s. Informed by science fiction sensitive to the authoritarian use of database technology, these personal computing advocates hoped that […]

A system for detecting an accessible bug

We have described each of the operations on the retinal image in terms of what common factors in a large variety of stimuli cause response and what common factors have no effect. What, then, does a particular fiber in the optic nerve measure? We have considered it to be how much there is in a […]

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 ‘dawning’ of an aspect

“I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect…” And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect… I see two pictures, with the […]

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 […]

Convolutional Network, 1993

In 1988, Yann LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called Convolutional Neural Networks, the “Optimal Brain Damage” regularization methods, and […]

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 […]

You were asked to draw an angel

Playing with Quickdraw

In the cage

It had occurred to her early that in her position–that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie–she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively–though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity […]