Picasso
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AI spots art fakes by examining a single brushstroke
Attempts at art forgeries run from the laughable (remember Monkey Jesus?) to the exquisite (this ambiguous Baroque masterpiece nearly cost a gallery €120 million last year), and traditionally the art world has had to rely on expert knowledge and supporting documentation to weed out the real from the fake. But now researchers claim AI is able to identify forgeries simply by looking at the brushstrokes used to compose a piece.
'Vincent' AI transforms your rough sketch into a Van Gogh
Prisma made AI art style transfer fun for the masses, but a new machine learning app has much bigger ambitions. Applying its vast knowledge of art from the Renaissance to today, "Vincent" can take your simple sketch and transform it a finished painting influenced by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Picasso. "We're exploring completely uncharted territory –- much of what makes Vincent tick was not known to the machine learning community just a year ago," said Cambridge Consultants Machine Learning Director Monty Barlow.
The fate of a Picasso is in the Internet's hands
Each holiday, Cards Against Humanity runs a mystery gift club, in which subscribers pay $15 in exchange for... uh... mystery gifts. This year, the presents included socks, socks and socks, as well as a year's membership to NPR and giving a week off to the employees of the factory where the cards are printed. The latest in the series of "Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah," however, asks the promotion's 150,000 subscribers to decide the fate of a signed print of Picasso's Tête de Faune. The people have a simple choice: either they can vote to donate the work to the Art Institute of Chicago, or slice it into 150,000 pieces.
Algorithm turns any picture into the work of a famous artist
A group of German researchers have created an algorithm that basically amounts to the most amazing Instagram filter ever conceived: a convolutional neural network that can convert any photograph into a work of fine art. The process takes an hour (sorry, it's not actually coming to a smartphone near you), and the math behind it is horrendously complicated, but the results speak for themselves.
Apple's secretive internal training program praises Picasso, has full-time faculty
The Apple University, as the company's training courses have been called, was established by Steve Jobs in an effort to get employees acquainted with how Apple does things. Courses there are not mandatory, but getting employees to enroll is apparently never an issue, according to Brian X. Chen's investigations in the New York Times -- which is worth reading in full. It's an unsurprisingly secretive setup, and no pictures of the classrooms (or their contents) have ever surfaced. Chen talked to three employees who have taken classes, and the courses are apparently unequivocally Apple: polished and planned to the finest detail. ("Even the toilet paper in the bathrooms is really nice") It has a full-time faculty (plucked from Yale, Harvard, MIT, Pixar and more) that create and teach courses, with recent classes including one on how to blend resources from recently acquired companies into Apple. Others focus on important decisions in the company's past: the move to offer iTunes on Windows PCs is given as an example, a decision that turned out to be a big success. The university also touches heavily on design philosophy: one course shows a slide of The Bull, Picasso's famous deconstruction of a bull drawn in 1945. "You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do," said one student. Examples of what not to do also come up. In the case of TV remotes, Google's own 78-button remote is compared unfavorably to Apples's stripped-down iteration.
If Picasso made a phone, the Picasso Phone probably wouldn't be it
Yeah, the keypad is... uh, "modernist" in a super annoying way, we guess, but the exterior of this handset (which seriously is Picasso branded, for the record) is about as run-of-the-mill as it could possibly be. Scheduled to hit Taiwan, the glossy clam features a translucent cover that lets an OLED external display peek through when on, a 1.3 megapixel autofocus camera, A2DP, Picasso-themed content, and that's about it. So if you want to get enraged by some nonsensically-placed navigation keys in exchange for some low res Picasso wallpapers, this may be your phone -- but be warned, you may be causing the dude to spin in his grave once or twice.
Bosch unveils parking space measurement system
While Toyota already has its self-parking Prius on the streets, and Volkswagen (not to mention BMW and Honda) isn't too far behind, Citroën is joining the fold thanks to a newly-unveiled system developed by Bosch. Citing the C4 Picasso as the "world's first car to feature integrated parking space measurement," Bosch apparently hopes to get its own snazzy parking assistant on more rides in the future. The system utilizes six total sensors on the front / rear of the vehicle to gauge parking space dimesntions (and alert you of obstacles) while cruising by at up to 12.5-miles per hour, and can inform the driver if the space he / she is eying is too small, "a tight squeeze," or just right. The system initiates the measuring process when the motorist tags a button on their steering wheel, and looks to the right or left depending on which turn signal is in use. While not quite as advanced as Toyota's gig, Bosch hopes to upgrade its system to allow the vehicle itself to control the maneuvering sometime in 2008, but those not able to hold out can pick up the current rendition real soon.[Via Gizmag]
Rig of the Day: Siblings
Now here's a person after my own heart. Flickr user bushwood's snapshot features a G5 Power Mac, an original Macintosh, an iPod and a print of the old "Picasso" illustration. I especially like that the original Mac is still running. It's nice to respect your elders."macs" posted by bushwood.If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. We'll select an image every day to highlight.
