“In the three videos, which were posted under the TikTok account @deeptomcruise, someone who appears to be Cruise is seen playing golf, doing a magic trick and awkwardly sharing an anecdote. Everything is practically spot on, from the laugh to the gestures to the facial expressions. But in reality, it’s just Fisher behind the camera, whose image has been warped by deepfake technology.”
It took a lot more work than the average person could handle, says visual effects artist Chris Ume.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shown that they can block inflammation in mice, thereby protecting them from liver disease and hardening of the arteries while increasing their healthy lifespan.
Researchers have succeeded in making an AI understand our subjective notions of what makes faces attractive. The device demonstrated this knowledge by its ability to create new portraits that were tailored to be found personally attractive to individuals. The results can be used, for example, in modeling preferences and decision-making as well as potentially identifying unconscious attitudes.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki and University of Copenhagen investigated whether a computer would be able to identify the facial features we consider attractive and, based on this, create new images matching our criteria. The researchers used artificial intelligence to interpret brain signals and combined the resulting brain-computer interface with a generative model of artificial faces. This enabled the computer to create facial images that appealed to individual preferences.
“In our previous studies, we designed models that could identify and control simple portrait features, such as hair color and emotion. However, people largely agree on who is blond and who smiles. Attractiveness is a more challenging subject of study, as it is associated with cultural and psychological factors that likely play unconscious roles in our individual preferences. Indeed, we often find it very hard to explain what it is exactly that makes something, or someone, beautiful: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” says Senior Researcher and Docent Michiel Spapé from the Department of Psychology and Logopedics, University of Helsinki.
“As several people mention in the replies to LenKusov, shooting or otherwise damaging that hefty lithium battery pack could make it explode—which is either very bad if you’re close-range, or exactly what you want if you’re somehow hitting it from a distance and trying for fireworks.”
It turns out that a flip through Spot’s user manual reveals its weaknesses.
Something completely logical. I’ve always wondered why these vehicles haven’t been designed to use the energy that wheel rotation produces to charge the batteries of the vehicle.
This month is a time to celebrate. CERN has just announced the discovery of four brand new particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
This means that the LHC has now found a total of 59 new particles, in addition to the Nobel prize-winning Higgs boson, since it started colliding protons – particles that make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons – in 2009.
Excitingly, while some of these new particles were expected based on our established theories, some were altogether more surprising.
There’s more AI news out there than anyone can possibly keep up with. But you can stay tolerably up to date on the most interesting developments with this column, which collects AI and machine learning advancements from around the world and explains why they might be important to tech, startups or civilization.
To begin on a lighthearted note: The ways researchers find to apply machine learning to the arts are always interesting — though not always practical. A team from the University of Washington wanted to see if a computer vision system could learn to tell what is being played on a piano just from an overhead view of the keys and the player’s hands.
Audeo, the system trained by Eli Shlizerman, Kun Su and Xiulong Liu, watches video of piano playing and first extracts a piano-roll-like simple sequence of key presses. Then it adds expression in the form of length and strength of the presses, and lastly polishes it up for input into a MIDI synthesizer for output. The results are a little loose but definitely recognizable.
Uber and OpenAI researchers say an advance in Go-Explore AI in beating Atari games could have applications for robotics and drug design.
A new laser thruster could be a step towards new technology to push satellites rapidly between planets.
The demonstration model of the Photonic Laser Thruster (PLT) moved a 750-gram mock satellite along a track in the laboratory using only the power of light.
Volunteer students at Beihang University have reportedly lived in the Lunar Palace 1 biosphere environment for 370 days. Media outlets have reported that two groups of students took turns living in the biosphere over the course of 370 days, and required minimal supplies from the outside.
Many groups have tried building and living in biospheres over the years. The goal has always been to find out if it is possible to build a self-sustaining ecosystem that could be used on another planet. The most well-known was Biosphere 2—it was built in the Arizona desert and hosted people for two years, but ultimately failed in its goal to remain self-supporting. However, such efforts have led to a better understanding of how a real biosphere might work and how plants might be grown beyond Earth.
Over the past several years, the Chinese government has made it clear that they plan to send people to the moon in the coming years. They also plan to build a permanent colony there, to be shared with other countries, as soon as it is feasible. As part of that effort, they have been planning, building and testing biospheres since 2014. In 2017, they finished construction of the Lunar Palace 1 biosphere. Once set up and tested, four volunteers entered the facility and stayed for 110 days. Shortly thereafter, another group moved into the biosphere and stayed for 65 days—they were replaced immediately by another team who spent 200 days in the test environment. That team was then replaced by the first team, which spent an additional 105 days in the facility. Altogether, the two groups spent 370 consecutive days in the biosphere.
A former graduate student reflects on how Isadore Singer, who died on February 11, brought together mathematicians, physicists and anyone else interested in the deeper connections between diverse fields.
