Category Archives: Uncategorized

Alex Sciuto

24 Feb 2015

https://github.com/aparrish/gen-text-workshop

Example Bots

Camptown Races,
Egress Methods,

Markov Chains

Classic technique in text generation. Since the 1960s.

Ngrams

Basis is n-gram – smarting : [“sm”, “ma”, “ar”, .. “ng”]
https://books.google.com/ngrams

Markov Modeler Pyton
import markov
text = open('../text.txt').read()
model = markov.model(text, 3)
print ''.join(markov.generate(model, 3))

Context Free Grammar

Define the structure of a grammar you want to emulate. Diagram a sentence. Hierarchy and recursion of sentences.

That dog laughed.
That dog over there laughed.
That do I told you about yesterday—the insolent one—laughed.

***Simple grammar***
Sentence => Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase
Noun Phrase => "the" + noun
Verb Phrase => verb
Noun => "dog"
Very => "barked"
***Slightly Less Simple Grammar***
Sentence => [Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase]
Noun Phrase => ["the" + noun, "the" + Adjective + Noun]
Verb Phrase => [Verb, Verb + Noun Phrase] 
Noun => ["dog", "cat"]
Verb => ["barked"]
Adjective => ["brown"]

CMU Rhyming Dictionary

sejalpopat

19 Feb 2015

I looked at the paper Data Visualization in the First Person which points out a lot of interesting more psychological points about visualization and the perspective implied in these. It discusses, for example, viewpoint and how the choice of composition in visual scenes (such as paintings) can make you feel included or excluded from the scene. It also comments about leveraging human capabilities and ability to quickly locate 3d structures and spatial relationships. The paper applies these notions to possibilities in 3d visualization.

The author was responsible for many of the visualizations in the Ted Talk Birth of a Word.

chen

19 Feb 2015

Here is a website I found from D3 Gallery. I literally have played it for 1 hour. Actually, this is why I introduce you this website; I would like to put lots of time in it.

屏幕快照 2015-02-19 上午12.34.48

屏幕快照 2015-02-19 上午12.20.25

The pixels your mouse going through will split into four smaller parts and finally it turns out to be a much higher resolution image.

This is a really novel interaction method for me, and if you are a person uneasy with undone job, it’s definitely a good chance to try this — you will regret but could not stop yourself.

Try this out! http://bit.ly/1E8clH9

—————————————————-٩(˃̶͈̀௰˂̶͈́)و————————————————————————

Sociotope.me

 

This is an interactive data visualization application basing on WebGL. You can connect social media with the application and it helps you analyze the posts you have made, and render it in a sorted organization.

It truly opened new ideas of doing data visualization. This application makes use of 3D modeling , Three.js and other tools we have mentioned in our class.

dantasse

13 Feb 2015

Machine Learning in the arts

Computers Watching Movies by Benjamin Grosser. Takes computer vision algorithms and applies them to movies. At first it’s just kind of cute, but upon a closer look, there’s something really interesting there. For example, look at the Matrix and Inception links vs. Annie Hall and American Beauty. Matrix and Inception cover more of the screen; they look more “epic” maybe. For example, maybe before watching the movie, you watch the computer watching the movie. Or maybe there’s something you can tell about people’s movie tastes based on the CV outputs of what they watch. (I know Netflix would love to know about that.)

Genetic Algorithm Walkers by Rafael Matsunaga.

Genetic algorithms are a lot of fun, but it’s particularly fun when you’re genetic-algorithming something silly like humanoids walking. It shows the algorithm in action in a way that’s pretty easy to understand. Also, it maps the variables to pretty-easily-rememberable names. It’s a neat way to show evolution, to teach how genetic algorithms can come up with something that works pretty well for difficult tasks like walking with joints.

 

sejalpopat

12 Feb 2015

For this looking outwards I mainly looked at papers that related to extracting patterns from 2d visuals.

Pattern Recognition Using Genetic Algorithms
In this paper the author recounts how his approach to designing “creatures” in a genetic algorithm and how they perform at recognizing patterns in 2d visuals. I thought this was interesting because the author emphasizes drawing from existing visual systems in animals and refers to that in his design. One problem with this paper is it reads like a journal entry about ideas that may potentially be more fully explained later but are not quite fleshed out yet; given this it was hard to follow some of the paragraphs that trail off into different possible explanations for the observed results.

A Language for representing and extracting 3D semantics from Paper-Based Sketches
I
 liked this paper a lot more because the application of the research was not unclear; I think its really interesting to think of pattern recognition in terms of recognizing parts of a 3D geometry and not just the repetition of 2d patterns like the previous paper. This paper also appealed to me because I find the idea of paper-based programming and languages that are not linear (but spatially organized) super fascinating. The goal of the paper is to allow sketching in conjunction with annotation that defines operations (i.e. “extrude”, “sweep”, “revolve”) to result in 3d forms.