Linden Vet Featured in Steven Levy's Story on Deep Dreams

I told you about ex-Linden inventor Karl Stiefvater's art experiments with Deep Dreams, Google's neural network, and now acclaimed technology journalist Steven Levy is writing about them too, in an epic story about the gobsmacking technology:

It came from a trio of researchers based at University of Tubingen in Germany. Leon Gatys, a German doctoral candidate at the Bethge Lab at University of Tubingen, had been working with a team schooled in computation and neuroscience, trying to understand biological and computer visual systems. They had been using neural nets to identify and ultimately output textures as opposed to objects, when their experiments took a weird turn — was it possible to get a neural net to transform images creatively, in the same way an iconic artist would? Could a neural net understand a painting with the analytical skills of an art historian? Could it act as a master forger, rendering a vanilla scene from a photograph into something that appeared to be from the brush of a famous painter? ... The paper hit the internet in early September. When an open-source version of the software appeared not long afterwards, a graphics community already intoxicated from Deep Dreams experienced another woozy orgy of creation.

Here comes Karl:

One eager participant was Karl Stiefvater, a computer graphics specialist (he wrote the code that blew up Neo’s spaceship in The Matrix trilogy; more recently he built key graphics tools for Linden Labs). His iOS app, Pikazo, offers styles drawn from sources beyond humans: for instance, one option is to render an image in the style of a circuitboard. It’s not an instant transformation, as “It takes four quadrillion floating point operations,” Stiefvater explains.

And in case you missed that: Karl built an app for that.

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Comments

[irihapeti]

400 quad. woooahh !

is so intense that is

and even then don't always get a answer

is so hard doing what Karl S. is doing. Is like the No Mans Sky people as well. Like is said: "I see math equations"

Good on him Karl for giving it a go. Big ups from me (: