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ScienceHealthThis AI Can Tell if You Have Covid-19 Just by Listening to Your Cough, Researchers Say
It feels like whenever I cough these days it triggers a mini-panic attack that I promptly try to quash with a steady stream of chamomile tea. Thankfully, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they figured out a way to gauge whether a person has covid-19 just from the sound of their cough, so … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsNvidia Wants to Eliminate Compression During Video Calls by Using Neural Networks to Perfectly Render Your Face
There are a thousand reasons to hate hopping on a video call every 10 minutes to chat with your co-workers, among them the ugly video compression artifacts that can occasionally make your face completely unrecognizable. Nvidia has a potential solution to the problem, but instead of fixing compression algorithms, it wants to use neural networks to … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsLunar Rover Footage Upscaled With AI Is as Close as You’ll Get to the Experience of Driving on the Moon
The last time astronauts walked on the moon was in December of 1972, decades before high-definition video cameras were available. They relied on low-res grainy analog film to record their adventures, which makes it hard for viewers to feel connected to what’s going on. But using modern AI techniques to upscale classic NASA footage and … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsDisney’s Developed Movie-Quality Face-Swapping Technology That Promises to Change Filmmaking
In a few short years, neural-network-powered automated face swaps have gone from being mildly convincing to eerily believable. But through new research from Disney, neural face-swapping is poised to become a legitimate and high-quality tool for visual effects studios working on Hollywood blockbusters. One of the bigger challenges of creating deepfake videos, as they’ve come … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsGoogle’s Art App Now Turns Your Selfies Into Famous Masterpieces
In what promises to be an excellent way to kill a solid 10 minutes, the Google Arts & Culture app has been updated with a new Art Transfer feature that will apply the look of countless famous paintings and artists to your own photos using machine learning techniques. The last time you opened the Google … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsTerrifying Things Happen When an AI Generates Fake Faces Synced to Music
We’re still trying to figure out the best applications for neural networks, machine learning, and all the recent advancements in artificial intelligence. Amongst all the practical research being conducted, there’s also lots of frivolous experimentation being done with results that walk the line between fascinating and terrifying. Automated image processing has emerged as a strong … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsAI Trained on Moon Craters Is Helping Find Unexploded Bombs From the Vietnam War
There’s still no completely safe and surefire method for locating unexploded ordinance after a war is over, but researchers at Ohio State University have found a way to harness image processing algorithms, powered by machine learning, to study satellite imagery and locate hot spots where UXO are likely to be located. The researchers focused their … Continued
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io9Toys and Collectibles11 of the Coolest Builds By Bored People With a Lot of Lego Bricks
There are a lot of reasons why Lego remains one of the world’s most popular toys, over 3,700, in fact: the number of unique Lego pieces that have been created over the decades. It allows everything from Batmobiles, to excavators, to Kessel running space ships to be built from plastic bricks, but Lego can be … Continued
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Tech NewsFakesThis VFX Team Made a Tupac Deepfake to Rap with Snoop Dogg
I’m going to go ahead and file that under “headlines I never imagined I’d be writing in 2020.” For his newest music video, rapper Snoop Dogg commissioned the production studio Corridor Digital to bring Tupac Shakur back to life through the wonders of technology. His vision: Splicing a deepfake Tupac into the rapper’s final interview … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsThis Office Space Meets The Matrix Deepfake Deserves a Theatrical Release
The deepfake hits just keep on coming. Following an excellent reimagining of Back to the Future where Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox are replaced with Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, another talented deepfaker has put Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving into Office Space, creating the fourth Matrix film we really deserve. YouTube deepfaker … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsNeural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone
There are lots of valid reasons to be worried about how deep learning techniques could potentially be used to manipulate footage for nefarious reasons. But as Denis Shiryaev demonstrates by upscaling some old black and white film footage from 1896, those AI-powered tools can also be a powerful way to bring the past back to … Continued
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Tech NewsArtificial IntelligenceWTF Is an Artificial Human and Where Did They Come From?
Neon is the name of the company and also the name of its only product—if you can call it that. I’m told a Neon is a living entity, but it doesn’t have a physical body. I’m told a Neon is computationally created, but it’s not an AI assistant. So what the fuck is Neon and … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsNvidia Taught an AI to Instantly Generate Fully-Textured 3D Models From Flat 2D Images
Turning a sketch or photo of an object into a fully realized 3D model so that it can be duplicated using a 3D printer, played in a video game, or brought to life in a movie through visual effects, requires the skills of a digital modeler working from a stack of images. But Nvidia has … Continued
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io9Toys and CollectiblesA Neural Network Powers This Lego-Built Brick Sorter That Can Recognize Every Piece Ever Made
Lego becomes more and more enjoyable as your collection grows, until the point when your morass of plastic bricks becomes so overwhelming that it’s impossible to find the piece you’re looking for. At that point, you need to develop a sorting system, or do what Daniel West did, and use a bunch of your Lego … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsDeep Learning Is Making Video Game Characters Move Like Real People
As video games give players more freedom to explore complex digital worlds, it becomes more challenging for a CG character to naturally move and interact with everything in it. So to prevent those awkward transitions between pre-programmed movements, researchers have turned to AI and deep learning to make video game characters move almost as realistically … Continued
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Tech NewsGoogleGoogle Tweaks Search to Better Understand Your Gibberish Queries
Searching for information online sometimes takes creativity—depending on how you word a query, Google can bring back some wonky results. That’s why Google announced today that it’s improved search to better understand natural language for “queries [it] can’t anticipate.” Part of the issue is that we imperfect humans don’t always know how to spell what … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsGoogle May Have Used Your Mannequin Challenge Videos to Train AI
Remember back in 2016 when everybody was posting those Mannequin Challenge videos? Well, it turns out that instead of collecting dust in Ye Olde Meme Archive, Google researchers are using the videos to help train robots to better navigate their surroundings. While humans are naturally able to look at a 2D video and understand it … Continued
