A journey into the art of face analysis and classification. — Congrats on becoming a Faceworker! Our AI finds the perfect face for every job. Audition for each job by showing us you can make your face fit what the job needs. Ready to try out for your first job? Facework is a game that imagines a world where face analysis…

The use of mugshots in research, and the shift from face recognition to face attribute classification. — In 2018 I read a research paper about estimating body mass index from face photos, written by an insurance company. The paper had a diagram, a mosaic of photos of mostly Black men showing that the training data was built on mugshots taken by the Florida department of corrections. I’ve…

In the late 1960s, scientists Katy Payne, Roger Payne, and engineer Frank Watlington popularized underwater recordings of humpback whales, with the goal of ending the extinction-level threat of commercial whaling. “I felt that unless people got interested in whales there was no hope of saving them and I realized that…

In 2014 machine learning researcher Ian Goodfellow introduced the idea of generative adversarial networks or GANs. “Generative” because they output things like images rather than predictions about input (like “hotdog or not”); “adversarial networks” because they use two neural networks competing with each other in a “cat-and-mouse game”, like a…

Update: I have found a studio manager, but I will leave this post up in the hope it will help others ask for the help they need. Hi! I’m an artist based in Los Angeles working with code, and I’m looking to hire a part-time studio manager. My work takes…

Creating new datasets and exploring new algorithms in the context of the dance performance “discrete figures” — In February 2018 Daito Manabe wrote me an email with the subject “Dance x Math (ML)”, asking if I’d be interested in working on a new project. …

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice. In 2013 around the age of 28, I stopped feeling rested when I woke up each morning. It happened gradually and never really disappeared, but in the process of trying to fix it I learned a lot about sleep…

Algorithmic music composition has developed a lot in the last few years, but the idea has a long history. In some sense, the first automatic music came from nature: Chinese windchimes, ancient Greek wind-powered Aeolian harps, or the Japanese water instrument suikinkutsu. But in the 1700s automatic music became “algorithmic”…

This short tutorial describes a few methods for gaining access to the internet, a basic human right, from public wireless networks. This tutorial has been tested on Mac, should work on Linux, and hasn’t been tested on Windows. Preparation Make sure you do this step before you are stuck without Internet…