I was walking home from work today when I saw a man listening to what looked like a stethoscope, except that the earpieces were on the ground instead of someone’s chest. There was water spilling from the ground around him. Continue reading “[Day 876] I’m a street doctor”
Technologies
[Day 795] Is Andrej Karpathy human?
Sophia the robot visited Vietnam today and VnExpress asked me to write an op-ed about what it means to be human. In the article, I mentioned the program that Andrej Karpathy wrote that generated Shakespeare-sounding text.
I didn’t think much of it until my editor texted me: “Is Andrej Karpathy human?”
I was like: “I guess.”
She was disappointed and took that example out of my article.
[Day 276] Detailed instruction on how to do Style Transfer
If you don’t already know, style transfer is the cool, hip thing that has been taking the recreational AI community by storm. It’s so cool that even Kristen Stewart co-authored a paper about it. To quote one researcher who has done extensive work in style transfer that I’ve got a chance to talk to, “it is an utterly unremarkable paper that wouldn’t have been published otherwise [if Kristen Stewart’s name is not on it]. That’s a publicity stunt.”
Some background on why I’m doing this: I’m teaching the course CS 20SI: “TensorFlow for Deep Learning Research” and for the assignment about convolution neural networks, I thought it’d be fun for students to do style transfer as their exercise at home. They, after all, showed a lot of enthusiasm when we did Deep Dream in class.
Continue reading “[Day 276] Detailed instruction on how to do Style Transfer”
[Day 169] The magic of phonetic writing
In my anthropology class, there is this lady who comes to every lecture with a peculiar-looking keyboard and transcribes everything everyone says in the room. The average rate for English speakers in the US is 150 wpm, so I estimate her writing speed is well above 150 wpm because she gets everything everyone says right, even manages to insert things like *bell chiming* or *indiscernible sound in the background*. This is really impressive, given that professional typists only have the speed of 75-85 wpm.
So, after the lecture today, I decided to come and introduce myself to her. When I told Sarah, the lady’s name, about my fascination with her typing, she was very excited. She told me she loved talking about that because she thinks it’s magical too. Here is a picture of the setup that she uses:
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