Where's My Thought Translator

Psychedelic Artist Here

Text rules the internet. We know that. (It's why you can't google smells.)

But humans aren't born to read, and if we had the choice, we would much rather talk to things than write to them. This is why speech recognition has become such a big deal.

For a while there, voice rec was in trouble. Kind of like how autocorrect was in trouble, maybe you remember that more.

Then came all these neural nets and backward propagation, and now we have mindbots playing video games better than humans. Machine learning artificial intelligence is on a winning streak these days. But it's funny that with all this talk about biased algorithms, we often fail to recognize one group of people that are consistently being left out, even from the most basic of services offered by our digitally-assisted exocortices.

The people left out are those who are hard of hearing, who cannot see well, or who speak with impediments. Your phone may be great at deciphering your drunk-ass request for a cab at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that's because it's been trained on a few happy hour voices just to deal with that particular instance.*

Your phone has not been trained to talk to you after your face underwent reconstructive surgery, messing with your speech. Or when you can't speak at all because you can't hear. The problem is that speech recognition technology hasn't been trained on sign language.

Deep Forest Deep Dream Mandala by Nora Berg

Along comes this gentleman, who basically mixes a Nintendo Wii with an Amazon Alexa to allow anyone using sign language to communicate with their omniscient overlords.

The way he does it is really clever though, as he uses a publicly available neural net to (literally?) teach the network sign language, whereupon he further develops that recognized sign language into text, and then ties it all to a text-to-speech program, which can then finally talk to Alexa.

What I want to know is, how long do I have to get this thing to watch me before it can recognize my thoughts and turn them into words so that I can finally be one with the internet??

Sign-language hack lets Amazon Alexa respond to gestures
July 2018, BBC News

Post Script
The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech)

Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk [and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder].
-Fast Company

Post Post Script
I'm sure I concur with everyone else who is saying that Alex Grey is the only artist where Deep Dream makes his work look worse! Still, how is it that I can't find more of it online? Also, can't someone train a network on his paintings instead of the corpus they used for Deep Dream?

Alex Grey Meets Deep Dream

Alex Grey As Himself

Post Post Post
Accidental robot-hole. I should know way more about neural style transfers, which came out last year and as an extension of the Deep Dream project.

Style transfer is where you anti(?)train a neural net to overfit for a particular style, and then fit that style onto a new image. It makes way more sense when you see it.

Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Here, a famous Escher painting trained also on the School of Athens:

Deep Escher in Athens, unknown origin

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky

Brad Pitt x Duchamp(?)

Abstract Cat

Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And finally, don't forget who started this all:

Abstraction of a Cow, Theo van Doesburg, circa 1900

Abstraction of a Tree, curated from Piet Mondrian, circa 1900

Selfie Face Syndrome

Distortive effects of short distance photographs on nasal appearance: The selfie effect
Mar 2018, phys.org

From the Rutgers Department of Otolaryngology (facial plastic and reconstructive surgery) - not only are some people crazy about taking pictures of themselves, but the distortive effects of current camera lenses are making those same people want reconstructive surgery to fix their faces, when in fact they need to fix their cameras.

Explains:
The Rutgers-Stanford model, published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, shows that an average selfie, taken about 12 inches from the face, makes the nasal base appear approximately 30 percent wider and the nasal tip 7 percent wider than if the photograph had been taken at 5 feet, a standard portrait distance that provides a more proportional representation of facial features. -phys.org

Who cares? It's a public health issue, says the researcher, because people's self-image is a public health issue.

Read further:
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (2018). DOI: 10.1001/jamafacial.2018.0009 

Heads Up

Milan Fashion Week: Models carry fake heads on Gucci catwalk
Feb 2018, BBC

On a scene designed as an operating room, fashion pinnacle Gucci sends its models down the runway holding their own heads in their hands. These heads look exactly like the people holding them.

Quick reminder - there was an artist a few years ago, biohacker Dewey-Hagborg, who made the paper because of her accurate 3D replicas of your head, off DNA you left in public, like on a straw or a coffee cup, or her favorite - cigarette butts.

There's only so many genes that code for face shape (5?). But she also puts the found genome against a real-human genome database, and pieces together other data like family history.
Together all this info gives her a general idea of what that DNA would look like if it were to make a face, and she designs and prints that face.

But why does this image creep me the f out? Recent headlines like these:

• Scientists Create Artificial Womb
• Baby Lynlee 'born twice' after life-saving tumour surgery; They take the baby out, perform surgery on her, and put her back in for 12 weeks
• Children receive new ears grown from their own cells in world first
• New lung 'organoids' in a dish mimic features of full-size lung
• Pig-Human Hybrid Created in Lab
• Wiring Monkey Brains Together Has a Point, Say Scientists
• No, there has not been a successful human head transplant