Users simply upload 10 to 20 photos of their faces, and the app’s AI-powered image generating tool does the rest. It may seem like harmless fun, but some artists say the AI is stealing their work. Even worse, the app is generating sexualized images of minors, and users are unwittingly signing away the rights to their own images.

Fantasy Portraits Ignite Ethical Concerns

Artificial intelligence often learns by scraping the internet for content. The Lensa app’s Magic Avatar function draws from sites where real artists upload their work, like DeviantArt, Behance, and ArtStation. Lensa runs on Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image app trained to learn patterns through an online database of images called LAION-5B.

Some artists are recognizing their distinctive styles and even the remnants of their signatures in the AI portraits, like Kim Leutwyler, a Sydney-based artist who told The Guardian she saw almost every portrait she’s ever shared on the internet in the Lensa results.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Spanish illustrator Amy Stelladia says she learned her art was being used by AI apps after discovering a website called haveibeentrained.com, which allows artists to search the LAION dataset for their work. The tool also provides an easy way for artists to request that their art be removed from the AI-training network.

For artists, the problem is twofold. First, the AI is flooding the market with cheap art that exploits and devalues human creativity. “They are meant to compete with our own work, using pieces and conscious decisions made by artists but purged from all that context and meaning,” Stelladia says. “It just feels wrong to use people’s life work without consent, to build something that can take work opportunities away.”

Second, AI photo apps like Lensa are making bank while the human artists they draw from barely scrape by. By some estimates, Lensa is drawing in $1 million USD per day, and the artists seeing their work in its results aren’t even getting credited, let alone compensated.

Portrait Results are More Than a Little Problematic

Some users have found that even when they submit source images that are fully clothed and show no skin at all, the results are often semi-nude and sexually suggestive. At MIT Technology Review, Melissa Heikkilä writes that out of 100 avatars she generated, 16 were topless and another 14 were barely clad. Heikkilä notes that she and another colleague of Asian descent seemed to get more images like these than their white colleagues who tried the app.

Lensa’s Magic Avatar has also generated nude art based on photographs of children, lightened black skin, and made users significantly thinner than they appear in the source images they uploaded.

AI training data like LAION is full of racist stereotypes, pornography, and even explicit images of rape. Of course, AI training data reflects the biases and prejudices of human artists and other content producers, but there doesn’t appear to be any attempt on the app creators’ part to moderate that data. While Stable Diffusion offers a filter on its dataset to limit graphic results, Lensa doesn’t appear to use it.

Lensa also doesn’t seem to enforce its policies prohibiting nudity and minors, and it doesn’t prevent users from uploading source images of people other than themselves. That makes it easy for anyone to exploit Magic Avatar and produce sexualized images of anyone they want, including children.

Signing Away the Rights to Your Own Image

When users upload their own images to Magic Avatar and similar apps, they’re essentially selling their personal information for a very low price. Lensa’s privacy policy allows them to “collect and store your Face Data for online processing function.”

Though the images are supposedly automatically deleted within 24 hours after being processed by Lensa, they’re used to train the AI to produce more portraits. Users aren’t compensated when the company uses their images for that purpose. The app thus becomes just another way to give corporations more control over our identities — and that doesn’t seem worth the four bucks.

The post That Popular AI Photo App is Stealing from Human Artists — and Worse first appeared on Dornob.

California-based Egyptian artist and architect Hassan Ragab uses the AI art-generating program Midjourney to stimulate his own creativity, and his latest project may be his most surreal yet. “A State of Decay” takes the aesthetics of Art Nouveau architecture and warps them into dreamlike shapes and proportions. While parts of the buildings appear to be solid stone, others look like billowing smoke condensing down into solid, weight-supporting masses. Check out an animated version on Ragab’s Instagram.

The results are eerily beautiful. The characteristic sinuous, sculptural lines and asymmetrical shapes of Art Nouveau are amplified and exaggerated, morphing from the feasibly real to the blatantly unreal. The fact that such structures are not physically possible (at least, not yet) is actually part of the point. If we don’t believe something is possible, we don’t even attempt to work toward it and solve problems that could make it possible along the way.

It’s clear that AI isn’t quite up to the task of designing buildings that are safe, practical, and realistic, and there’s no danger of it replacing architects anytime soon. For artists like Ragab, using AI programs like Midjourney is a way to push their own creative ideas to the next level and introduce elements of surprise. They input text prompts into the program — perhaps something like “Art Nouveau buildings partially consisting of smoke” in this case. That’s the extent of their own control over the results. The AI inserts its own perceptions, resulting in ideas that could actually be feasible as a source of inspiration for wildly creative new architectural forms and materials.

Some users who are new to AI programs like Midjourney might find they’re getting results that are too similar to those of others. Ragab recommends that they get more specific and experimental with their prompts. “Using the right prompts is only one part of the process,” he writes on Instagram. “There are thousands of possibilities that the prompt alone won’t generate. You have to have a process for prompt writing, generating variations, and tweaking your process as you go. And of course not to mention the most important factor (your unique idea).”

In previous projects, Ragab has used AI to help envision conceptual green facades inspired by nature, organic Gothic facades resembling the work of artist H.R. Giger, an interplay of glass walls and red feathers, and many more awe-inspiring images.

“The more I work with Midjourney the more I know there is more to it,” Ragab adds. “As creatives we always have the moment where we stop. Sometimes because we need to, but most of the times we can’t go any further because we are bored, tired, or because it’s time consuming. And therein lies the true power when working with AI. It allows you to make that push, to add something to your limits in the same way [the] plane allowed us to fly. It’s another barrier that we are breaking. And although there are doubts and too many unknowns, I think we will carry on and time will reveal itself to us with even crazier scenarios than the ones we already have about the future.”

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In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication.

“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

She points out that digital listening posts are now being used to continuously record the sounds of ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the bottom of the ocean. Developments in miniaturization have even enabled scientists to place microphones on tiny animals like honeybees.

“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes. The next step for many scientists is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to sift through these sounds and enable robots to “speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication.”

She cites a team of researchers in Germany that have taught tiny robots how to do the honeybee waggle dance. Using these dancing machines, the scientists were able to command the honeybees to stop moving, and to communicate where to fly to collect a specific nectar. The researchers plan to experiment with implanting robots into the hives so that the honeybees accept them as members of their community.

Bakker also writes about bioacoustics scientist Katie Payne and her discoveries regarding elephant communication. Payne was the first to find that elephants make infrasound signals, sounds below the human hearing range. The vibrations of these signals allow elephants to send messages across long distances through soil and stones. Scientists have since found that elephants have different signals for “honeybee” and “human,” as well as distinguishable signals for “threatening human” versus “nonthreatening human.” If the power of AI could be harnessed to send messages to elephant herds, we might be able to help protect their dwindling populations without removing them from their natural habitats.

Coral reefs also get attention in Bakker’s book. “A healthy coral reef sounds a little bit like an underwater symphony,” she explains. “There are cracks and burbles and hisses and clicks from the reef and its inhabitants and even whales dozens of miles away. If you could hear in the ultrasonic, you might hear the coral itself.” With the use of AI, scientists might eventually be able to get coral to repopulate certain areas by broadcasting “healthy coral reef” sounds to coral larvae.

While the idea of someday having “a zoological version of Google Translate” sounds overwhelmingly positive, there is the fear is that unscrupulous humans might use the technology to control animal populations for their own gain. Bakker warns that the possibility of exploiting animals “raises a lot of alarm bells” and that our “newfound powers” should never be used “to assert our domination over animals and plants.”

The post New AI Tech Allows Humans to Talk to Animals first appeared on Dornob.

The robot’s self-led evolution is part of what makes it so fascinating. It isn’t improving its speed and dexterity thanks to new lines of code in its programming or some kind of robot bootcamp. It’s learning on its own by running through facilities full of obstacles that mimic conditions in the real world.

A lot of robot developers train their creations to navigate rough terrain by essentially running them at full capacity at all times, anticipating the most challenging obstacles like ice on a path. But that makes the robot inefficient, and keeps it from learning through experience. MIT puts the Mini Cheetah and other robots through physical agility courses, but they’ve also found a much faster way to get the results they want: through artificial intelligence.

The Mini Cheetah robot project is led by researchers from the Institute of AI and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) and MIT’s Improbable AI Lab, which is part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) directed by MIT Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal. MIT PhD student Gabriel Margolas and IAIFI postdoc Ge Yang explained the process in an interview with MIT.

“Programming how a robot should act in every possible situation is simply very hard,” Margolas and Yang explain. “The process is tedious, because if a robot were to fail on a particular terrain, a human engineer would need to identify the cause and failure and manually adapt the robot controller, and this process can require substantial human time. Learning by trial and error removes the need for a human to specify precisely how the robot should behave in every situation. This would work if (1) the robot can experience an extremely wide range of terrains; and (2) the robot can automatically improve its behavior with experience.”

“Thanks to modern simulation tools, our robot can accumulate 100 days worth of experience on diverse terrains in just three hours of actual time. We developed an approach by which the robot’s behavior improves from simulated experience, and our approach critically also enables the successful deployment of those learned behaviors in the real world.”

The Mini Cheetah features a mechanically robust design that lets it survive accidents and high-impact falls. It’s powered by high-torque actuators that allow for omnidirectional movement with different gaits depending on the terrain: trotting, pacing, bounding, and something called “pronking,” a behavior seen in animals like gazelles that involves springing into the air and lifting all four feet off the ground simultaneously.

This is what allows the Mini Cheetah to do a 360-degree backflip, which it was able to do before it could even walk. The cheetah has also learned how to turn at high speeds and run with a disabled leg. To understand just how agile the Mini Cheetah really is, you have to see it in action. Check out this video from MIT CSAIL showing the robot’s latest evolution.

The post MIT’s Frighteningly Fast Robot Cheetah Uses AI to Break Speed Records first appeared on Dornob.

The wires-out bot was able to walk around on the stage, wave, and even “raise the roof.” Although this was “literally the first time the robot [had] operated without a tether,” in theory, Optimus — also known as Tesla bot — will be able to lift enormous loads and traverse tricky terrain. It uses “essentially the same self-driving car computer” that controls Tesla’s electric cars and is outfitted with a host of video feeds to direct its movements.

During the presentation, Tesla engineers explained that proprietary actuators, which act as muscles for the humanoid bot, could allow it to lift objects many times its weight. The adaptive robotic hands will also be able to independently move their fingers and manipulate a wide range of objects.

While the robot didn’t show off many skills on stage, the presentation featured video of a tethered Optimus walking around Tesla HQ delivering boxes to desks and watering office plants.

After debuting the “Bumble C” prototype, as he called it, Musk explained that his team had already moved on to developing the next model, which he plans to put into production. Three Tesla engineers then brought the sleeker version to the stage, where it waved but could not walk.

Musk first introduced the concept of his Optimus robot at last year’s AI Day, but without a shred of physical work to show, he presented a dancer dressed in Tesla bot spandex instead. Since then, the company has been hard at work on the new prototype. The production model bot features customized Tesla actuators and is getting a special battery that can hopefully allow it to work for a full day on a single charge.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done to refine Optimus and prove it,” Musk said, adding, “I think Optimus is going to be incredible in five or 10 years, like mind blowing.”

“We are trying to follow the goal of fastest path to a useful robot that can be made at volume,” he added, estimating that the Tesla bot could be commercially available within three to five years. Musk also posited that when manufactured en masse, the cost should be much less than that of a car. “I would say probably less than $20,000 would be my guess.”

He envisions Optimus robots eventually creating an army of productivity. “This means a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty, where people, you can have whatever you want, in terms of products and services. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it,” he said with his characteristically dramatic flair.

Musk also believes that this type of cutting-edge AI should be for everyone, not just the private sector. “It’s very important that the corporate entity that makes this happen is something that the public can properly influence,” he said. “So I think the Tesla structure is ideal for that.”

And although the Optimus robot is a bit of a departure from Tesla’s long-standing mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” Musk defended his humanoid helper by saying: “I think the mission does somewhat broaden with the advent of Optimus to — you know, I don’t know: making the future awesome.”

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Announcing its vision for “ambient intelligence” at a device event on October 5th, the tech giant described a home in which artificial intelligence machines and services sense the state of the residents’ environment to help in every situation when assistance is needed, either initiated by the occupant or automatically by the AI algorithms.

“Today, ambient intelligence comes to life across all of our devices and services, working behind the scenes on customers’ behalf, so they can focus on the here and now, and the people and experiences that matter most to them,” said Amazon’s head of Devices and Services Dave Limp at the event.

As a Star Trek fan, Amazon Devices & Services VP and General Manager of Consumer Robotics Ken Washington foresaw the future of ambient intelligence back in 2016 when he bought his first Amazon Echo smart speaker.

“I started building these scripts — a series of instructions — in my home so that when I walked into a room, lights would come on, when I left the room, lights would go off, when I turned on my stereo or my TV, the lights would dim,” he said on the company website. “Back then, that was really novel. It made my home feel like I was living on the starship Enterprise.”

While Washington had the personal know-how to create the scripts, Amazon has since brought that level of functionality to the everyday consumer. “Alexa is really core to our journey around ambient intelligence,” explains Amazon Vice President Heather Zorn. “This is really about creating an intelligent AI that works on your behalf out of the box, so you don’t have to have any specialized knowledge to get real value.”

She said she uses ambient intelligence technology to wake up her boys for school with lights that turn on at a certain time and a peppy morning song played by Echo.

Amazon has over 300 devices that can connect with Echo, including the just-launched Halo Rise, a non-contact bedside device for monitoring your sleep each night, and the Fire TV Omni QLED Series, which will automatically adjust its display based on the amount of light in the room, is voice controlled, and can essentially act as a giant Alexa. And of course, there are the favorites like Ring doorbells, smart thermostats, and even Amazon’s Astro robot-dog, which can follow you around and bring you household items.

Amazon’s internet-blanketed houses can also utilize a new “Hunches” feature to sense if things are off from normal routines. “[Hunches] can be super powerful,” Zorn adds “If every night you turn off your kitchen light before bed at 10 p.m. and then one night you don’t, Alexa can ask if you want the light off and, if you want, turn it off on your behalf moving forward.”

While a home that does everything for you does sound incredible, critics point out that users who buy into the ambient intelligence pitch are exchanging their privacy for convenience. Although Amazon continually promises that “customer trust is paramount in everything we do,” the company has a long history of privacy violations. In 2021, for example, Amazon earned the biggest privacy fine ever issued for breaching the EU’s regulations on how to process personal data.

It will ultimately be up to Amazon customers to ask themselves whether having a fully automated, environment-sensing home is worth being spied on at every moment of the day. For many, the answer is already a resounding yes.

The post Amazon’s Ambient Intelligence Takes Homes into the Realm of (Dystopian?) Sci Fi first appeared on Dornob.

“I would like to share with you the first collection of images of my AI-based project called ‘As if nothing happened,’” the Istanbul-based artist said in an Instagram post. “Behind this project lies the question of ‘how would people look photo-realistically if some great events had not happened to them.’”

Using cutting-edge technology, Yesiltas, who is also a lawyer by day, took old photographs of ten famous musicians, actors, and icons and gave them crow’s feet and gray hair to imagine their 2022 appearance.

“When I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest,” he told Bored Panda. “I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me, and that’s how this project emerged.”

His version of an un-spectacled John Lennon features the singer with a tangle of windblown silver hair and a full white beard. Lennon would have been 82 this year; he was only 40 when a crazed fan shot and killed him in 1980.

Heath Ledger, who would have been 43 this year, has a slightly pushed-back hairline and a few more creases around his mouth and eyes. The actor, who posthumously won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his twisted portrayal of The Joker in the 2008 film The Dark Knight, died in 2008 at the age of 28 from what was deemed an accidental overdose.

Yesiltas’ iteration of Freddie Mercury adds streaks of gray to his bushy mustache. The lead singer of Queen would have been 76 this year; he died at age 45 from complications of AIDS.

His likeness of Michael Jackson not only envisions what the musical legend would have looked like at age 64 (he died in 2009 from being overmedicated), but also how he would have appeared without any plastic surgeries or the vitiligo that changed his skin coloring.

“The hardest part of the creative process for me is making the image feel ‘real’ to me,” Yesiltas explains. “The moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me looks very realistic as if it was taken by a photographer.”

Other celebrities in his first series of photos included Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, Elvis Presley, and Tupac Shakur.

Far and above the rest of the portraits, the photographer garnered the most online criticism for his depiction of Princess Diana. Although still beautiful, reviewers thought Yesiltas gave her too many wrinkles for what would have been her current age of 61. “This could had been Princess Diana when she turned 70,” or “If Diana was hitting the meth pipe, maybe…” were among the comments on Instagram.

After asking for viewer feedback and suggestions, Yesiltas also responded to pleas for an aged Selena, Amy Winehouse, and Paul Walker.

As an artist, Yesiltas has been “imagining scenes and capturing memories for 19 years.” His photos have made it into many books, magazines, exhibitions, and websites over that time, earning him several awards in the process. More of his work can be found on his Instagram account.

The post Photographer Uses AI to Imagine What Dead Celebrities Would Look Like Today first appeared on Dornob.

When machines can produce stunning masterpieces that mimic a human’s signature style, that artist’s work can suddenly seem less valuable. But a recent project by Manas Bhatia shows us one way in which artificial intelligence could enhance our creativity instead of replacing it. Envisioning what organic architecture of the future could look like, “Symbiotic Architecture” breaks through our understanding of what’s actually possible and asks us to think about our built environment a little differently.

Bhatia, an architectural designer based in India, uses the AI art generator Midjourney as a tool to overcome his own conscious and subconscious assumptions. He’s particularly interested in finding sustainable solutions that are able to withstand climate change by acting more like natural structures than artificial environments. For Symbiotic Architecture, he asked the program to combine an apartment building with Hyperion, a towering 380-foot redwood in California that’s considered the world’s tallest-known living tree. He entered combinations of words like “giant,” “hollowed,” “tree,” “stairs,” and “facade,” continuing to alter the prompts until he got the results he wanted.

The final digital works of art produced by the program are nothing less than stunning, even if they seem completely impossible in the real world. Massive coastal redwoods the size of Hyperion and even larger are pierced with glass-clad dwelling units stacked on top of each other. Little sprouts of leaves pop up here and there between windows and balconies. The images give us an idea of what the world might look like if human dwellings were more like those of ants and other creatures that build their homes from the world around them. The idea is that the structures we live in breathe and potentially even grow as a part of nature instead of attempting to be separate from it.

Would we really want to insert architecture into existing groves of sensitive, slow-growing, and endangered redwoods? Definitely not, but that’s not really the point. Just because our existing construction methods, materials, and technologies aren’t capable of producing safe and durable buildings that look like this doesn’t mean we can’t develop new ones that can. Working backwards from fantastical ideas could produce amazing innovations that allow us to burst out of our minimalist architectural stagnancy. For instance, it’s not that hard to imagine something like a naturally reproducing fungus-based material growing to a desired shape and size around a framework of modular living pods with an appearance resembling these giant inhabitable trees.

“The project began as an AI-based investigation into the interactions we have all had with nature, such as appreciating a tree’s shade on a hot day, reading a newspaper in a courtyard under a tree, or simply hanging out in a park to take in the changing hues of the leaves,” Bhatia explains. “Building on these observations came the idea of a ‘utopian future’ in which buildings are not machines made of steel or concrete…Instead, the structure is alive and has the ability to grow and breathe.”

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Sales of NFTs skyrocketed to $25 billion last year, and art NFTs got a big boost during Christie’s fourth annual Art+Tech Summit in August with $93 million in sales. Most art NFTs are original creations by humans, but the new wave of AI-generative NFTs highlights the potential for people to collaborate with machines to produce unique images. Whether those images mimic art or actually qualify as art might be a matter of personal opinion, at least for now. But some artists are telling Cointelgraph that they find the process of co-creation with AI surprisingly freeing, with results that can be remarkably indistinguishable from human-created works.

This piece by Claire Silver, “Cassandra Ex Machina,” is one example. There are no obvious tell-tale signs of AI participation in the image, like strange little swirls of surplus imagery hidden in the details. Created using a text-to-art generator called Eponym, which was developed by Art AI, the piece and others like it turn phrases into unique NFT art pieces, and each text prompt can only be generated once. As it turns out, NFT collectors are definitely interested in these collaborative pieces; Eponym’s first offerings created by 3,500 artists sold out overnight on NFT marketplace OpenSea.

A glance at the Eponym collection on OpenSea gives you an idea of what’s possible with these kinds of AI art generation engines. With titles like “Gateway to heaven,” “There was chaos, there was dancing” and “Moon colony xi,” they encompass a wide variety of styles, some looking a little more digital than others. Another platform, Metascapes, consists of 3,333 AI-generated NFTs based on landscape photography from around the world, and the images are strikingly photorealistic.

With Wall Street starting to turn its attention toward NFTs, we may be heading towards a whole new way of doing business as part of the development of the larger metaverse. Facebook’s transition to Meta and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent focus on this network of 3D virtual worlds may spur skeptics to take concepts like cryptocurrency and NFTs more seriously. Before long, our concept of the metaverse is likely to shift from the virtual worlds of video games like Fortnite to a multilayered digital reality with its veryown economy.

A lot of the technology that companies like Meta are hyping as part of the metaverse doesn’t even exist yet (like all those holograms they show floating in the air), but when things solidify a bit more, art is inevitably going to be a big part of the picture. We’ll probably be debating whether computers really count as artists for years into the future, and what it says about the distinctions of our own creations.

For Silver, the creator of “Cassandra Ex Machina,” AI image generation is an extremely useful tool that more artists should take advantage of. “Being able to work with an AI to bring your ideas to life is an experience like no other, it augments creativity in a way that feels like freedom, a type of play you haven’t experienced since you were a child,” she told Cointelgraph.

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Today’s social and economic climate make this device especially attractive. According to a study from the American Psychological Association, Americans are more stressed out than ever, with 47 percent of adults reporting feelings of anxiety, 44 percent feeling sad, and 39 percent feeling extreme anger. No wonder a mind-trainer that pledges inner tranquility and relief from brain fog is in high demand.

And lots of people are apparently excited and ready to supercharge their brains, as the project met its crowdfunding goal within three hours of its campaign posting on Indiegogo. With 24 days left to go at the time of writing, backers have already raised over $655,000, 2,184 percent of the original $30,000 goal.

“We believe that through Sens.ai, anyone can finally have access to world-class neuro-optimization technology in the comfort of their own home and at an approachable cost,” says Paola Telfer, CEO and founder of Sens.ai. “One of the many benefits of Sens.ai is the ability to reduce stress and increase happiness. Many people struggle to reduce stress levels quickly and long term. This is where Sens.ai comes into play, utilizing personalized HRV and neurofeedback training technology, it empowers people to quickly summon calm when they feel stress and more importantly, train calm as a long-term, substance-free habit.”

The headset features sensors that can take in data from the brain and body and use it to provide audiovisual feedback. Its Gamma-grade sensors can read the fastest brainwaves, while the Pulse Oximeter sensor monitors heart signals thousands of times per second, measuring heart rate variability and allowing the Sens.ai to tailor a training program to increase heart coherence, an indicator of a balanced nervous system.

Sens.ai also incorporates photobiomodulation, a type of infrared light therapy used to stimulate the gray matter. LEDs strategically placed in the headset send out light energy that is absorbed by photoreceptors in the brain, initiating metabolic processes that improve circulation and oxygen utilization. The company says the result is an “energy lift” and an “accelerated ability to learn.”

Pairing with a phone app, users will be able to access 20 different brain-enhancing courses, each lasting eight to 12 weeks. Some are aimed at cognitive speed, others include mindful meditations, and others still endeavor to increase things like memory retention and concentration. Users can also access programs to help with better sleep, resilience, creativity, or clarity.

During the training programs, the user’s brainwaves are converted into lights and sounds on the phone app. The lights get higher and the sounds get louder and more frequent when the user is doing well and in “the training zone.” The headset sensors will also sense when the wearer needs a neuro boost and activate the LED lights for an immediately felt state change. The results can be tracked on the app afterwards and monitored for progress.

The Sens.ai team of cognitive experts says it built the device on decades of neurotechnology research. With several patents pending, they claim that their headset is the most comprehensive brain training solution offered at home. It can produce results with just 20 minutes of use, three times a week.

“The most exciting technology revolution is not outer space, it’s the exploration of inner space,” the company says on its Indiegogo campaign page.

The base-model Sens.ai is currently on offer for $999 on Indiegogo, with the brain-training devices expected to ship out in the second quarter of 2022.

The post The Sens.ai Headset Promises a Sharper, Faster, Better Brain first appeared on Dornob.

Designed by Bumblebee Spaces, a San Francisco-based startup founded by former Tesla and Apple engineers, this robotic system hides a bed, a desk, and even storage within a ceiling compartment, making the 470-square-foot studio units feel a lot more livable. Mounted to a grid capable of holding several tons of weight, the system also responds to voice commands, so you can simply ask it to move the furniture around at your whims. No need to open an app or even press a button.

Made of stylish light-colored wood, the system blends right into the contemporary style of the apartment interior and boasts built-in LED lighting. When the components are lowered, the surprisingly narrow supports are visible in each corner, maintaining a light and open feel. Taking the automation of the room even further, the system uses artificial intelligence to recognize various objects and remember where you put them. Lost your keys or sunglasses? Just ask. It’ll also learn your daily routine, and can be set to shape-shift at certain times of the day without being prompted.

Another cool feature is the system’s ability to photograph and catalog the contents of the storage bins that retreat into the ceiling on all sides of the bed (an add-on for which you can choose two, four, or six compartments). The Bumblebee app lets you preview your boxes so you know exactly which one you need to access instead of lowering each one and physically sorting through them. Built-in sensors and other safety features ensure the kinetic components won’t put any people or pets in danger.

The studio apartment itself features nine-foot ceilings made of exposed concrete, floor to ceiling windows, and monolithic resin floors, as well as several spacious closets, Italian stainless steel cabinets in the kitchen, and a stainless steel suite of appliances. Needless to say, it’s rare for rentals to have features like the $12,000 to $30,000 Bumblebee system, especially at a rent price that’s not too far from average in New York City. These five apartments will rent for $3,550 a month, and with four months free in a 16-month lease, they average out to even less. The building’s market-rate rentals will go for about $2,056 a month, and the affordable units, which make up about a third of the building, are even less.

BIG’s design for The Smile is a response to New York City’s 1916 zoning resolution, which calls for “stepped facade” towers to allow sufficient light and air to filter down to street level. Other unusual amenities in the building include a game room, co-working studio, demo kitchen, fitness center with Peloton bikes, yoga room, steam room, dry sauna, and “sensory experience showers.”

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Art recovery company Oxia Palus told CNN they were initially able to partially discern the figure of a nude woman underneath the newer layers of paint using a superimposed X-ray fluorescence (XRF) image, but the other technologies have allowed them to bring the hidden work “back to life,” more or less as it looked when Picasso originally painted it. The XRF imaging and image processing revealed the outline, and then the company trained artificial intelligence to add brushstrokes in Picasso’s unique style using his other works.

To get the recreation of “The Lonesome Crouching Nude” as accurate as possible, they didn’t just rely on how the brushstrokes look when viewed straight-on. They used a height map of the portrait to give it texture, printing the image onto canvas with 3D printing to achieve the impasto of layered paints that give Picasso’s originals their lush painterly quality.

Finding a new Picasso is monumental regardless of the circumstances, but the fact that this work dates to the artist’s “Blue Period” makes it all the more important. As Oxia Palus co-founder George Cann notes, “At the time that Picasso painted ‘The Lonesome Crouching Nude’ and ‘The Blind Man’s Meal’ he was poor and artist materials were expensive, so he likely painted over the former work with reluctance.”

Considering that the figure has previously appeared in a number of Picasso’s sketches and in another painting, “La Vie,” Cann believes she was meaningful to the artist. “I hope that Picasso would be happy I knowing the treasure he’s hidden for future generations is finally being revealed, 48 years after his death and 118 years after the painting was concealed,” he told CNN.

Oxia Palus call themselves “the world’s first NeoMasters,” bringing to life an “artist parallel universe” currently disguised under unknown quantities of master artworks in collections around the world. Painting over older works is a common practice among artists, so there are potentially thousands of undiscovered works waiting to be unveiled by some of history’s most celebrated artists.

The company previously helped to reveal another Picasso, “La Femme Perdue,” disguised beneath the well-known work “The Old Guitarist,” painted in 1903 and 1904. Conservationists had discovered its rough outline in 1986 thorough x-radiography, but artificial intelligence made it possible to see the full piece. Oxia Palus also found an older Madonna hidden behind Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks.” In addition to printing them on canvas, the company reproduces the newly uncovered works on proprietary NFT ArtSticks for digital display.

The company works under the guidance of leading experts in art and computer vision, including Dr. David G. Stork, and is constantly looking for new talent to continue their search for unknown masterpieces, including Technical Art Historians, Spectroscopists (specialized in IRR, XRF and UV imaging), and Machine Learning Engineers.

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The Lumina webcam offers three essential features that set it apart from all the others. First, it uses artificial intelligence and a CMOS sensor to auto-correct for ideal color. The user simply holds up the included color card and it automatically pairs with the camera, giving the system a baseline “for realistic color which is used to repair color deficiencies, find the perfect exposure levels, and correct for lighting temperature.” Users can customize even further, if desired, by fine-tuning the camera’s 30-plus settings and parameters.

Second, it allows for a DSLR bokeh effect with its innovative blurring techniques. Inspired by the way 3D gaming engines use blur functions, Lumina can keep the user looking crisp and crystal clear while softly fading the background, allowing the focus to stay entirely on the person in the center. Users can manually adjust the amount of blur and even add RGB/HSV transformations if desired.

Third, Lumina includes an auto-framing “cameraman” feature that tracks the subject’s face and body position. This means the background will be ideally composed no matter how often a person moves around during a call. The ultra-wide 95-degree field-of-view lens works with the AI Cameraman software to “adjust everything from video framing, transition speeds, reaction time, and even the transition easing curve to be more fluid and natural.”

The camera’s compact body is made of aluminum, with a choice of four sophisticated colors: gold, rose gold, dark gray, and silver. And at just 2.75 inches long, it’s even smaller than a tube of lipstick. The Lumina package also includes a magnetic privacy cover “that snaps on like magic,” a camera mount, two USB-C cables, and a 17-patch color card for calibration.

Being able to appear perfectly photogenic on each online interaction is apparently a prevalent desire, as Lumina’s Indiegogo campaign raised over 5,000 percent of its funding goal from more than 4,000 supporters with six days left to go.

Lumina’s CEO Raymond Lei is no stranger to finding a need and filling it. After a frustrating interaction while trying to order t-shirts for his high school tennis club, Lei was inspired to improve the online shopping experience for everyone. Starting with just $2,000, he started his own t-shirt company “ooShirts.” After its massive success, he dropped out of UC Berkeley to create Scalable, a multi-million dollar firm that builds e-commerce infrastructure for entrepreneurs. After a year of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, he realized the universal lack of video quality for conference calls and decided to solve that problem, too. Together with Chief Technology Officer Mike Xia, they created the Lumina 4K webcam to give everyone a leg up on Zoom.

Early bird backers of the crowdfunding campaign were offered the AI webcam package for $170, a 32-percent discount from the intended price. The website says Lumina will start shipping sometime after mid-October 2021.

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Albert Zhang, founder and CEO of AiTreat, began his career as a trained TCM physician. He quickly found that delivering treatments was “tedious and repetitive.” He began formulating the idea of EMMA as a way for doctors to use their time more efficiently.

“One physician can only see one patient at a time, but with EMMA, the physician can operate two robots and see up to four patients simultaneously,” he told CNN.

While he doesn’t intend for robots to replace professional masseuses, Zhang says they can do the majority of the massage therapy, allowing their human counterparts to “focus on the 10 percent highly skilled part” and saving them from the exhausting strain on their muscles throughout the day.

“By using Emma to do the labor-intensive massages, we can now offer a longer therapy session for patients while reducing the cost of treatment,” said Zhang in the Robotics Business Review, adding that “the human therapist is then free to focus on other areas such as the neck and limb joints, which EMMA can’t massage at the moment.”

And EMMA can replicate human touch in her massage movements quite convincingly. Using sensors and 3D vision technology, the machine measures muscle stiffness and identifies pressure points. Having been programmed with thousands of data points like various body shapes and sizes and massage types, the AI machine can develop a custom regimen tailored to each patient’s meridian and acupoints. EMMA’s robotic arm also moves extremely methodically, with soft touch treatment modules warmed to a comfortable range of 100 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The principle of traditional Chinese medicine is all about personalized treatments,” Zhang explains, stressing that his smart machine is “highly flexible and customizable.”

As an added safety measure, the force exerted by EMMA is limited to a maximum of 100 Newtons, or “an impact that will feel no more painful than getting struck by an [elevator] door (commonly 150 Newtons),” the company website assures. And patients always have complete control over the robot during the massage. They can adjust the strength of the movements as well as stop the treatment immediately at any point.

Zhang’s massage robot has been operating for over four years now, with 11 functioning versions of EMMA at eight different clinics in Singapore. To gain widespread acceptance of the AI masseuse, he is planning to conduct clinical trials in Germany, China, and Singapore to test her medical efficacy. He is already seeing great interest from practitioners in China and the US.

“I think it’s only the beginning,” says Zhang. “I can see that with support from the physicians, from different countries, the robot will be better and better, and more and more people will benefit from this robotic technology.”

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Since the movie is about a scientist who can help people relive their pasts, after uploading a photo of yourself on this website, the AI-driven tech animates your mugshot and guides you through the process of revisiting the past, seeing yourself smile, move, and blink in a pretty convincing manner.

“It’s a new kind of experience,” said D-ID CEO and co-founder Gil Perry in an interview with Fast Company of the eerie personalized trailers. “The audience can engage and kind of feel the emotions of being inside the experience, the movie.”

At the end of the video, the website gives you option to buy tickets to the real movie in theaters or share your clip on social media. This kind of individualized marketing strategy is quickly gaining traction as it’s proven to lead to greater audience engagement and more movie theater foot traffic. In fact, Perry says his company is already working with other studios to create similar marketing promos.

D-ID, founded in 2017 by Perry, COO Sella Blondheim, and CTO Eliran Kuta, started as a privacy protection service, giving businesses the ability to “de-identify” photos, removing any “sensitive biometric data and personally identifiable information from facial images.” To the naked eye, the photos look the same, but a computer would be unable to decrypt or reverse-engineer it, thereby providing anti-hacking protection.

The Tel Aviv-based company made waves back in February when it partnered with genealogy website MyHeritage to let customers bring pictures of their deceased ancestors to life. “We’re basically transforming all the photos in the world to videos – we like to say we ‘Harry Potter-ize’ the world.”

The photo/videos are disconcertingly realistic. D-ID has worked tirelessly to achieve this effect with all different types of images. “The hard part is when you have no different angles – for example, you can upload a photo which is very frontal and without teeth,” Perry said in a piece for Tech Radar. “Our algorithms know how to predict and create the missing parts that you didn’t have in the photo – for example, ears, teeth, the background. Basically, we cross what people call the uncanny valley.”

Perry believes there are ample possibilities for his company’s deepfake capabilities, especially in the entertainment field. Most notably, it allows movie directors to play around with stunts and special effects before even casting the actors. “We can animate and bring to life things that are not real humans, but animals, cartoons, paintings,” he explains, adding that “it really helps save money for pre-production, when filmmakers are not really sure what the movie is going to look like.”

Currently, D-ID is in talks with stock photo companies, a place where customers might want the ability to change the expressions or angles of the models for their own needs.

“What we offer companies or businesses is the ability to create meaningful, creative reality experiences,” Perry says. “We give them the tools to do things they couldn’t do before — creative things that can engage an audience.”

The post This AI Startup can Deepfake You into a Hollywood Movie first appeared on Dornob.

In the wake of the COVID-19 social distancing protocols, the fashion artist fine-tuned her “Proximity Dress,” which uses ultrasonic sensors to inflate at the hips if someone gets too close for comfort, creating a larger personal bubble for the wearer. She originally unveiled a prototype of the outfit back in 2012 but has since added 3D-printed elements everywhere, as well as noise-free sensors.

“I haven’t made dresses for myself in a long time,” she wrote, “and I got a bit fed up with people in public not considering the current distancing suggestions, so this one I’m keeping…”

The white “smart dress” appears unassuming enough when in resting position, but when the thermal sensors around the neck detect a stranger within a defined space around the wearer’s body, the built-in robotic 3D-printed hip mechanisms activate, and the skirt expands on either side. The effect is a little like a pufferfish swelling up when threatened.

One of her previous interactive creations, the “Spider” dress, has arachnid-like arms that extend in a defensive position when outsiders come too close. That 3D-printed design garnered acclaim around the world, being included in fashion shows in Amsterdam, Russia, and China.

Wipprecht explains that her “designs are based on the Proxemics Theory of Edward T. Hall. This defines four spaces around the body, each with their own characteristic distances. Whereas Hall had to measure the space between people using a wooden stick, I have been working since 2007 to translate these concepts into the digital domain, in order to measure the spaces between people up to a range of 25 feet.”

To accomplish this goal, the sensors on the Proximity Dress provide readings from high-output acoustic power with real-time waveform signature analysis and automatic calibration. And don’t worry, the suit doesn’t record any video imagery for its motion detection, so no one’s privacy is being violated during the detection process.

Wipprecht got her start in fashion while still in high school. “I was really fascinated by the notion that the people really express themselves through basically the things that they wear,” she says.

As time went on, however, her designs began to feel stale. “I started to notice that the garments that I was creating were ‘analog.’ They were not doing anything. They were not sensory. They were not changing.” Since that time, she’s worked to incorporate technology, including artificial intelligence, into every piece of clothing, allowing her pieces to move, breathe, and react to the environment around them.

Her next focus is on clothing that can visually gauge the wearer’s anxiety and depression levels. Her “Pangolin” prototype requires the use of a headset that can track the brain’s electrical signals and display them on the outfit. When someone is feeling calm, the outfit’s lights turn a soothing shade of purple.

When stress levels rise, the lights flicker and the motorized “scales” flap rapidly. “We live in a time and age [when] negative emotions start to take over,” Wipprecht notes, adding that “a lot of people start getting into more depressive modes, maybe not wanting to speak about it… So, [the Pangolin dress] might even create a situation that these things become more discussable.”

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