Hi my name is Ajani McIntosh. I am a student at Farmingdale State College and I am conducting a research on how the driving experiment affects the functioning of the driver. This survey should take between 2-3 minutes. I intend to use the data I gain strictly for my course and for nothing else. The data collected will not be used for financial, political or legal gain. Your participation is appreciated and voluntary. If you find any of the questions too personal or excessive, you can leave the survey as you please. Please note that if your entry is incomplete, it will not be included in the data leading to the conclusion of my research. Thank you for your participation and time.

Here is the link to the survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdSQ0yKbLi1bfGOG6f6jQu4vOKuYm-F-si-xszopjbOMLk4RQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

I have prior experience of working on a very interesting project: Prostate Cancer Detection using Deep Learning in Histopathology slides, it was in collaboration with Helsinki University Hospital. Now, I am interested in working on something beyond classification. I am also going through relevant publications but at the same time, I need some feedback from the community about interesting problems.

Here’s a twitter thread including a video of a ragdoll getting lots of cubes in the face: https://twitter.com/profbof/status/1194734191843454976

Here’s a blog post: https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/drecon-data-driven-responsive-control-of-physics-based-characters

Here’s a paper, which will be presented at Siggraph Asia next week: https://static-wordpress.akamaized.net/montreal.ubisoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/13214229/DReCon.pdf

And here’s a high level explanation of what this is all about:

Physics-based animation holds the promise of unlocking unprecedented levels of interaction, fidelity, and variety in games. The intricate interactions between a character and it’s environment can only be faithfully synthesized by respecting real physical principles. On the other hand, data-driven animation systems utilizing large amounts of motion capture data have already shown that artistic style and motion variety can be preserved even when tight constraints on responsiveness and motion control objectives are required by a game’s design.

To combine the strengths of both methods we developed DReCon, a character controller created using deep reinforcement learning. Essentially, simulated human characters learn to move around and balance from precisely controllable motion capture examples. Once trained, gamepad controlled characters can be fully simulated using physics and simultaneously directed with a high level of responsiveness at a surprisingly low runtime cost on today’s hardware.

Pruning is a technique in deep learning that aids in the development of smaller and more efficient neural networks. It’s a model optimization technique that involves eliminating unnecessary values in the weight tensor. This results in compressed neural networks that run faster, reducing the computational cost involved in training the networks.

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More at https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/research-guide-pruning-techniques-for-neural-networks-d9b8440ab10d

I’ve been looking at StackOverflow etc for an answer to this question, and so far I’ve only seen that time is not a good way of measuring how long a classifier takes to run on a dataset.

Is there a better method of measuring the “time” it takes for a classifier to run?

What are your thoughts?

Hello all,

I’m writing here to discuss a bit of a moral dilemma I’m having at work with a new project we got handed. Here it is in a nutshell :

Provide a tool that can gauge a person’s personality just from an image of their face. This can then be used by an HR office to help out with sorting job applicants.

So first off, there is no concrete proof that this is even possible. I mean, I have a hard time believing that our personality is characterized by our facial features. Lots of papers claim this to be possible, but they don’t give accuracies above 20%-25%. (And if you are detecting a person’s personality using the big 5, this is simply random.) This branch of pseudoscience was discredited in the Middle Ages for crying out loud.

Second, if somehow there is a correlation, and we do develop this tool, I don’t want to be anywhere near the training of this algorithm. What if we underrepresent some population class? What if our algorithm becomes racist/ sexist/ homophobic/ etc… The social implications of this kind of technology used in a recruiter’s toolbox are huge.

Now the reassuring news is that the team I work with all have the same concerns as I do. The project is still in its State-of-the-Art phase, and we are hoping that it won’t get past the Proof-of-Concept phase. Hell, my boss told me that it’s a good way to “empirically prove that this mumbo jumbo does not work.”

What do you all think?