Interesting Things
A running list of interesting projects, articles, and resources.
Nov 6, 2017
- Interview with artist Robertina Šebjanič, who makes work about underwater sound pollution and jellyfish communication
- Google's open source chatbot platform bottery
- Joi Ito's essay Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto
- Crazy paper on tricking computer vision system
- Adam Harvey's project MegaPixels, which compares your face to machine learning datasets and finds the nearest match
Oct 30, 2017
- Perfect timing for Halloween: an hour of imaginary celebrities from NVIDIA
- Machine learning project from Mario Klingemann using textures from electron microscope photos to draw emoji
- Some seriously crazy new tools from Adobe
- National Novel Generation Month (or NaNoGenMo) starts November 1!
- Stevens Venture Center call for participants for an upcoming hackathon, plus volunteers and mentors
Oct 23, 2017
- This is what happens when you win Paperclips
- Talk by game designer David O'Reilly (maker of the game Everything) at NYU Game Center
- Some very cool videos/images of Nervous System's new geode-inspired puzzle (1, 2, 3)
Oct 16, 2017
- Very interesting show in Philadelphia titled Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art, & Technology (1968–85)
- Show at ZKM titled Open Codes: Living in Digital Worlds
- A Javascript clone of Tetris that takes only 509-bytes of code
- TechCrunch article Thoughts on White People Using Dark-Skinned Emoji
- Fantastic deep look at animation and the uncanny valley from Alan Warburton
- Gerenominos, cards for generating ideas for interactive artworks from Kate Compton
- Every wonder why it's called "upper" and "lower" case letters? Here's the answer.
- The addictive clicker game Paperclips, which has the bonus as being a good example of training a machine learning system
Oct 2, 2017
- Google's deeplearn.js code and tutorials
- Another, related, resource from Google: a machine learning glossary
- Interesting piece from Aeon about art, algorithms, and creativity
- Cool post from IEEE on the Apollo program's "rope memory"
- Short piece in the Guardian on Cathy On'Neil and her view that algorithms are destructive
- Blog post on a project mining "collective memory" from Wikipedia visits
Sept 25, 2017
- VICE documentary on an early, all-analog motion graphics system
- HARVEST, a project by Julian Oliver that uses wind power to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research
- Creative Applications, a blog about art and technology, starts using Javascript-based Bitcoin mining code in place of ads
- Guggenheim pulls several works after protests from animal rights groups and an online petition
- Twitter now maxes out at 280 characters... if you don't speak a "cramming" language
Sept 18, 2017
- Using a neural network to name guinea pigs
- The Smithsonian's record of the first computer "bug" ever found
- Nice piece on painter Frank Auerbach
- Giant language-processing/data-vis project mapping all North American English dialects
- Insane collaborative "code golf" project creating a working version of Tetris within Conway's Game of Life
- Lore-El Center's LeadHERship Conference is October 21
- VA&T bowling night!
Sept 11, 2017
- Interesting, and disturbing, research out of Stanford showing an 80-90% accuracy rate predicting sexual orientation using deep neural networks: the paper and author's comments, which address many of the troubling issues
- Lessons From Early AI, an essay by Daniel Temkin on his Esoteric Codes excellent blog
- Two years later, Reddit's closing of several subreddits drastically reduces hate speech on the site
- An interesting interview with artist Sebastian Schmieg on images and code
- The NY Art Book Fair is Sept 21–24 at MoMA PS1!
- Registered to vote in Hudson County? Registration drive on campus next Monday from 1–3, in the lobby outside the dining hall!
Sept 4, 2017
- Our supercomputer needs a name! Help us by filling out this form with a suggestion
- A few more weeks left to see Ian Cheng's installation Emissaries at PS1
- Artist Lauren McCarthy's LAUREN
- Sci fi writer Ursula Le Guin's amazing essay A Rant About "Technology"
- An interesting thread on using machine learning to identify neo-Nazi symbols
- Stevens Venture Center's Digital Healthcare Hackathon
May 1, 2017
- Aerial Bold, a project pulling letterforms from satellite images
- White Collar Crime Risk Zones, a project from The New Inquiry using machine learning to predict where financial crimes are likely to occur
- Two really (really) in-depth articles on how scrolling and typing work
- What museums learn by tracking your phone
- Article on A/B testing in social networks like OkCupid
- Purdue University acquires the for-profit Kaplan University (who will keep 12.5% of revenue generated)
- Interesting take on digital voice assistants like Siri and Alexa as skeumorphic
- Short video documentary on twins who make art (and money) on Instagram
April 17, 2017
- Artists Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti form a shell company to photograph tax havens
- Field of Vision – The Moderators, a documentary about internet moderators from Ciaran Cassidy and Adrian Chen
- Water Printer by Daniel Watkins
- Exhibition of 64 early internet artifacts in London
- Pretty cool making-of video for Sherman Williams by Psyop
- Interactive, online course about probability from Brown University
- Important work: using machine learning to analyze internet dog slang
April 10, 2017
- Google releases their Earth Engine geospatial data and tools
- Smithsonian Folkways' recordings of an office from 1964
- Zach Lieberman's writeup of how his installation Más Que la Cara was developed
- Nice piece on data and research titled Ten Simple Rules for Responsible Big Data Research
- David Bowen's SPACEJUNK: a sculpture where sticks point to the oldest piece of space debris as it flies overhead
- Cool project Unpaywall, an extension showing open access versions of research behind paywalls
- Great documentation of The Counterpointer, a synth that generates three-part harmonies in the style of Bach
April 3, 2017
- Redesigning the classic Zapfino typeface for Arabic
- Mastadon.social, an open-source, distributed alternative to Twitter
- Abstract, software for designing interfaces
- Very weird machines for testing food properties
- Adobe's new tool for using AI to design websites
- Machine learning tool for identifying terrorists by their V-signs
- John Maeda's annual Design In Tech Report, plus the slides
- The Best Art bot
- Twitter replaces the blank egg, spends a month designing something meant to be generic and temprorary
March 27, 2017
- Simple but very nice website for the festival Elevation 1049
- Using plastic bottles as heatshrink tubing for wood joints
- StackOverflow's annual Developer Survey
- Brain-scan-like graphs of neural networks
- Lots of discussion this last week about a painting by Dana Schutz in the Whitney Biennial, depicting the body of Emmett Till
March 20, 2017
- Artsy's 16 Women Pushing Design Forward in the US
- Nice writeup on Image-to-Image
- How recording bird colors eventually became Pantone
- Processing Foundation's call for Google Summer of Code
- The Photo Retouchers Accord
- The site Logobook, with examples dating back to the 1950s
- Making of The Bear & The Hare animation
- Trailer for David O'Reilly's new game EVERYTHING
- Weirdo voice synth webtoy Pink Trombone
March 6, 2017
- Video documentary from Motherboard on microsoldering and smartphone repair
- Marshmallow typeface
- What Design Can't Do by Silvio Lorusso
- Cellular automata works by Troika
- Kickstarter's annual benefit statement for their second year as a Public Benefit Corporation
- NASA's huge open-source software catalog
February 27, 2017
- Radiohead's Fitter Happer is their gloomiest song, says science
- Recipe for making your own ink
- Universal Everything's Screens of the Future: Future Display Prototypes
- Lauren Hudgins on how hating Comic Sans is ableist, and an article by Vincent Connare, the font's designer, on why he made it in the first place
- Simon Christoph Krenn's super creepy Cambrian Explosion
February 20, 2017
- The World Press Photo contest named an image of the assassination of Russia's embassador to Turkey as their photo of the year, sparking lots of debate
- Wearable antennas for recording magnetic fields by Dewi de Vree and Patrizia Ruthensteiner
- Every New York Times Front Page Since 1852 by Josh Begley
- Sculptures by Pennacchio Argentato
February 13, 2017
- MS Word sounds playing Smash Mouth is probably the worst thing ever
- A really wonderful online book about programming for designers
- If you're interested in machine learning, you might want to check out Google's TensorFlow Summit
- Very nice writeup of a visual identity project for Beijing Design Week 2015
February 6, 2017
- Ten Meter Jump documentary from Sundance, via NY Times
- Buzzfeed recorded a Facebook livestream from two different profiles
- Re-ordering video frames based on audio similarity by Mario Klingemann
- MoMA exhibition of art from Muslim nations affected by Trump's entry ban
- Mozilla has a new logo, and they've published extensive materials on the redesign
- New York Times' extensive data on universities, including economic mobility of students at Stevens
January 30, 2017
- Crossvision slit-scan weirdness by Henning Marxen
- Paper on using style transfer for rendering sequences in film
- Upcoming online talk by Grady Booch of IBM Research, on AI in the physical world
- A wonderful interview with designer Julia Born on the Walker's design blog about books and collaboration
- Alphabo, a modular alphabet system from 1932