The coffins, whose decorations are still visible, were uncovered at a Theban necropolis near Luxor.
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Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Recovering “lost dimensions” of images and video
MIT researchers have developed a model that recovers valuable data lost from images and video that have been “collapsed” into lower dimensions.
The model could be used to recreate video from motion-blurred images, or from new types of cameras that capture a person’s movement around corners but only as vague one-dimensional lines. While more testing is needed, the researchers think this approach could someday could be used to convert 2D medical images into more informative — but more expensive — 3D body scans, which could benefit medical imaging in poorer nations.
“In all these cases, the visual data has one dimension — in time or space — that’s completely lost,” says Guha Balakrishnan, a postdoc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and first author on a paper describing the model, which is being presented at next week’s International Conference on Computer Vision. “If we recover that lost dimension, it can have a lot of important applications.”
Captured visual data often collapses data of multiple dimensions of time and space into one or two dimensions, called “projections.” X-rays, for example, collapse three-dimensional data about anatomical structures into a flat image. Or, consider a long-exposure shot of stars moving across the sky: The stars, whose position is changing over time, appear as blurred streaks in the still shot.
Likewise, “corner cameras,” recently invented at MIT, detect moving people around corners. These could be useful for, say, firefighters finding people in burning buildings. But the cameras aren’t exactly user-friendly. Currently they only produce projections that resemble blurry, squiggly lines, corresponding to a person’s trajectory and speed.
The researchers invented a “visual deprojection” model that uses a neural network to “learn” patterns that match low-dimensional projections to their original high-dimensional images and videos. Given new projections, the model uses what it’s learned to recreate all the original data from a projection.
In experiments, the model synthesized accurate video frames showing people walking, by extracting information from single, one-dimensional lines similar to those produced by corner cameras. The model also recovered video frames from single, motion-blurred projections of digits moving around a screen, from the popular Moving MNIST dataset.
Joining Balakrishnan on the paper are: Amy Zhao, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and CSAIL; EECS professors John Guttag, Fredo Durand, and William T. Freeman; and Adrian Dalca, a faculty member in radiology at Harvard Medical School.
Clues in pixels
The work started as a “cool inversion problem” to recreate movement that causes motion blur in long-exposure photography, Balakrishnan says. In a projection’s pixels there exist some clues about the high-dimensional source.
Digital cameras capturing long-exposure shots, for instance, will basically aggregate photons over a period of time on each pixel. In capturing an object’s movement over time, the camera will take the average value of the movement-capturing pixels. Then, it applies those average values to corresponding heights and widths of a still image, which creates the signature blurry streaks of the object’s trajectory. By calculating some variations in pixel intensity, the movement can theoretically be recreated.
As the researchers realized, that problem is relevant in many areas: X-rays, for instance, capture height, width, and depth information of anatomical structures, but they use a similar pixel-averaging technique to collapse depth into a 2D image. Corner cameras — invented in 2017 by Freeman, Durand, and other researchers — capture reflected light signals around a hidden scene that carry two-dimensional information about a person’s distance from walls and objects. The pixel-averaging technique then collapses that data into a one-dimensional video — basically, measurements of different lengths over time in a single line.
The researchers built a general model, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) — a machine-learning model that’s become a powerhouse for image-processing tasks — that captures clues about any lost dimension in averaged pixels.
Synthesizing signals
In training, the researchers fed the CNN thousands of pairs of projections and their high-dimensional sources, called “signals.” The CNN learns pixel patterns in the projections that match those in the signals. Powering the CNN is a framework called a “variational autoencoder,” which evaluates how well the CNN outputs match its inputs across some statistical probability. From that, the model learns a “space” of all possible signals that could have produced a given projection. This creates, in essence, a type of blueprint for how to go from a projection to all possible matching signals.
When shown previously unseen projections, the model notes the pixel patterns and follows the blueprints to all possible signals that could have produced that projection. Then, it synthesizes new images that combine all data from the projection and all data from the signal. This recreates the high-dimensional signal.
For one experiment, the researchers collected a dataset of 35 videos of 30 people walking in a specified area. They collapsed all frames into projections that they used to train and test the model. From a hold-out set of six unseen projections, the model accurately recreated 24 frames of the person’s gait, down to the position of their legs and the person’s size as they walked toward or away from the camera. The model seems to learn, for instance, that pixels that get darker and wider with time likely correspond to a person walking closer to the camera.
“It’s almost like magic that we’re able to recover this detail,” Balakrishnan says.
The researchers didn’t test their model on medical images. But they are now collaborating with Cornell University colleagues to recover 3D anatomical information from 2D medical images, such as X-rays, with no added costs — which can enable more detailed medical imaging in poorer nations. Doctors mostly prefer 3D scans, such as those captured with CT scans, because they contain far more useful medical information. But CT scans are generally difficult and expensive to acquire.
“If we can convert X-rays to CT scans, that would be somewhat game-changing,” Balakrishnan says. “You could just take an X-ray and push it through our algorithm and see all the lost information.”
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Assembler robots make large structures from little pieces
Today’s commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations — wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else — and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly.
But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots?
That’s the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It’s now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies.
The new work appears in the October issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, in a paper by Jenett, Gershenfeld, fellow graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman, and CBA alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM ’07, PhD ’12, who is now at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he leads the ARMADAS project to design a lunar base that could be built with robotic assembly.
“This paper is a treat,” says Aaron Becker, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, who was not associated with this work. “It combines top-notch mechanical design with jaw-dropping demonstrations, new robotic hardware, and a simulation suite with over 100,000 elements,” he says.
“What’s at the heart of this is a new kind of robotics, that we call relative robots,” Gershenfeld says. Historically, he explains, there have been two broad categories of robotics — ones made out of expensive custom components that are carefully optimized for particular applications such as factory assembly, and ones made from inexpensive mass-produced modules with much lower performance. The new robots, however, are an alternative to both. They’re much simpler than the former, while much more capable than the latter, and they have the potential to revolutionize the production of large-scale systems, from airplanes to bridges to entire buildings.
According to Gershenfeld, the key difference lies in the relationship between the robotic device and the materials that it is handling and manipulating. With these new kinds of robots, “you can’t separate the robot from the structure — they work together as a system,” he says. For example, while most mobile robots require highly precise navigation systems to keep track of their position, the new assembler robots only need to keep track of where they are in relation to the small subunits, called voxels, that they are currently working on. Every time the robot takes a step onto the next voxel, it readjusts its sense of position, always in relation to the specific components that it is standing on at the moment.
The underlying vision is that just as the most complex of images can be reproduced by using an array of pixels on a screen, virtually any physical object can be recreated as an array of smaller three-dimensional pieces, or voxels, which can themselves be made up of simple struts and nodes. The team has shown that these simple components can be arranged to distribute loads efficiently; they are largely made up of open space so that the overall weight of the structure is minimized. The units can be picked up and placed in position next to one another by the simple assemblers, and then fastened together using latching systems built into each voxel.
The robots themselves resemble a small arm, with two long segments that are hinged in the middle, and devices for clamping onto the voxel structures on each end. The simple devices move around like inchworms, advancing along a row of voxels by repeatedly opening and closing their V-shaped bodies to move from one to the next. Jenett has dubbed the little robots BILL-E (a nod to the movie robot WALL-E), which stands for Bipedal Isotropic Lattice Locomoting Explorer.
Computer simulation shows a group of four assembler robots at work on building a three-dimensional structure. Whole swarms of such robots could be unleashed to create large structures such as airplane wings or space habitats. Illustration courtesy of the researchers
Jenett has built several versions of the assemblers as proof-of-concept designs, along with corresponding voxel designs featuring latching mechanisms to easily attach or detach each one from its neighbors. He has used these prototypes to demonstrate the assembly of the blocks into linear, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional structures. “We’re not putting the precision in the robot; the precision comes from the structure” as it gradually takes shape, Jenett says. “That’s different from all other robots. It just needs to know where its next step is.”
As it works on assembling the pieces, each of the tiny robots can count its steps over the structure, says Gershenfeld, who is the director of CBA. Along with navigation, this lets the robots correct errors at each step, eliminating most of the complexity of typical robotic systems, he says. “It’s missing most of the usual control systems, but as long as it doesn’t miss a step, it knows where it is.” For practical assembly applications, swarms of such units could be working together to speed up the process, thanks to control software developed by Abdel-Rahman that can allow the robots to coordinate their work and avoid getting in each other’s way.
This kind of assembly of large structures from identical subunits using a simple robotic system, much like a child assembling a large castle out of LEGO blocks, has already attracted the interest of some major potential users, including NASA, MIT’s collaborator on this research, and the European aerospace company Airbus SE, which also helped to sponsor the study.
One advantage of such assembly is that repairs and maintenance can be handled easily by the same kind of robotic process as the initial assembly. Damaged sections can be disassembled from the structure and replaced with new ones, producing a structure that is just as robust as the original. “Unbuilding is as important as building,” Gershenfeld says, and this process can also be used to make modifications or improvements to the system over time.
“For a space station or a lunar habitat, these robots would live on the structure, continuously maintaining and repairing it,” says Jenett.
Ultimately, such systems could be used to construct entire buildings, especially in difficult environments such as in space, or on the moon or Mars, Gershenfeld says. This could eliminate the need to ship large preassembled structures all the way from Earth. Instead it could be possible to send large batches of the tiny subunits — or form them from local materials using systems that could crank out these subunits at their final destination point. “If you can make a jumbo jet, you can make a building,” Gershenfeld says.
Sandor Fekete, director of the Institute of Operating Systems and Computer Networks at the Technical University of Braunschweig, in Germany, who was not involved in this work, says “Ultralight, digital materials such as [these] open amazing perspectives for constructing efficient, complex, large-scale structures, which are of vital importance in aerospace applications.”
But assembling such systems is a challenge, says Fekete, who plans to join the research team for further development of the control systems. “This is where the use of small and simple robots promises to provide the next breakthrough: Robots don’t get tired or bored, and using many miniature robots seems like the only way to get this critical job done. This extremely original and clever work by Ben Jennet and collaborators makes a giant leap towards the construction of dynamically adjustable airplane wings, enormous solar sails or even reconfigurable space habitats.”
In the process, Gershenfeld says, “we feel like we’re uncovering a new field of hybrid material-robot systems.”
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Beyonce crowned SECOND most beautiful woman in the world according to ‘Golden Ratio’ equation
Supermodel Bella Hadid has been crowned the most beautiful woman in the world following scientific research into what constitutes the “perfect face,” and our queen Beyonce Knowles Carter is apparently a very close second.
According to The Daily Mail, the Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi – which is designed to measure physical perfection – determined that Hadid to be 94.35% “accurate” on a scale up to 100%.
READ MORE: POLL – Michelle Obama would be Dem front-runner if she entered the 2020 race
This was determined specifically because out everyone who was assessed her facial features and face shape came closest to the ancient Greeks’ idea of perfection. Singer Beyoncé who at 38 is 15 years the model’s senior, came in second with a score of 92.44%.
“Bella Hadid was the clear winner when all elements of the face were measured for physical perfection,” explained Dr De Silva, who runs the Centre For Advanced Facial Cosmetic And Plastic Surgery in London.
READ MORE: Alice Walker speaks on anti-gay remarks from ‘Color Purple’ actress
“Beyoncé ran her a close second, scoring the highest marks for the shape of her face (99.6%) and getting very high scores for her eyes, brow area and lips,” he continued, noting, “These brand new computer mapping techniques allow us to solve some of the mysteries of what it is that makes someone physically beautiful and the technology is useful when planning patients’ surgery.”
Other notable mentions include actress Amber Heard who was third with 91.85% and pop star Ariana Grande who landed in fourth spot with 91.81%.
READ MORE: LeBron James apologizes for criticizing Daryl Morey over China comments
As explained by the report, “The Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi originates from the European Renaissance. Artists and Architects used an equation – known as the Golden Ratio – as an aid during the creation of their masterpieces.
Scientists have since adapted the mathematical formula to explain what makes a person beautiful. The length and the width of someone’s face is measured and then the results are divided. According to the Golden Ratio, the ideal result is roughly 1.6.
Measurements are then taken from the forehead hairline to the spot between the eyes, from the spot between the eyes and the bottom of the nose and from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chin. A person is considered to be more beautiful if the numbers are equal.”
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Tyler Perry opens up about discipling his son for disrespecting the nanny
We may know Tyler Perry as an accomplished movie mogul, but the acclaimed director is also a doting dad, and may have had his biggest directorial debut when he had to redirect his 4-year-old son Aman and admonish him for disrespecting the nanny.
READ MORE: Tyler Perry opens up about how Hollywood “ignored” him—
Perry shared the details of that teachable moment between father and son while appearing on The Real on Monday with cohosts Loni Love, Jeannie Mai, Tamera Mowry and Adrienne Bailon.
The 50-yer-old comedian who recently made headlines for becoming the only Black man in the US with a major movie studio, dished about the beauty of being able to feed into his son’s soul, something he said no one imparted to him during his childhood.
“I will tell you this, one moment that was really hard for me. I had to discipline [Aman],” the Vice star began.
“He was really rude to the nanny and he was in the bathroom arguing with her…I get down to his level and I’m talking to him and I say ‘Listen, what are you doing? You don’t do this. This is unacceptable. You’re not going to disrespect her. You’re not going to disrespect your mom. You’re going to do what they say to do,'” Perry explained.
Perry said that as he was leaving an indelible impression on his child who was bawling, he took had to fight back tears.
“And he’s just crying and he goes ‘Yes papa, yes.’ But as he’s crying and I’m down on his level. I’m trying to hold my tears,” he added.
Tyler continued, “I get up and I leave out of the room and Gelila says ‘Are you okay?'”
READ MORE: Jordan Peele inks MAJOR 5-year deal with Universal Pictures—
“No one talked to me like that when I was a five-year-old,” he explained. “No one had a conversation with me. No one talked to me like a person. So here I am having an opportunity to heal my ‘little boy self’ by talking to my son like a person.”
Perry shares his child with longtime girlfriend Gelila Bekele.
This is a such a touching story, but we surely know Madea would have handled the little tot a lot differently.
Check out the clip!
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Reports say HOT 97 won’t play Tekashi 6x9ine’s music post release
Tekashi 6ix9ine’s got it all figured out: snitch on the homies, get prison sentence reduced, come home, refuse witness protection, keep making music with a reported $10 million record deal, puppeteer the public and resume business as usual.
READ MORE:50 Cent set to produce docuseries about Tekashi69’s rise and fall—
And while we all scratch our heads in confusion, that seems to be the case for Tekashi who spilled the beans and testified against Nine Trey Gang members, and several celebrities during his federal case in order to reduce his time in jail.
Tekashi turned into a federal informant against Nine Trey Blood gang members and other rappers, something some celebs have dogged him out for.
But at least one station, New York’s Hot 97 says at least they don’t plan to help him secure the bag and won’t be playing the rapper’s music post prison release, TMZ reports.
An executive from the radio station told the outlet that they will ice 6ix9ine’s new music once he comes home from the clink. The exec reportedly was never a Tekashi fan in the first place, and has a major issue with his snitching.
But getting the cold shoulder from Hot 97 probably also has much to do with the fact that Tekashi dissed Ebro on a track called “Stoopid.” Ebro is one of the station’s most popular personalities and former program director.
Still the insider reportedly told the outlet if people demand that Tekashi’s songs get air play, then they’ll surely reconsider.
This all comes to a shock to Ebro and the Hot 97 team. Taking to his twitter, he delivers a statement denying the TMZ report.
All execs @HOT97 deny speaking to anyone @TMZ ….. so this means that Tekashi marketing machine is revving up to rally his on-line #Bots and drive stories.
— El Viejo Ebro (@oldmanebro) October 14, 2019
Tekashi’s deal with the feds earned him the ability to be released from jail by next year in exchange for giving them info that reduced his possible 47-year sentence for cooperating with prosecutors.
READ MORE: 50 Cent set to produce docuseries about Tekashi69’s rise and fall—
Tekashi will be rolling in the dough once he rolls out of federal prison after landing a lucrative music deal for $10 million while in prison, The BCC reports.
The “Gummo” rapper whose real name Daniel Hernandez, is expected to produce two albums after his release – one in English and one in Spanish.
Tekashi will be sentenced December 18.
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Firm sues Ava Duvernay for ‘defaming’ The Reid Technique in her film
If you’ve seen Netflix’s When They See Us, then you have probably squirmed like the rest of us when the young boys portraying the “Central Park Five” were peppered with questions by the NYPD as they cried, and were hammered on end with lies until they confessed to crimes they didn’t commit.
READ MORE: Why ‘When They See Us’ brought me to tears and made me call my mother to thank her
That pivotal movie moment, carefully crafted by director Ava DuVernay, is now under fire after John E. Reid and Associates filed a federal lawsuit against Netflix and the acclaimed director saying they defamed the “Reid Technique” a police interrogation method highlighted in the miniseries that they in fact developed, Variety reports.
The company stated the method, which was developed in the 1940s is still use the method in police law enforcement training today by agencies around the world. But they contend that the dramatization of the technique on screen, including the assumption that it includes coercing confessions, is off base.
In the fourth episode of the series, an NYPD detective Michael Sheehan is confronted and asked about using the method which resulted in five defendants copping to the rape of a white female Central Park jogger.
“You squeezed statements out of them after 42 hours of questioning and coercing, without food, bathroom breaks, withholding parental supervision,” the character says. “The Reid Technique has been universally rejected.”
Sheehan fires back: “I don’t even know what the f—ing Reid Technique is, OK? I know what I was taught. I know what I was asked to do and I did it.”
According to the lawsuit the term, saying the method is “universally rejected” is false. The lawsuit claims that the technique doesn’t involve coercion.
“Defendants intended to incite an audience reaction against Reid for what occurred in the Central Park Jogger Case and for the coercive interrogation tactics that continue to be used today,” the suit states. “Defendants published the statements in ‘When They See Us’ in an effort to cause a condemnation of the Reid Technique.”
The lawsuit further states that the company has suffered irreparable harm to its reputation and the plaintiff is seeking actual and punitive damages. It also wants an injunction to stop Netflix from further distributing the series as well as secure a portion of the profits from the series.
The “Central Park Five,” as they were called, had their sentences later vacated after DNA evidence proved another man was the actual culprit and he also ultimately confessed.
READ MORE: ‘When They See us’ viewed on 23 million accounts, Netflix confirms
Duvernay told the painful story from the perspective of the men for the miniseries which mustered up a national conversation that put much of the focus on former prosecutor Linda Fairstein who led the charge to put the teens behind bars.
The men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam are now dubbed the “Exonerated Five.”
John E. Reid was a former Chicago police officer who developed the widely known police interrogation method which was licensed to Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates. One thing that might work in DuVernay’s favor is that in 2017, the company ditched using the method because of claims that it could incite misuse and possibly produce false confessions.
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Cyntoia Brown-Long gives her first interview since her release from prison
Cyntoia Brown-Long sits down with NBC’s Lester Holt to break her silence in her first interview since her release from prison earlier this year. Brown was previously serving life for committing a murder at the age of 16.
READ MORE: Cyntoia Brown: 7 facts you need to know about her release from prison
Brown-Long made headlines after capturing the attention of celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who advocated for clemency after learning that she was a sex trafficking victim when she was convicted in 2006 of murdering 43-year old, Nashville real estate agent, Johnny Allen. She was sentenced to life in prison.
Brown-Long admits that the spotlight cast on her case made her “nervous” that she would upset the governor and somehow hurt her case.
“Suddenly, people like Kim Kardashian are tweeting about you and raising this issue of clemency. Was there a part of you that was afraid of the attention?” Holt asked.
“I was,” Brown said.
“…maybe it could backfire?” asked Holt.
“I was. So, like, I was so nervous. And then I was, like, “I don’t want the governor to think that, like, I’ve done this, like, to try to kinda, like, you know, push his hand. Like, that could backfire. That can look really bad.” We had actually even heard back from the governor’s counsel that, you know, the whole Kim Kardashian thing was not helping. So I was kinda fearful at first. But I had to just, like, trust that God had a plan,” Brown said.
READ MORE: Cyntoia Brown debuts memoir book cover, opens up about ‘loving’ her freedom
Brown also opened up about the life-altering decision to shoot a man, who believed was reaching for a gun to kill her.
Brown never disputed murdering Allen, and admitted to shooting him at close range in the back of the head. However, her attorneys contend that Brown was not in her right mind during the murder.
According to her lawyers, when Allen picked her up at a Sonic restaurant to have sex with her, he was acting erratic. This made Brown nervous, and she fatally shot him because she was afraid. Making the situation more complicated, Brown’s mother drank while pregnant with her, and her attorneys argue that the teenager may have suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which could have impaired her judgment and mental state. She was only 14-years old at the time of the murder.
Gov. Bill Haslam granted her clemency after her case went viral and she received online support from a number of celebrities including Kim Kardashian West and Rihanna.
Now a married woman (she met her husband Jamie Long while she was in prison serving time), Brown says she wants people to understand that she is so much more than the sum of her crimes.
On what she wants people to know about her:
“I want them to see that I’m so much more than the worst thing that I’ve done. You know, I’m so much more than that moment.”
On being released from prison and getting a second chance:
“I know there are people looking at me saying ‘okay, well what’s this girl gonna do? And is she really changed? So I feel like it’s an honor to actually be a picture of what rehabilitation looks like. Of what it looks like when we give people a second chance.”
On taking responsibility for the murder of Johnny Allen and recognizing his family’s grief:
“He is a victim, you know? He was, he was, his family’s a victim. You know, his friends, the people that knew him, the people that loved him. Like, they had someone snatched away from them. And I did that.”
READ MORE: Netflix acquires rights to Cyntoia Brown documentary
Brown served 15 years in prison for killing Allen, aka a pimp named Kut Throat. She was convicted as an adult at 16-year-old of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. Without her release she would have served time until 2055 or 51 years.
But while in prison at the Tennessee Prison for Women she made use of her time, earning both an associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, thanks to Lipscomb University’s LIFE program.
Brown-Long will appear on TODAY Tuesday morning for her first live interview. Her husband will also appear for their first joint interview on the 3rd Hour of TODAY.
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