A review of methods I’ve used to train a machine to draw. What worked, what didn’t work, and future directions. — — modified 12/08/2020 — Summary In this set of experiments, I used 4000 flat art illustrations from various artists. Most images contained a person doing something. To train, I used a Pytorch pix-2-pix implementation and a few other libraries. Training objectives were: To improve the machine’s ability to color images without…

Why Antler Norway is especially appealing for founding a consumer-facing software startup — My connection to Kahoot! This January I’m going to Oslo to join a VC backed accelerator - Antler, with the intention of founding a company. I’m from Israel, a country roughly the same size as Norway, that has more than twenty tech unicorns. Yet I’m going to an accelerator in Norway. A few people…

AI moves from pattern detection to “patterned” creation and most designers are optimistic about this change. — AI opening new creative options Ask an Uber driver what he thinks about self-driving cars and you’ll probably get a mix of denial, dismissal, and dread. That should not surprise, as the profession is projected to become obsolete when self-driving cars finally hit the road. By contrast, when designers are asked about the impact Artificial…

I set out to check if Machine Learning can become a standard tool in a designer’s tool-set. Can it be used not just for eccentric art but also for commercial use-cases such as illustrations for websites, landing pages, application flows, and blogs? In the first test that I ran, I…

Designers already use machine learning on a daily basis without paying much attention to it, since machine learning is embedded into common features. For example, smart lasso cropping in Photoshop uses edge detection ML, and autofocus on a camera uses object detection ML. But can designers use ML not just…

Search engines and recommendation engines display results ranked by relevance, in a list or a thumbnail layout. That’s useful in many cases but sometimes it’s more useful to also explore the relation between results. Consider the human mind. …

Originally published in MediaPost With the threat of ad blocking looming ominously over both publishers and ad-tech companies, it would be an easy way out to pin the blame on Flash or rich media — the very tools whose ad revenues have long allowed publishers to thrive. Although this easy…