Awesome Technology

The use of artificial intelligence to generate and manipulate images has had its share of controversy, but recent technological advancements are still amazing. Two Minute Papers explores four very different ways to use AI: making still images dance, compressing video conferencing, upscaling video resolution, and making software that can identify smells.

With ongoing improvements in artificial intelligence technology, it’s getting harder and harder to discern whether what you see was made by a human rather than a computer. ColdFusion explores a cynical but plausible theory that bots now control the majority of the internet and social media, and humans are now in the minority.

Designer, writer, and engineer Marcin Wichary created this extensive visual history of keyboards and the people who use them. The two-volume set is packed with 1300 photos and numerous stories about the amazing mechanical device that changed the world in so many ways.

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It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most expensive display you can buy, gradients of color in dark scenes often look like a blocky mess. Tom Scott offers a great explanation of the technological limitations that cause these issues, and the visual mechanisms that make them less noticeable in brighter scenes.

This control system helps improve the quality and consistency of indoor and greenhouse gardens. Its sensors track critical environmental data like temperature, humidity, PH, and more. It can use that data to trigger grow lights, pumps, valves, and other components, for a fully-automated grow operation.

One of the limitations of cheap desktop 3D printers is their small print bed size. But this nifty hack by Swaleh Owais incorporates a conveyor belt print surface that can eject parts and then move on to the next one without human intervention. By angling its print head, it can also print very long objects.

If you ever thought that blurring out text would protect sensitive information, you might be in trouble. This video from censiCLICK shows how readily-available technology can recover text that has been blurred using a mosaic filter. The moral of the story? Completely remove or block out anything you don’t want to be recovered.

Artificial intelligence tech is everywhere these days, informing everything from credit decisions to diagnosing diseases and keeping cars from crashing. TED-Ed’s Briana Brownell explains the three main kinds of machine learning technology, how they differ, and how little we really know about how AI works.

After multiple lockdowns in the UK, vlogger Tom Scott is starting to run out of ideas of things he can make videos about. So he turned to an artificial intelligence to see if it could come up with any. OpenAI’s GPT-3 tech came up with a mix of mundane, ridiculous, and surprisingly legitimate-sounding ideas, depending on its tuning.

Smart home gadgets can make controlling your home easier, from turning on lights when you walk in the door, to seeing who’s at the door from your phone, to keeping your place secure. Our friends at batteriesplus.com and Batteries Plus Bulbs stores offer an array of smart home tech, including these great products from Geeni.

Pretty much every display you can buy today is either LCD or OLED. But for decades, the cathode ray tube was the only way to watch video. This older clip from How Its Made show the process, including filling the tube with phosphors, adding conductive elements, and installing an electron gun to create images on the tube.

If you’ve used Photoshop’s content-aware fill, you know that it’s gotten easier to remove objects from still images. Doing the same in video is much trickier, but as Two Minute Papers explains, there’s new AI-based tech that’s really good at removing objects from moving images. It can also expand content into missing areas.

Firefighters need every advantage they can get. Sam Cossman of Qwake Technologies met with Adam Yamaguchi of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation to show off the mask his company has developed which can overlay high-contrast outlines and heat signatures of objects even when they’re obscured by smoke or darkness.

Stop-motion animator LEGOEddy ran one of his 15 fps animations through a tool called DAIN, which converted his original video to a buttery-smooth 60 fps. The software not only interpolates frames but is able to properly handle depth-of-field and occlusion (objects hidden behind others.) Learn more on Two Minute Papers.

Developed by engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), these compact robots can work together and assemble themselves into various structures, allowing them to not only to move large objects like furniture, but to become furniture themselves.

UK tech company Sonantic has developed an AI-driven text-to-speech system that can generate digital voices with much greater expression than others. In this clip, you’ll hear “Faith” a completely artificial voice character act out a story with tremendous emotion. Look out voice actors, the robots are coming for you!

Flying multiple drones near each other can lead to accidental collisions. Now, engineers at Caltech have developed an data-driven method that can safely control the movement of multiple drones in crowded spaces, without pre-mapping the space or knowing what patterns the other drones will fly in.

Before the Internet we know today, we had standalone services like AOL. And before that, we had Bulletin Board Systems. These homebrew hangouts let people with similar interests congregate via their computers. Off the Cuf looks back at the first BBS and its creators, and how they laid the groundwork for much to come.

Typical 3D printers build up objects one layer at a time. This new technology is capable of printing an entire, highly-detailed object at once. The one big caveat of EFPL and Readily3D’s volumetric printer is that it can only print really tiny objects. Since it can print in a sterile container, it could be used for biomedical applications.

Károly of Two Minute Papers explains how Researchers at Google have devised an AI-backed translation tech which maps speech to speech without an intermediate translation to text. What’s really amazing is that it can synthesize the voice of the original speaker into the other language. Listen to some of its voice samples here.

Scientists from Samsung’s Moscow-based AI Research Center recently showed off “Few-Shot Adversarial Learning” tech, which can generate talking head videos from just a handful of still images, and a source video of another head. It’s so impressive, they even made the Mona Lisa talk.

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