I think the web is a big boring mistake, and here are my baby steps to rectify it and save humanity.
"One wrapper to rule them all."
Identity is the artificial flower on the compost heap of time. -- Louis Menand, "Listening to Bourbon"
What are you, at your core? Awareness is a key part, one that we share with many animals, and can feel when looking into a dog's eyes. I am working on creating that feeling of awareness with photos, so that you can look into the eye of the computer screen and feel something responding to you. To do this, Phobrain uses a new type of downloaded brain, in the form of neural nets trained on identified photo associations, and adds variation in response to your mouse movement and (offline for now) a DNA dynamics simulation to give it a sort of tin man's heart.
How does it work? You look at two photos, and compare and contrast the pair and the previous pair. Then you draw a line of dots on the pair, and this is used to select the next pair. I find that if I give some attention to drawing, like tracing something in a photo, I see more in the next pair, and often feel like it has answered me, even though I know that it has no such understanding.
How is the line of dots used? The distance between first and last dots divided by the total line length, with similar geometric info, is used to drop into the multidimensional mental landscape I have created by training neural nets on my favorite pair choices (over 1M pairs). It is analogous to skipping a stone on a pond in a quiet forest, in mapping your action in a unique way each time, and having no more model of you than the pond. Since it is dependent on you, there is a chance one might unconsciously learn to direct it, and thus make it more of a mirror than it knows how to be. The way it is done is the line data is treated as if it were cookie data used to select online ads: it massages the neural net-derived weights (in place of advertiser data) that then go into a weighted-random auction process.
Clicking in the grey area just above the photos chooses a pair of unseen photos at random.
Screens. The screens show either portrait-oriented or landscape-oriented pairs. The landscape pairs can be either side-by-side or stacked. Side-by-side landscapes are recommended if a wide screen is available.
+ gives color similarity (using one of 10 algorithms). - gives color opposite. c chooses curated pairs. The purple options, Σ1 Σ1 Σ3 Σ4 Σ5 ΣΣ Σ&xscr; , apply various combinations of neural networks. The grey numbered options, 2 3 8 27 32K, apply the Golden Angle in spaces of the numbered dimensions. | chooses a pair completely at random. + chooses a match based on descriptions using keywords. In Search Mode, clicking on a photo results in a match to its neighbor (rather than replacing the pair), depending on whether you click on a corner (4 different color matching algorithms) or the center (keyword matching).
Clicking in the grey area next to the options, to the left of the yellow + or to the right of the green +, will cause any keywords shared by the photos, or color-matching algorithm used to choose them, to appear to the right of the options, for as long as the mouse button is held down. Clicking in the grey area next to a photo toggles it with the one that was there before. Clicking below the photos, in the grey area just above the options, toggles both photos with the non-showing pair. Holding this area down for a second restores the most recent pair.
The keywords used by the + option allow some storytelling, like a psychic crossword, or a therapist analyzing dreams. The common features could be people, things, colors, shapes, textures: whatever we think would make the most obvious and interesting connections as you hold both pictures in your mind. (Again, you can see the keywords that matched by clicking and holding the mouse next to the options.) The keywords for the features are scripted and discussed like characters in Sesame Street, merging points of view to create a hybrid 'brain'. Each photo is like a brain cell, connected to other photos by keywords they have in common. You explore this 'brain' when you use the + option.
Don't worry if you don't see any similarities at first — it's not perfect — but if you keep at it, you will start to see themes that last over a few pictures, then more will start making sense — it's like learning a language you find you already know. You can use another option to change the subject when you get tired of a theme, then return to + if you see something you want to pursue.
Looking at the photo on the left above, we might describe it with the words "woman hand phone face blue". If I click on + for it. I expect to see another picture with at least one of these features, but will blue-ness jump out for me on the next photo? As you go from picture to picture, it is a little like a crossword puzzle, matching up words instead of letters.
Now consider the photo on the right above: it is outdoors not indoors, in public not in private, the background has classic geometry, the real person in it is a boy and not a woman, and the color that jumps out is red instead of blue. On the other hand, there are two males in each picture, and there are representations of people (picture on phone, and statue). Perhaps the most interesting similarity between the two photos is that there is an interaction between a person (or people) and a representation of a person in each. This site can help build up your analytical abilities, although it does not do such a complicated analysis itself, and would be unlikely (we hope) to join these two pictures when the + option is used.
Like when learning a language, you can enjoy the view and watch for patterns to emerge.
Sessions: Each browser creates its own session, which should keep you from seeing any repeats of pictures within a given View.
The dog's eyes: My goal is to make the site smart enough so that it seems alive, like the feeling you get when looking into a dog's eyes. The fading image when you enter the slideshow is a gesture toward that goal. More concretely, a live molecular dynamics simulation is used as a sort of heart: it is affected by clicks on the slideshow page, and in turn affects the next picture you see; and it gives a continuing life to the site.
Can you make it browsable? I don't plan to add any kind of browsability like other excellent sites have. Can we upload pictures? I plan to add the ability to upload photos to the site.
Japanese researchers found that dogs who trained a long gaze on their owners had elevated levels of oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain that is associated with nurturing and attachment, similar to the feel-good feedback that bolsters bonding between parent and child. After receiving those long gazes, the owners' levels of oxytocin increased, too.
A more nuanced story about oxytocin from Wikipedia.
The Photo.net No Words Forum threads photos on themes like Phobrain, but without a dynamic personality responding in the moment. Very interesting for the variety of viewpoints.
Ostagram.ru uses deep learning to hybridize pairs of pictures, creating novel effects analogous to combining Phobrain pairs in your mind.
Google Images allows you to search with words or pictures, and in principle Phobrain could use it for raw associations for its personality to select from (similarly for photo stock agency collections).
New deep learning image retrieval methods like Google's could be retrained with Phobrain principles, rather than simply used to feed Phobrain.
Clever Canines: Dogs Can 'Read' Our Communication Cues Joseph Castro, Live Science.
Can you train yourself to develop â€˜super sensesâ€™? Harriet Dempsey-Jones, Postdoctoral Researcher in Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford.
Harvard scientists think they've pinpointed the physical source of consciousness.
How Do We See Art: An Eye-Tracker Study, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and Carlos Pedreira, Front Hum Neurosci. 2011; 5: 98.
Humans named colors one by one, blue is the most recently 'discovered'. Maybe a 'phobrain' will someday be a thing?
A computer passes the Turing Test, masquerading as a wise-cracking, 13-year old boy.
Microsoftâ€™s Tay AI Bot Shut Down After Racist Tweets "What was also disturbing about this, beyond just the content itself, is that Tayâ€™s responses were developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians. That means even as she was tweeting out offensive racial slurs, she seemed to do so with abandon and nonchalance."
Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition. W. Xiong, J. Droppo, X. Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolke, D. Yu, and G. Zweig, Microsoft Research.
Creating The Never-Ending Bloom: SciFri article about spiral geometry using the Golden Angle, featuring John Edmark.
"The Talk" by Scott Aaronson & Zach Weinersmith - Are you old enough to understand the truth about quantum computing? (cartoon).
Kubernetes Commit Impact an animation of the morphing structure of a shared project, analogous to the brain that Phobrain would form with lots of users and envisioned enhancements.
word2vec graph, word associations analogous to the Phobrain picture graph.
Beautiful 3-D Brain Scans Show Every Synapse National Geographic.
Weekend (or deathbed?) reading: Consciousness in the Universe is Scale Invariant and Implies an Event Horizon of the Human Brain, Dirk K.F. Meijer, Hans J H Geesink, NeuroQuantology 15:3 (2017).
An intermediate goal for Phobrain: Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
P. Kainz, M. Mayrhofer-Reinhartshuber, and H. Ahammer. IQM: An extensible and portable open source application for image and signal analysis in Java. PLoS ONE, 10(1):e0116329, Jan. 2015.
BoofCV, Peter Abeles, 2012. An open source Java library for real-time computer vision and robotics applications.
AMBER: Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement, D.A. Case, R.M. Betz, W. Botello-Smith, D.S. Cerutti, T.E. Cheatham, III, T.A. Darden, R.E. Duke, T.J. Giese, H. Gohlke, A.W. Goetz, N. Homeyer, S. Izadi, P. Janowski, J. Kaus, A. Kovalenko, T.S. Lee, S. LeGrand, P. Li, C. Lin, T. Luchko, R. Luo, B. Madej, D. Mermelstein, K.M. Merz, G. Monard, H. Nguyen, H.T. Nguyen, I. Omelyan, A. Onufriev, D.R. Roe, A. Roitberg, C. Sagui, C.L. Simmerling, J. Swails, R.C. Walker, J. Wang, R.M. Wolf, X. Wu, L. Xiao, and P.A. Kollman (2016), AMBER 2016, University of California, San Francisco.
ParmBSC1 DNA Force Field PÃ©rez, Alberto, MarchÃ¡n Ivan, Svozil Daniel, Sponer Jiri, Cheatham Thomas E., Laughton Charles A., and Orozco Modesto. Refinement of the AMBER force field for nucleic acids: improving the description of alpha/gamma conformers. Biophys J. (2007) 92 (11), 3817-29.
NGL, a WebGL protein viewer. NGL Viewer: a web application for molecular visualization, Oxford Journals, 2015.
Ivan Karp, owner of OK Harris gallery, once told me, "What you have here is fine art photography." Memorial, with great remembrances to put that in context.
What's it all about, Alfie? (discussion) Photo.net.
Creation, illustrations for Robin Williamson's epic song.
Four Duets, homage to TS Eliot's Four Quartets.
Decentralized identity management through behavior, coupled with free mass psychotherapy.
When Algorithms Are Running the Asylum Psychiatryâ€™s biggest breakthrough in decades might come from machines that donâ€™t need to understand the mind at all.
Building "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Comment on The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson.
Siamese neural nets applied to choosing pairs.
Photo classification with TensorFlow For Poets.
Calculating histogram distances in Poincare spherical spaces.
Analysis of angles in many-dimensional image spaces.
Proposal: An Immersive Demonstration of Animal Presence Through Display of Photos.
Analysis of distance functions in many-dimensional image spaces.
Setting up an online DNA molecular dynamics simulation.
2/2019 New AI coming soon!
6/2018 Phobrain offline pending solving growth issue.
3/2018 Phobrain's 'story' now branches into two plots, which can run in parallel, cross sides, and rejoin.
2/2018 Simpler neural net models yield better effective accuracy, as high as 97%, vs. about 60% for the Siamese nets and about 20% for the other options. Neural nets are now used in Browse Mode (default) when clicking on the left-hand picture, while only training pairs are shown when clicking on the right-hand photo. About 250 networks are used.
11/2017 Siamese neural nets: now 40; added keyword vectors to histogram models.
10/2017 Added 10 siamese neural net models using color histograms in Browse and Search (AI) Modes. Added 700 of Bill's photos.
8/2017 More complex personalities for Browse left/right options. Added 600 of Bill's photos.
6/2017 Added 'Let pics repeat' option. Bifurcated Browse Mode into keyword-based choice of next pair, vs. mixed color/keyword-based choices.
5/2017 Added Golden Angle spiral progression to Search Mode. Dimensional analysis. Retired single-photo screen, cutting database size in half. Added 500 more photos by Bill.
4/2017 Created Browse Mode for the pairs views, chaining curated pairs by keywords, with the pair-forming options now available under Search Mode.
Added 1700 more photos by Raf & Skot.
3/2017 Added a free Pair Workbench page for loading your own photos from disk, and from web sites that allow it (e.g. imgur). Scales them to match/fit, lets you toggle with previous photos/pairs. Lets you save screenshots.
2/2017 Converted View to switch between 4 tilings of one or two photos, consolidating earlier work and adding horizontal and stacked landscape tilings.
1/2017 Added 'c'=curated pair option to pairs page, for manually-selected top 15% of over 25K pairs examined.
Added a new archive by photographers Raf & Skot, with 1500 photos.
12/2016 Added pairs page, with color-match and color-opposite functions.
10/2016 Added exploration when drawing on the photo: the line you draw maps through color space to the next photo, based on averaged colors.
Added 1700 more of Bill's photos, now caught up.
9/2016 Added click-to-toggle region alongside picture to see previous photo.
Added 1500 more of Bill's photos. Added 200 of Ellen's photos.
8/2016 Revised keyword algorithm: postponed use of geometrical keywords like 'juxtapose' and 'angular' until 100 photos have been seen.
7/2016 Unified keyword coding schemes and revised keywords.
6/2016 Clicks on different zones of the picture invoke different image matching algorithms, analogous to touching a face.
5/2016 A live DNA molecular dynamics simulation interacts with picture selection, acting as a beating heart for the site. The moving molecule.
4/2016 Added 1400 of Elle's pictures. User mouse behavior now influences picture selection.
1/2016 Elle classified the photos according to her own scheme.
10/2015 Site (single-photo) launched with 6500 of Bill's photos, keywords, color analysis, and - | + .
6/2015 Laptop bought, mothballed server-script random-selection prototype reimplemented in Java.
In tribute to Lucy Reynolds, teacher of Graham technique and breeder of dogs.