TensorFlow Dev Summit 2017

About two months ago I applied to go to Google's first annual TensorFlow Dev Summit.  I sent in the application and forgot about it.  After a month I figured that I did not get an invite. Then about a week ago, the invite came in.  Turns out only one in ten applicants were invited to the conference. I have no idea what criteria they used to select me, but I am currently on plane to Mountain View excited to talk with the TensorFlow team and see what other developers are doing with it.

The summit will be broadcast live around the world.  Here is a link.  Look for me in the crowd. I will have a grey pullover on.

Brushstroke Maps for Three Famous Paintings

When you Google "Famous Artwork" a list of paintings is revealed, and at the top of that list is da Vinci, Van Gogh, and Munch. Here is a picture of the top ten actually...

Now that we have a stroke map of the Mona Lisa and The Scream, we decided to round up the top three by creating a mapping of The Starry Night.  Interestingly, The Starry Night is probably one of the best examples of the importance of brushstrokes in a painting.  There is nothing but flow in it.  And a major part of the composition is the movement made by the direction of the strokes. 

If we could somehow capture how Van Gogh used his strokes, well thats impossible, but if we could at least learn something from them. Well we will never know until we try.

As of 7:00 PM January 8, 2017, cloudpainter has just barely begun to explore the strokes of Van Gogh's The Starry Night.  We realize these first strokes are rudimentary, but its just laying down a background. Over the next several days we will attempt to copy as many of the strokes with as much detail as possible. These will be stored in an Elasticsearch database and shared for anyone to use in attempts to deconstruct Van Gogh's brushstroke.

Full Visibility's Machine Learning Sponsorship

Wanted to take a moment to publicly thank cloudpainter's most recent sponsor, Full Visibility. 

Full Visibility is a Washington D.C. based software consulting boutique that I have been lucky enough to become closely associated with. Their sponsorship arose from a conversation I had with one of their partners. Was telling him how I finally thought that Machine Learning, which has long been an annoying buzzword, was finally showing evidence of being mature. Next thing I knew Full Visibility bought a pair of mini-supercomputers for the partner and I to experiment with. One of the two boxes can be seen in the picture of my home based lab below. It's the box with the cool white skull on it. While nothing too fancy, it has about 2,500 more cores than any other machine I have ever been fortunate enough to work with. The fact that private individuals such as myself can now run ML labs in their own homes, might be the biggest indicator that a massive change is on the horizon.

Full Visibility joins the growing list of cloudpainter sponsors which now includes Google, 7Bot, RobotArt.org, 50+ Kickstarter Backers, and hundreds of painting patrons. I am always grateful for any help with this project that I can get from industry and individuals. All these fancy machines are expensive, and I couldn't do it without your help.

Pindar Van Arman