Tag: Future Tense

Listened Have we lost our sense of reality? from Radio National

Are the systems we’ve developed to enhance our lives now impairing our ability to distinguish between reality and falsity?


Guests

Dr Laura D’Olimpio – Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Australia

Andrew Potter – Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University; author of The Authenticity Hoax

Hany Farid – Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Mark Pesce – Honorary Associate, Digital Cultures Programme, University of Sydney

Robert Thompson – Professor of Media and Culture, Syracuse University

This is an interesting episode in regards to augmented reality and fake news. One of the useful points was Hany Farid’s description of machine learning and deep fakes:

When you think about faking an image or faking a video you typically think of something like Adobe Photoshop, you think about somebody takes an image or the frames of a video and manually pastes somebody’s face into an image or removes something from an image or adds something to a video, that’s how we tend to think about digital fakery. And what Deep Fakes is, where that word comes from, by the way, is there has been this revolution in machine learning called deep learning which has to do with the structure of what are called neural networks that are used to learn patterns in data.

And what Deep Fakes are is a very simple idea. You hand this machine learning algorithm two things; a video, let’s say it’s a video of somebody speaking, and then a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand images of a person’s face that you would like to superimpose onto the video. And then the machine learning algorithm takes over. On every frame of the input video it finds automatically the face. It estimates the position of the face; is it looking to the left, to the right, up, down, is the mouth open, is the mouth closed, are the eyes open, are the eyes closed, are they winking, whatever the facial expression is.

It then goes into the sea of images of this new person that you have provided, either finds a face with a similar pose and facial expression or synthesises one automatically, and then replaces the face with that new face. It does that frame after frame after frame for the whole video. And in that way I can take a video of, for example, me talking and superimpose another person’s face over it.

Listened Disrupting the Disruptors from Radio National

Has our contemporary embrace of disruption become a problem rather than a solution?

Antony Funnell speaks with a number of guests, including Mark Pesce – Honorary Associate, Ian Verrender and Professor Gregory Whitwell, about the idea of disruption today. However, the most interesting conversation is with Professor Andrew King. He has done considerable work testing Clayton Christensen’s theory and highlights some of the limitations to it. This includes Christensen’s approach to ongoing research and modelling, where he collects data, theorises and then tests with new data, adjusting his initial theory. You can read more on King’s work here.

🎧 On Foreign Aid (Future Tense)

Eleven Chinese warships reportedly sailed into the East Indian Ocean this month, amid a constitutional crisis and state of emergency in the Maldives. In part, this is claimed to be in connection with aid.

As Future Tense captured in the first of a two part series, China is an emerging player when it comes to overseas aid. The problem with this is that much of it is not actually ‘aid’ money. As Brad Park explains:

China actually provides a lot of state financing that is more commercially oriented and is provided market terms or close to market terms. And so much of the money in fact that is going to Russia is not aid in the strict sense of the term, they are loans offered on close to market rates, and China is offering those loans in part because it’s one of the world’s largest net creditors, it’s sitting on very large reserves, it wants to earn an attractive financial return on its capital, and so it has an aggressive overseas lending programs. So China wants those loans to be repaid with interest.

This is also a part of China’s growing international expansion.

In part two, Samantha Custer, Abhijit Banerjee and Stephen Howes discuss the sustainable development goals developed by the United Nations. These provides the policy and guidance for how aid should be spent.

Bookmarked The GIF as an increasingly important visual communication tool (Radio National)

The GIF, this little looped video, is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication.

Antony Funnell leads a discussion into the place of GIFs in modern communication. This includes contributions from:

  • Gretchen McCulloch – Montreal-based Internet linguist – on the role of visual information.

  • David McIntosh – CEO and co-founder, Tenor (formerly Riffsy) – on the possibility of a Gif keyboard

  • Dr Tim Highfield – Research Fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, QUT – on the curtural dimensions.

  • Cheney Brew – Trove Digital Communications Officer, National Library of Australia on the GIF IT UP competition

I have written about GIFs before, even created a collection of GIFs for my colleagues on leaving my old organisation. However, this podcast provides some of the background to them.