Algorithmic photo of connected feet

Algorithmic Photography

For a long time I have been interested in thinking about what would happen if cameras could do more than capturing a somewhat realistic representation of the incoming light through a lens. I have experimented with long exposures, slit-scans and other ways of interpreting the world. But what if we could express a photographic vision in an algorithm we could use when capturing images? We already have the tools to retouch images in post production but I am interested in finding out what happens when I implement an idea in an algorithm before any light is captured and then apply it in an environment....

September 26, 2021 · Peter Krantz
Girl with seaweed

Girl with seaweed

September 23, 2021 · Peter Krantz

The Mimic Pendant Lamp

This is a prototype for a dining table pendant lamp. A camera monitors what’s underneath the lamp and tries to mimic the colors it sees with the LED:s on the top of the lamp. This creates a somewhat matching ambient light in the room. It is made from oak wood and it uses a Python script on a Raspberry PI Zero W for the image analysis. The drawback is that the boot time is close to 20 seconds....

May 13, 2020 · Peter Krantz

The unreasonable effectiveness of recipe generation with the GPT-2 sample model

The release of the OpenAI GPT-2 sample language model from the paper Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (also see Better Language Models and Their Implications) shows great promise of what is to come. The paper describes how training data was collected by following outbound links from Reddit. This got me thinking about what types of content it has seen. I have experimented with triggering recipe generation from the model by using “recipe” and similar conditioning texts....

February 27, 2019 · Peter Krantz

Political advertising on social media is at risk of being lost forever

Not that long ago almost all political advertising was clearly visible in the physical world. Posters, newspaper ads and pamphlets were widely circulated, collected and preserved. It is not unlikely that you are able to walk into an antiquarian book shop and find examples of political propaganda hundreds of years old. Other copies will end up in attics, basements, shoeboxes and occasionally be donated to archives or sold on eBay. It was easier to see who said what and to whom....

July 10, 2018 · Peter Krantz

Christmas carols and death metal lyrics in Tensorflow

After the previous experiment with a character based recurrent neural network (RNN) for romantic novel titles I wanted to find more details about word level RNN:s. I was happy to find that Sung Kim has made it easy to explore word-level RNN:s with Tensorflow in this repository. Training text is 50/50 Christmas carols and death metal lyrics. Output examples below. (added line breaks and bolded lines that seemed like reasonable song names :-)....

December 23, 2017 · Peter Krantz

Chat Roulette Kastanjett at Stupid Hackathon Sweden

The Stupid Hackathon is a one-day event where participants conceptualize and create projects that have no value whatsoever. Me and Memeleader made Chat Roulette Kastanjett - a service for all castanet players who want to talk to other castanet players over castanet morse code. We made a small chat website (with the help of socket.io and Heroku), wired up castanets with a micro Arduino controller running morse code debugging code. And we won a prize!...

February 12, 2017 · Peter Krantz

Nurse Christmas Havin's Love or Using Deep Learning for Romantic Novel Titles

Torch is a scientific computing framework with wide support for machine learning algorithms. Andrej Karpathy has an excellent blog post explaining recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and character level models. With his sample code for Torch it is very easy to get started creating your own RNN by using text from a specific domain. This model learns to predict the next character in a sequence. The model can be used to generate text character by character that looks similar to the original training data....

December 23, 2015 · Peter Krantz

Polonoise from 1790

The Gothenburg University Library has digitized several years of sheet music from a publication called Musikaliskt Tidsfördrif (“Musical pastime”). The first issue from 1790 contains a short Polonaise. I transcribed it in MuseScore and generated an audio file. It may be the first time it is played for two hundred years or so. You can listen to it here: Download the sheet music and mp3 file below. Both are Public Domain....

December 22, 2015 · Peter Krantz

The first step to find out what users think

Empowering everyone to evaluate usability can improve the digital workplace. Here is how you take the first step with userpoll.io. Bad software makes a bad digital workplace Organizations that have been around for a few years typically have a large number of legacy systems. Ages ago, when they were created, it is likely that no one cared about their usability or design. Users were used to obeying software and taking a course in order to be able to file a report....

June 7, 2015 · Peter Krantz