Saturday 22 July 2017

AI TRAINED TO UNDERSTAND BEAUTY



Artificial intelligence can translate languages and play games – now it's being tasked with understanding human subjectivity

What makes something beautiful? It’s an entirely subjective question. But artificial intelligence now ‘thinks’ it has the answer.

Using deep learning techniques, data scientists from Warwick Business School trained a computer system on 200,000 images from the website Scenic-or-Not, where members of the public vote on how beautiful a British scene is. These include Loch Scavaig on the Isle of Skye... and Newbury Road roundabout.

These include Loch Scavaig on the Isle of Skye... and Newbury Road roundabout.The project was linked to earlier studies by the same team from Warwick's Data Science Lab that showed a direct correlation between residing in a scenic location and good health. I

if the AI could recognise beauty like a human, city planning for wellbeing could potentially be automated. Deep learning essentially involves inundating a powerful system with labelled information, and waiting for it to make connections, categorise and sort data. In theory, it can then contextualise new scenes using that information. Such a model is designed to replicate, to a lesser extent, the connectivity of the human brain.

The Warwick lab wanted an objective take on what makes a scene beautiful, and used the MIT Places Convolutional Neural Network to run the task. While going through the Scenic-or-Not images, the system – which has already been trained on 2.5 million labelled images – duly began to label everything it could recognise, from grass to horizon, hills and sky. In doing this, it also noted whether or not they were attributes found in a highly rated scene.

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The project was linked to earlier studies by the same team from Warwick's Data Science Lab that showed a direct correlation between residing in a scenic location and good health. If the AI could recognise beauty like a human, city planning for wellbeing could potentially be automated.

The findings from Warwick, so far, have not been revolutionary: uninteresting is not beautiful, ancient churches are. But the study is in its early stages, and points to the system at least being able to understand what many city planners may not have grasped - adding a patch of grass does not necessarily transform a space.

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