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I'm a bit of an eclectic mess 🙂 I've been a programmer, journalist, editor, TV producer, and a few other things.

I'm currently working on my second novel which is complete, but is in the edit stage. I wrote my first novel over 20 years ago but then didn't write much till now.

I post about #Coding, #Flutter, #Writing, #Movies and #TV. I'll also talk about #Technology, #Gadgets, #MachineLearning, #DeepLearning and a few other things as the fancy strikes ...

Lived in: 🇱🇰🇸🇦🇺🇸🇳🇿🇸🇬🇲🇾🇦🇪🇫🇷🇪🇸🇵🇹🇶🇦🇨🇦

Fahim Farook

When I was young I loved reading accounts of travel in far off, oft forgotten places. Things like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Travels with a Donkey”.

I loved learning about now gone places, the feel of the dust on the road, the texture of the food they ate, or just how a tuft of grass felt between your fingers. Anything that gave me a feel for a place that I’d never been to …

Later, when I was still young, I read “Destiny’s Road” by Larry Niven, which to me personally is one of the greatest #ScienceFiction novels ever because of the imagery and the feelings it evoked. It was like reading one of those travel novels, but for an alien planet. Niven gave me details about the flora and fauna of the planet that still paints vivid pictures in my mind 25+ years later …

So why am I talking about this now?

Well, today I heard about hedge apples from @at and @Fawn and that took me down a rabbit hole of reading to discover more about hedge apples. For some reason, reading the Wikipedia entry about hedge apples reminded me of “Destiny’s Raod” and led me down a twisted lane of memory pathways 🙂

A long, long time ago, I read this book by Yakov Perelman called “Fun with Mathematics” (I think?) The USSR put out a lot of books back then (mostly Progress Publishers) and there were a lot of interesting science and maths books from them. This book (or possibly something similar, the details are hazy in my mind since this was 40 years or so ago) talked about a greatest tall tale competition.

One guy comes in and tells a tale of Baron Manchausen (or maybe it was the baron himself) about some feat where he does something which sounds patently impossible. Then another guy comes in an tells a rather prosaic sounding story about an ordinary day where some perfectly ordinary sounding things happen with regards to fruit on a bush, birds singing etc.

The judges say that what the Baron talked about (possibly a journey to the moon) was possible but what the other guy talked about was impossible because that particular fruit did not grow in that season and those birds were not found in that area etc. They were trying to make you realize that perfectly ordinary things could be impossible and that things that sounded impossible could actually be fact.

So why am I dragging that hazy memory out, kicking and screming?

Because reading about the hedge apple made me wonder if you could perhaps combine all of these things, perfectly normal bits of information from our ordinary world, into a science fiction tale of travel in a far off planet with just a few changes in detail. Create a story like “Destiny’s Road” where strange plants and wondrous creatures are revealed and they are all based on things that we find right here on earth but don’t really know about, or do know about, but don’t really think are that strange to others from another part of the world?

This has got the gears in my brain turning extra hard … 😛

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny%27s_Road

#Writing #Stories #Memories #Books
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Fahim Farook

Talking of organising your home timeline, or filtering, I’ve always treated the home timeline as my main source of info. I always read it, and I always read all of it. Which is why I needed filtering in the first place.

Now this might be fairly obvious to others, but I had a complete blindspot as to the fact that I could not look at the home timeline at all. I could simply create lists for all the people I follow, disregard the home timeline and simply look at the lists only. This would have removed a lot of the pain points I had around filtering …

But that’s not what I did.

And there was a reason for why I did things my way. My personal Fedi client has a notification feature which notifies me when the home timeline has posts. It adds a badge with a count to the app icon. Otherwise, I forget to look at posts at alll and might go through the whole day without reading what is going on in the Fediverse.

Sure, this is another *me* problem 😛 But for my personal reading style, just using lists and ignoring the home timeline would not have worked very well. But I guess if you do not have the specific need that I do, you could simply split up all the people you follow into lists and then disregard the home timeline?

#FediClient #Filtering #Organizing
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Fahim Farook

As is usual with most (any?) simple system, as time goes on, it becomes ever more complicated by accumulating new features 😛

The filtering of the home timeline on my custom Fedi-client started out that way. It was simply a matter of filtering out people who were members of my lists so that my home timeline would be less cluttered.

But then I started following high-volume hashtags. So I decided to add hashtag filtering.

But today I noticed that this also removed low-volume hashtags such as #MachineLearning that I did want to see in my home timeline …

So what do I do to fix that?

This is where the system starts getting complicated 😛 I’m thinking of adding a selective feature which lets me specify which hashtags should be filtered. Sounds simple enough, right? And at it’s core, it is …

But to implement this, I’d have to implement a new UI to show all followed hashtags and add a new property to the hashtag data to indicate that it should be filtered, or not.

I don’t know if I’ll implement this or not. I feel like taking the weekend off from coding. But on the other hand, the urge to code might be so great that I do it anyway. I guess we’ll see …

#FediClient #Filtering #Organizing
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New postdoc opportunity in , people + AI, AI/ethics, and related topics!

We've got a new center at UMD on Values-Centered AI, and want *YOU* to apply for our postdoc position.

Deadline: Mar 31, 2023
Job ad: https://research.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2023-02/vcai-postdoc.pdf
App form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfySV8JY6-aNz6YKW5O-nsi5srvHbDINeBw9LFAhWYkXi1Prw/viewform

This is an opportunity to work with a highly interdisciplinary group in a 1- or 2-year postdoc with no deliverables attached 😉, including connections to HCIL, CML, CLIP, TRACE, SDS Center, Urban Computing, and more!

>

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Fahim Farook

Boosted 7 papers out of 77 in the cs.CV category on arXiv.org today — apparently it’s 7’s all the way 😛

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning
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Fahim Farook

"Data-driven Approach for Automatically Correcting Faulty Road Maps. (arXiv:2211.06544v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — A method to fix faulty road maps (specifically roads displayed on maps) using machine learning.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06544
Code: https://github.com/soojunghong/image_inpainting_model_for_lane_geomery_discovery

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
GT, Input, and Output denotes t…
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Fahim Farook

"ZITS++: Image Inpainting by Improving the Incremental Transformer on Structural Priors. (arXiv:2210.05950v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — Better image inpainting by detecting structures in the source image using techniques such as edge detection.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05950
Code: https://github.com/dqiaole/zits_inpainting

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Left (a)-(e): Comparisons of ZI…
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Fahim Farook

"Designing an Encoder for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Models. (arXiv:2302.12228v1 [cs.CV])" — A method to teach text-to-image models new concepts in seconds.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12228

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Our encoder-based method enable…
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Fahim Farook

"Aligning Text-to-Image Models using Human Feedback. (arXiv:2302.12192v1 [cs.LG])" — A fine-tuning method for better aligning generated images to the input text prompt when using diffusion models.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12192

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
The steps in our fine-tuning me…
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Fahim Farook

"Evaluating the Efficacy of Skincare Product: A Realistic Short-Term Facial Pore Simulation. (arXiv:2302.11950v1 [cs.CV])" — Simulating the effects of skincare products on your skin (specifically the pores) to gauge efficacy of the product.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11950

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Qualitative results of Facial P…
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Fahim Farook

"Region-Aware Diffusion for Zero-shot Text-driven Image Editing. (arXiv:2302.11797v1 [cs.CV])" — A region-aware text-guided image editing method which aims to replace one entity with another.

What I always wonder with these approaches is whether you can replace a larger entity with a smaller one, or vice versa, (say a horse with a cat) in a way that looks realistic?

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11797
Code: https://github.com/haha-lisa/RDM-Region-Aware-Diffusion-Model

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
The results of the proposed reg…
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Fahim Farook

"Controlled and Conditional Text to Image Generation with Diffusion Prior. (arXiv:2302.11710v1 [cs.CV])" — Using a Diffusion Prior to constrain the generation to a specific domain without altering the larger Diffusion Decoder in a memory and compute efficient way.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11710

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Diffusion Prior can be trained …
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Fahim Farook

I started reading papers on arXiv.org because I enjoyed learning about generative machine learning models. Then I started boosting papers that I liked because I thought it might be helpful to others …

Now, I sometimes get people asking me to explain the paper to them because they can’t be bothered to read it 😛 What do you do in such a situation?

Would explaining the paper actually do any good? If they can’t be bothered to read the paper, are they going to bother reading my explanation? Is it worthwhile spending the time to explain something to such a person?

I don’t know … It feels as if it’s just a drive-by thing — either because they think it’s funny or because people are like that. Or are there people who are really like “I can’t be bothered to read a paper but if somebody gives me bite-sized info, I’ll take it”?

I think people confuse me 😀

#MachineLearning #Papers #People
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Fahim Farook

A total of 77 papers in the cs.CV category on arXiv.org today — 58 new, 19 updated.

On to the Friday paper reading …

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning
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Jim Howard-Birt 🐦📸: Photos

It's small and round, and you rarely find them on the ground.

The wonderful Long-tailed tit.

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What do you get when you cross the Atlantic Ocean with the Titanic?
Show content

Halfway.

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This young network engineer at Project Waves is doing amazing things in Baltimore

My story here on how Devin Weaver designed, built, and operates a network that brings free gig speed service to low-income apartment buildings in one of the nation's most disconnected cities

https://communitynets.org/content/making-waves-baltimore-community-driven-connectivity

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