Eye on AI - August 5th, 2022
Welcome to Aigora's "Eye on AI" series, where we round up exciting news at the intersection of consumer science and artificial intelligence!
This week, we’ll be looking into a few novel applications of AI, including a baby monitor that warns parents when their newborn is hungry before the waterworks begin and a unique NFT cognac collection that features artwork designed using Usher song lyrics.
Enjoy!
Baby Monitor Notifies Parents of Hunger Issues Before Crying Begins
Each night, new parents experience that delicate dance between feeding and sleeping as they try to balance their nighttime needs with those of their crying newborn. It’s an exhausting experience, one that too often leads to daytime grogginess in parents and feeding frustrations in babies. But an independent researcher named Caleb recently discovered that it doesn’t have to be that way. Using a baby monitor camera and AI, he trained his model to notify him of nighttime hunger before his baby began to cry, allowing him and his partner to get more reliable sleeping time.
“[Caleb] based his system on Google’s MediaPipe library, using his baby monitor’s camera to track such behaviors as lip smacking, pacifier rejection, fist mouthing, and rooting, all signs that someone’s tummy needs filling,” writes Hackaday contributor Dan Maloney. “By putting together a system to recognize these cues and assign a weight to them, [Caleb] now gets a text before the baby gets to the screaming phase, to the benefit of not only the little nipper but to his sleep-deprived servants as well.”
Instead of relying on cries, a sign of late-stage baby hunger, Caleb’s AI system looks for physical cues to indicate early-stage hunger, such as lip curling and raising a fist to the mouth. When those cues combine to surpass a certain likely-to-cry threshold, the AI sends him an automated text, which allows one of the parents to address the issue while the other continues sleeping. This has a two-fold benefit: 1) it allows both parents to get more sleep, and 2) it reduces feeding times since crying babies are known to be more difficult to feed. Check out this video to learn more. Can you think of other AI-led applications for cameras that could be used for simple prevention measures?
Usher Uses AI to Design Cognac Art
Switching gears, we turn to the article “Usher uses artificial intelligence to turn his description of Rémy Martin cognac into artwork,” which describes how Usher launched his limited edition 1738 bottle with Rémy Martin by using his own musical vocabulary and AI to create the unique artwork that matched the tasted of the cognac.
“His description was fed through an AI technology known as Generative Adversarial Neural Networks and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training to turn his words into artwork,” writes Daily Mail contributor Paul Chavez. “... Usher made more than 50 different art pieces before making his choice and some of them will be displayed during the after party of his Las Vegas residency also called 'A Taste of Passion'.”
Fifty limited-edition bottles were created as part of the collaboration. Twenty-five were made available as NFT purchases on BlockBar.com, a direct-to-consumer NFT marketplace for luxury wines and spirits. The remaining twenty-five will be gifted to Usher to celebrate the 25th anniversary of My Way, his second studio album, which was released in September of 1997. As an additional easter egg, one NFT bottle will unlock an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Rémy Martin's brand home in Cognac, France, yet another great example of how NFTs are rapidly expanding into the physical world.
Other News
Improving aircraft design with Machine Learning and a more efficient model of turbulent airflow
AI can help fleets keep vehicles longer -- saving money and lives
DeepMind AI has discovered the structure of nearly every protein known to science
Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions unveils robotic security inspection dog
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