12. “You cant make reality TV out of spoilt teens using Instagram”
13. “Brands are not competing with other brands or Hollywood but
with millenial fooling around creating content”
STARING : Ashley Clements, Mary Wiles, Laura Spencer, Julia Cho
28. The Creators Project celebrates visionary
artists across multiple disciplines who are
using technology in innovative ways to push
the boundaries of creative expression. In
doing so, we seek to inspire new and
emerging artists by showcasing the infinite
possibilities presented by the advancement of
modern technology.
24/7 media platform,
440,00 YouTube subscribers
1.1 million social followers
375 million + video views.
As I mentioned in my previous post- I love audiobooks. And yet, I never really got into podcasts. Until, that is, Welcome to Night Vale. WTNV is a bi-monthly podcast that is written by the ridiculously talented Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink. It is, essentially, the news broadcast of a fictional, American desert town called Night Vale. And you may wonder what Night Vale is like, but I think I’ll let you keep wondering. All I’m going to say is that it is like a town that was founded by Lovecraft and built by Gaiman. (So, if you like either of those guys, you’re probably in it for the long haul and don’t have to read the rest of my raving.)
The podcast itself fluctuates between the odd, the creepy, and the adorable. I cannot actually stress how amazing the writing is. The format of a news broadcast ought to be pretty restricting but the writers of WTNV have conspired to make it anything but small and ordinary. As always, we start out with Cecil’s welcome …
Jean-Claude Van Damme and Volvo Trucks are surprising bedfellows after the Muscles from Brussels used two moving trucks to perform his signature split. Volvo Trucks already had entertained viewers with a series of surprisingly captivating stunts (in one, a hamster is used to ascend the edge of a cliff). But the campaign took on a life of its own when JCVD helped the effort go viral.
The point, of course, wasn’t to sell tractor trailers to average consumers; it was to build up a brand in a segment the way John Deere or Caterpillar have among people who will never drive their vehicles. But the JCVD stunt will now likely also benefit Volvo’s more traditional car division, making it cooler among younger consumers who may have never thought of checking out the brand before.
When it comes to SUVs, Dodge’s Durango wasn’t on most buyers’ minds. But “Anchorman 2′s” Ron Burgundy changed that almost singlehandedly, with Will Ferrell playing the over-the-top newscaster in 70 spots for the SUV. The stunt worked, boosting Durango sales by more than 40% this year. But take note: This could only be done with a star willing to put in the time to help a brand — rare when studios broker promotional partnerships around their films.
Chipotle’s haunting “The Scarecrow,” developed with CAA Marketing, poignantly put a spotlight on processed food with an animated short, app-based game and cover of “Pure Imagination” by Fiona Apple that demonstrated how a fast food chain can effectively make customers pause and think about what they’re eating while promoting itself at the same time.
Honda Motor Co. went old school with an effort to save aging drive-in movie theaters unable to upgrade their venues with new digital projectors. The Japanese automaker wound up helping nine theaters across the country and put a spotlight on an area of the exhibition biz that’s become an aging relic but a nostalgic part of car culture.
In its ongoing quest to topple Apple’s iPhone from the top rungs of the smartphone ladder, Samsung paired up with Jay Z to launch an app and give away 1 million copies of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” to owners of its smartphones 72 hours before the album’s release. The three-day head start may have cost Samsung $5 million (deal is said to be part of an overall $20 million deal with Roc Nation) but the move worked, rewarding Samsung owners and making them seem cool at the same time.
In a series of well-produced documentaries, Dove uses a sketch artist to compare the way women view themselves and how others they’ve met do with startling results that prove life changing for not only the subjects but the viewer as well. Improving a customer’s self-image should also help Dove boost its own image with its core audience
While the landphilarmoic talked about dealing with poverty
There are ideas that are required that help people who are disadvantaged
At first glance you may think – another glove for VR or controlling some console.
Not exactly…This is automatic sign language translator. Thanks to an accelerometer and flex sensors (tensometers) Arduino Mega is able to read the sign with Bayes filter. After that Arduino translates it to a text displayed on a LCD and synthesized using VoiceBox. Hats off.
You can read more here.
Pretty simple premise, if you ask me. In fact, if it’s on wikipedia then everybody should already know about it. There’s two options to go about sign language translation, but both need to measure a person’s hand movements. This can be done visually or mechanically; because it’d be a bit lame to have to carry around video cameras and computers necessary to do the processing, my group went with a glove based system. By the by, ‘my group’ consisted of a few buds in CMU’s Biomedical Engineering Design Capstone class: Allen Ambulo, Andrew S.D. Tsai, Michelle Lin, Sherry Huang, and Eric Wideburg. We also had the awesome Professors Dr. Conrad Zapanta, and Dr. James Antaki.So, clearly, the idea of a sign language recognizing glove is not new, but two things have not been done–at least we didn’t find evidence of it.
1) With the abundance of iPods and other media devices, why can’t this device also make noise? And if it could make noise that corresponds to whatever is being signed by the user, that’d be extra impressive.
2) Nobody likes to spell, so why do all currently made gloves mainly focus on finger spelling. Damn, you’d have some strong hands if all you were able to do was finger spell… Why not include good gesture recognition? Wiimotes do it, and 3 year olds are better than me at playing Nintendo Wii.
Anyway, lets talk about implementation. I wont go into the significantly boring detail in this post; I’ll probably put up guides on specific aspects (the Recognition, the Sensors, etc.) of the project later on.
Like any good embedded system, this glove is merely a system of input and output, with some processing in the middle. Like a kind of mathematical system of equations sandwich. Yum. Input comes from the sensors or from user input. Output is the LCD screen and the tiny speaker I stole off one of those cards that sing at you (thanks Grandma for the birthday card! I really like it!).
People interact with people
Crowdsourcing clicks against malaria
Crowdsourcing techniques and on-line games allow tele-diagnosis of malaria images through the Internet, shows new study presented by researchers from the Technical University of Madrid.
Madrid, 2nd December 2012
Malaria is one of the most important challenges for global health. It is responsible for nearly 1 million deaths and 200 million cases yearly. New research has proven the feasibility of a crowdsourcing system to tele-diagnose malaria images. The collective intelligence system relied on a community of on-line volunteers that learned to find and tag malaria parasites in digitized images of thick blood smears. This research has been recently published in a high impact journal of medical informatics (Journal of Medical Internet Research), and was directed by Dr. Miguel Luengo-Oroz from the Biomedical Image Technologies group at the Technical University of Madrid – CEI Moncloa, in collaboration with malaria expert John Frean from the Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, and Spanish software developer Asier Arraz.
The standard diagnosis procedure for malaria consists of first assessing the presence and type of parasites, and then counting the number of parasites in blood smears using a microscope - a task which can take up to 20 minutes of time from a specialist, which may not always be available. The new study has replicated the parasite counting diagnostic phase using the on-line game MalariaSpot (www.malariaspot.org) - asking the crowd to diagnose and count the parasites instead of an individual expert. In the game, Internet players have to tag as many parasites as possible in 1 minute in digitalized real images of infected thick blood smears.
“The idea is that by combining the clicks from several non-expert volunteers that play the game, we are able to produce a unique parasite detection system with remarkably high accuracy.” explains Dr. Luengo-Oroz. “Each day, millions of hours are spent playing video-games, especially young people and digital natives. A small percentage of this time would be enough to diagnose all the malaria cases on the planet.”
Over the course of 1 month, anonymous players from 95 countries played more than 12,000 games and generated a database of more than 270,000 clicks on the test images. Data analysis revealed that the fusion of 22 games from players with no prior training or 13 players with a 1 minute training resulted in a perfect parasite count - as precise as an expert microscopist. In addition, the researchers have discovered a mathematical equation that allows the prediction of the parasite counting accuracy based on the number of volunteers and their training time. This equation could be used in the future to design new system implementations.
The research team is preparing for a next phase of investigation, which will consist of a real-time experiment at a rural clinic in an infected region, and is eager to expand the network of collaborators. Dr. Luengo-Oroz affirms “If the results continue to be positive, we can imagine a fast remote diagnosis system with the potential to scale globally. Digitalized blood samples would be distributed through the Internet - transforming mobile phones into low-cost microscopies.” The researchers expect to expand the applications of crowdsourcing techniques and artificial intelligence (that they have defined as “crowd-computing”) to other medical image diagnosis problems with massive image data and not enough specialists to analyze them.
People interact with objects
Objects interact with each other
The driverless cars leads you to take machines more seriously and leads you to invent other things
Translating poems
Writing its own newpaper
Sending out autonomous emails
Storytelling and audience building formed the foundation of this model. With technology as the core narrative thread, we refined the focus to most effectively grow a strong community.
Arts and entertainment was an ideal filter:
Top passion point for youth
Huge area for technological innovation
Community of influencers
Potential for mass appeal
The founding mission statement:
The Creators Project celebrates visionary artists across multiple disciplines who are using technology in innovative ways to push the boundaries of creative expression. In doing so, we seek to inspire new and emerging artists by showcasing the infinite possibilities presented by the advancement of modern technology.