Week 5: Midterm Proposal

For my midterm, I am planning on building on my project from last week to make it into a user generated and user defined computer vision dataset. It will be made of two parts:

Part 1 - Create a website to allow people to draw how they want the computer to see them and label themselves

Part 2 - Create an output website that would allow people to put in a word and it will draw the corresponding person OR they draw a person and it predicts what kind of person they are drawing

Motivating Questions

  • Can we force technology to see us how we see ourselves? How we want to be seen?

  • Can this be used to train technology to see us differently?

  • Can we create new infrastructure for big data?

  • Can we create new modes of production for big data?

  • What type of augmentation does this give to our technology systems?

  • Can we make new biometric diagrams?

  • What would digital self portraits look like?

  • In what ways is obfuscation part of or not part of this process?

So far I have used the below for references in thinking about this work

Through this project, I hope I’ll learn:

  • Server management →

    • How to create and store a database on a server

    • How to pull information from a server

  • Use machine learning tools such as ML5

    • ML5 example: Train sketch RNN on drawings?

    • Code for Quick, Draw! which is used in the ML5 example

Other considerations for this first version:

  1. Should there be a time constraint?

  2. Total length of pixel constraint?

  3. Constrain labels to only one or two?

  4. Which order makes most sense/works best? Draw and then label or label and then draw?

These are questions that our professor Shawn asked me during office hours and I’d like to think more about!