Archive of month: 2010

Selling ProCasts

Having built ProCasts during 2009 (from ‘just me’ to a fab team of four) and then letting it sit quietly for the first half of this year I’m now selling the site as a lead-generation opportunity for a lucky fellow screencaster. The site continues to generate leads each week – this has lead to some […]
14 years ago

EuroPython 2010

I’m hugely looking forward to EuroPython in Birmingham from Monday. I’m driving up Monday very early (I wish I’d booked the hotel room for Sunday night too…). Browsing through the abstracts I’d say all the following look darned interesting! C++ integration concurrent sequential processes Arduino hacking javascript OpenData aerodynamics PyPy and Unladen Swallow game programming […]
14 years ago

22,937* faster Python math using pyCUDA

I’ve just uploaded a new Mandelbrot.py demo for pyCUDA, it adds a new calculation routine that straddles the numpy (C based math) and the pure-CUDA implementations. In total there are 4 variants to choose from. The speed differences are huge! Update – this Reddit thread has more details including real-world timings for two client problems […]
14 years ago

Presenting A.I. at FlashBrighton (using Python!)

A couple of weeks back I presented an Artificial Intelligence evening at FlashBrighton with John Montgomery and Emily Toop. The night covered optical character recognition, face detection, robots and some futurology. A video link should follow. Optical Character Recognition to Read Plaques Recently I’ve been playing with OCR to read photos with text, a particular […]
14 years ago

Abandoned petrol pump

Here’s a random moment – on Blackman Street just down from Brighton Station is this abandoned petrol pump. I’m curious to know what kind of business it supported – anyone know? This is the cheapside area of Brighton (meaning ‘market area‘ in olde English) known now as the New England Quarter – a few streets […]
14 years ago

Emily’s new blog

Emily (@fluffyemily) has started a new blog – EmilyToop.com – to note her progress with iPhone app development, robotics and general geekery. Her first post is Objective Flickr on the iPhone, inspired by some of the difficulties she had building her demo app for my Optical Character Recognition web service on the A.I. Cookbook. Ian […]
14 years ago

Talking on Artificial Intelligence next Tuesday at FlashBrighton

I’ve been invited to speak with John Montgomery next Tuesday at FlashBrighton – 7pm at The Werks for 1.5-2 hours or so of demos. We’ll be covering: Head tracking robot (build your own in a few hours!) Skiff Privacy Invasion – what we can learn from data mining the SkiffCam (the Gov’t can do it […]
14 years ago

Headroid1 – a face tracking robot head

The video below introduces Headroid1, this face-tracking robot will grow into a larger system that can follow people’s faces, detect emotions and react to engage with the visitor. The above system uses openCV’s face detection (using the Python bindings and facedetect.py) to figure out whether the face is in the centre of the screen, if […]
14 years ago

Extracting keyword text from screencasts with OCR

Last week I played with the Optical Character Recognition system tesseract applied to video data. The goal – extract keywords from the video frames so Google has useful text to index. I chose to work with ShowMeDo‘s screencasts as many show programming in action – there’s great keyword information in these videos that can be […]
14 years ago