All posts of Ian

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 […]
15 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 […]
15 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 […]
15 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 […]
15 years ago

Tesseract optical character recognition to read plaques

The tesseract engine (wikipedia) is a very capable OCR package, I’m playing with it after a thought for my AI Handbook plan. OCR is a pretty interesting subject, it drove a lot of early computer research as it was used to automate paper filing for banks and companies like Readers Digest. This TesseractOSCON paper gives […]
15 years ago

New book/wiki – a practical artificial intelligence ‘cookbook’

Having almost completed The Screencasting Handbook I’m now thinking about my next project. I’ve been involved in the field of artificial intelligence since my first computer (a Commodore 64 back in the 80s) and I’ve continued to be paid to work in this area since the end of the 90s. Update – as mentioned below […]
15 years ago