Archives of ArtificialIntelligence

Selling ProCasts through Flippa.com

A couple of weeks ago I sold ProCasts.co.uk, the screencasting business I built over the last two years. Some of you know that I moved away from the business back at Christmas and left it idle (a rather silly thing to do), here are some notes on how I sold it and how you could […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]