FOURTH PORTAL
GATEWAY TO THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
RESOURCES
The Resources page connects to academic papers, articles and other information that informs the Fourth Portal research and development and is free to access.
26 Aug 2024
What is TinyML?
Datacamp
TinyML has been gaining traction due to the development of hardware and software ecosystems that support it. The tool has made it possible to implement machine learning models in low-energy systems, like microcontrollers, TinyML can be used in a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, industrial predictive maintenance, and customer experience. It can also be used for computer vision, visual wake words, keyword spotters, gesture recognition, and more.
25 Aug 2024
Public Perception Of Face Search Technology
Fourth Portal reporting on PimEyes
PimEyes is an online face search engine that goes through the Internet to find pictures containing given faces. PimEyes uses face recognition search technologies to perform a reverse image search. Find a face and check where the image appears online. Our face finder helps you find a face and protect your privacy. Facial recognition online system allows you to search by image.
24 Aug 2024
A Dystopian Nightmare: When Our Fiction is Real
Medium
George Orwell — 1984. This book is so prolific that people use ‘Orwellian’ as an adjective, even though they might be using it wrongly. Does the concept of inescapable surveillance seem familiar? Instead of a totalitarian state of Big Brother, we might have sub-contracted this control to tech giants who can read your emails, hear your conversations, and monitor your search history. Synopsis of the full article on Medium.
20 Aug 2024
Quantum Compass
TECHSPOT
GPS-free navigation nears reality with quantum breakthrough.
In a nutshell: Today's typical navigation-grade motion sensors are about the size of a grapefruit, helping steer ships, planes, and vehicles in conjunction with GPS signals. This means they always need satellite connectivity to function, but a new breed of "quantum compass" could eventually let us ditch the satellites entirely.
9 Jun 2024
Freesound In The Era Of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Freesound Blog
Freesound was started in 2005 in the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, released under Creative Commons licenses that allow reuse. In an era of AI, what is the future of this important resource.
21 Apr 2024
What Is The Fediverse
The Verge
The Fediverse is the buzziest new thing in social networking is a big deal. It’s also very confusing. And it’s not actually new. It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows sharing of content, data, and follower graph between networks.
19 Apr 2024
The Cloud Under The Sea
The Verge
The industry responsible for laying the cables for the internet traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, under-appreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists.
14 Apr 2024
Tape Nostalgia Meets High-tech
phys.org
Researchers are developing a technique that uses the special synchrotron X-ray light from the Swiss Light Source SLS to non-destructively digitise recordings from historic audio tapes. Audio and video tape decays over time and can no longer be played back.
3 Mar 2024
Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST)
C4DM, Queen Mary, University of London
In 2018, the Fourth Portal curated delivery of the £5m EPSRC FAST programme to the music industry at Abbey Road studios, demonstrating the very latest technologies for end-to-end music production and delivery. The videos that follow provide an overview of the programme and demonstrators developed.
24 Jan 2024
Ecoclimates: Climate-Response Modelling of Vegetation
ACM Trans. Graph., Vol. 41, No. 4, Article 155
A simulator producing complex and realistic outdoor landscapes with vegetation growth and weather dynamics. With the ability to simulate more than 500,000 plants with individual geometries, the program can assist in predicting climate-response of vegetation to deforestation and changing weather patterns.
6 Jan 2024
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)
Tech Target/Wikipedia
Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are a technique that generates 3D representations of an object or scene from 2D images by using advanced machine learning. NeRFs show incredible promise in representing 3D data more efficiently than other techniques.
6 Jan 2024
Neural Radiance Fields For Outdoor Scene Relighting
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022
Photorealistic editing of outdoor scenes from photographs requires a profound understanding of the image formation process and an accurate estimation of the scene geometry, reflectance and illumination. The technique allows simultaneous editing of both scene illumination and camera viewpoint using only a collection of outdoor photos shot in uncontrolled settings.
2 Jan 2024
Challenges of Living with Artificial Intelligence
Living With AI Podcast
This podcast touches on some of the most important ethical and creative challenges that AI poses to music-making and the creative industries more generally. Could a robot improvise in a jazz band? What is the difference between an AI playing a piano and a pianola?