Tag: cs

CV Dazzle

CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

Foiling face detection.
2019-10-15: There’s also an IR version:

the key idea is to shine infrared light onto your face, in such a way that facial recognition systems are fooled. A small number of LEDs hidden in e.g. a cap turn out to be plenty good enough for this.

Smalltalk Rejection

Dear Dr. Kay, The program committee thanks you for the submission of your paper “Object Orientation – A New Paradigm of Programming”. Unfortunately your paper has been rejected. To do proper Computer Science, you must evaluate new ideas incrementally. In the future, please avoid excessive novelty.

Donald Knuth Interview

You are one of the fathers of the open-source revolution, even if you aren’t widely heralded as such. You previously have stated that you released TeX as open source because of the problem of proprietary implementations at the time, and to invite corrections to the code—both of which are key drivers for open-source projects today. Have you been surprised by the success of open source since that time? Donald Knuth: The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

interesting as always

Regarding The Art of Computer Programming, it’s such a fascinating project. As I was researching I realized that you started it before either of my parents were even born. When you’re considering a project of that scope, how do you go about outlining and organizing and planning?

Well the best thing is to be a very bad estimator of how much time it’s going to take. At one point I thought I would have it done before my son was born; he was born in 1965. If I had known how much work it was going to be, I would have been pretty stupid to have started because here we are almost 60 years later and I’m basically a little more than half done.

Synthesis Kernel

This dissertation shows that operating systems can provide fundamental services an order of magnitude more efficiently than traditional implementations. It describes the implementation of a new operating system kernel, Synthesis, that achieves this level of performance.

The Synthesis kernel combines several new techniques to provide high performance without sacrificing the expressive power or security of the system. The new ideas include:
Run-time code synthesis – a systematic way of creating executable machine code at runtime to optimize frequently-used kernel routines – queues, buffers, context switchers, interrupt handlers, and system call dispatchers – for specific situations, greatly reducing their execution time.
Fine-grain scheduling – a new process-scheduling technique based on the idea of feedback that performs frequent scheduling actions and policy adjustments (at submillisecond intervals) resulting in an adaptive, self-tuning system that can support real-time data streams.
Lock-free optimistic synchronization is shown to be a practical, efficient alternative to lock-based synchronization methods for the implementation of multiprocessor operating system kernels.
An extensible kernel design that provides for simple expansion to support new kernel services and hardware devices while allowing a tight coupling between the kernel and the applications, blurring the distinction between user and kernel services.The result is a significant performance improvement over traditional operating system implementations in addition to providing new services.

Mind-expanding in a lisp way