Gastronomic Algorithms: Artistic and Sensory Exploration of Alain Passard's Michelin Plates in the Manner of Giuseppe Arcimboldo with GANs

Although recent advances in artificial intelligence to generate images with deep learning techniques, especially generative adversarial networks (GANs), have offered radically new opportunities for its creative applications, there has been little investigation into its use as a tool to explore the senses beyond vision alone. In an artistic collaboration that brought Chef Alain Passard, art historian and data scientist Emily Spratt, and computer programmer Thomas Fan together, photographs of the three-star Michelin plates from the Parisian restaurant Arpège were used as a springboard to explore the art of culinary presentation in the manner of the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Fair Is Better than Sensational: Man Is to Doctor as Woman Is to Doctor

Analogies such as man is to king as woman is to X are often used to illustrate the amazing power of word embeddings. Concurrently, they have also been used to expose how strongly human biases are encoded in vector spaces trained on natural language, with examples like man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker. Recent work has shown that analogies are in fact not an accurate diagnostic for bias, but this does not mean that they are not used anymore, or that their legacy is fading. Instead of focusing on the intrinsic problems of the analogy task as a bias detection tool, we discuss a series of issues involving implementation as well as subjective choices that might have yielded a distorted picture of bias in word embeddings. We stand by the truth that human biases are present in word embeddings, and, of course, the need to address them. But analogies are not an accurate tool to do so, and the way they have been most often used has exacerbated some possibly non-existing biases and perhaps hidden others. Because they are still widely popular, and some of them have become classics within and outside the NLP community, we deem it important to provide a series of clarifications that should put well-known, and potentially new analogies, into the right perspective.

Coding Across the Curriculum

This chapter explores why teacher educators should teach teachers how to integrate coding across content areas and how to do so by applying concepts of computational thinking such as using algorithms, flowcharts, and Boolean logic to all fields. Teaching teachers how to teach coding across the content areas offers opportunities to diversify people in a field where intimidation, discrimination, and lack of opportunities has effectively kept the field of programming largely white or Asian and male. In addition, as our lives become more and more infused with technology, Rushkoff warns that we either learn how to program or become programmed. This means that not everyone needs to become a computer programmer, but everyone needs to understand how programming computers works. In other words, coding across content areas would help prepare all students, not just those pursuing the field of computer science, for the 21st century.

Techno-poetics in micro-stories of the digital age: The case of Alex Epstein

In this study, I frame the concept of techno-poetics by analyzing Alex Epstein’s micro-stories and by examining the development of the micro-fiction genre throughout the world. Epstein is a contemporary Israeli author whose universal micro-stories have been translated into several languages (English, Spanish, French, and Russian). Epstein uses a dual language: given his career as a computer programmer in a high-tech company, the language of his thoughts is conveyed through the logic of technology, whereas, as an artist, he is loyal to the language of poetics. Is Epstein a “programmer” of micro-stories? Within the framework of this study, I analyze the dynamic relationship between the polar opposites of technology and poetics, as it is revealed in Epstein’s micro-stories, taking into account the genre’s characteristics as well as the unique features with which Epstein—as a contemporary author—imbues his works. More specifically, I analyze six categories that describe the relationship between digital technology and the world of art, a relationship that informs Epstein's micro-stories. Epstein's work was not created in a void; nevertheless, his micro-stories differ not only from the works of previous authors of the genre, but also from those of his contemporaries, whose work, likewise, deals with the tension between technology and poetics. A major difference is the methods of publication that Epstein uses, which form part of the techno-poetical process. In this sense, the themes, the conception of art, and the method of publication are all indications of a unique artistic phenomenon.

An Improved Page Replacement Algorithm Using Block Retrieval of Pages

The computer programmer write programming codes of any length without keeping in mind the available primary memory. This is possible if we use the concept of virtual memory. As the name suggests, virtual memory is a concept of executing a programming code of any size even having a primary memory of smaller size than the size of program to be executed. The virtual memory can be implemented using the concept of paging. The operating system allocates a number of memory frames to each program while loading into the memory. The programming code is equally divided into pages of same size as frame size. The size of pages and memory frames are retained equal for the better utilization of the memory. During the execution of program, every process is allocated limited number of memory frames; hence there is a need of page replacements. To overcome this limitation, a number of page replacement techniques had suggested by the researchers. In this paper, we have proposed an modified page replacement technique, which is based on the concept of block reading of pages from the secondary storage. The disc access is very slow as compared to the access from primary memory. Whenever there is a page fault, the required page is retrived from the secondary storage. The numerous page faults increase the execution time of process. In the proposed methodology, a number of pages, which is equal to the allotted memory frames, are read every time when there is a page fault instead of reading a single page at a time. If a block of pages has fetched from secondary storage, it will definitely increases the possibilities of page hit and as a result, it will improve the hit ratio for the processes.

Interlude

In this interlude, the author talks about some of her fellow ballroom dancers at the Regent Ballroom and Banquet Center. She begins with Tony and Sarah, one of the many “empty-nester” couples who arrive at the Regent hoping to reconnect now that their children are grown and gone. When they are on the dance floor, you can see them exchanging gestures of affection and sweetness. Next is Doris, a divorced, independent, small-business owner who runs a seamstress shop from her home. The author then turns to Marty, a middle-aged dentist who says nothing before, during, or after his dance with the author; Don, a computer programmer who works for another ballroom dancer; and Laurie, a lawyer who also competes at the national level in amateur dance competitions with William as her partner. William, one of the most accomplished dancers at the Regent, invites her to dance the rumba.