Left: Ad for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Charles Livingston Bull 1915

Right: Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, Salvador Dalí 1944

A poster I found in my attic reminded me one of my favorite piece by Salvador Dali, I think we can agree one got inspired by the other.

How to properly dose a cocktail in a cone-shaped glass?

Let’s take a first example, The Black Russian recipe is:

2/3 Vodka

1/3  Kahlúa

The problem is that you cannot apply these proportions to the heights of each liquid since the glass is not a cylinder. For a same height, the volume will not be the same, and your cocktail a failure.

Our question is:

What is the ratio between the heights of the two liquids that will make their volumes meet the recipe proportions?

What we have is two volumes v_V and v_K and their proportion to the total of liquid V_total = v_V + v_K:

And what we want is the ratio h_V / H_total between the height of Vodka and the total height of liquid.

Volume of a cone is ,   being the base with its radius r.

We then use Thales’ theorem to link any radius r to its corresponding height h:

By using the two last formulas in our volume ratio equation, we get:

What we demonstrated here is a kind of Thales’ theorem (Intercept theorem), but for 3D cones. We obviously have the same kind of result with surfaces of triangles. That’s interesting, that’s a result I never encountered in the past. And it doesn’t only apply to right circular cones, but to any type of cone (pyramids for example), this can be proved by computing the base B using an integral.

The answer to our initial question is then:

That’s right, to have 2/3 of vodka in volume, the height of vodka should be almost 90% of the total height. If the ratio had been 1/2, the height of the first liquid should have been 80% of the total height. It’s not that obvious to me.

Last point, if your cocktail has more than two ingredients (for example a White Russian), I would suggest to always consider cones and not bother with substractions:

1/3 Vodka

1/3  Kahlúa

1/3 Cream

Start by adding 1/3 Kahlúa (70% of total height), then add Vodka until 2/3 of volume (90% of total height) and complete with cream.

Enjoy your cocktails, and happy new year!

Today, like many other, I listen my music digitally, I forgot about albums and cd players. And thanks to streaming services I can listen instantly to every track I want from any device. That’s great. But like me, don’t you miss the sensation of having a small physical collection that represents something for you? that you picked, that your friend can look at when they visit, that you can re-discover from time to time, that is truly yours ? CDs are just here for technical reasons. Let’s just stay with the idea of objects. That’s what the box is all about. It simply plays music associated to objects. And more than CDs, these objects can really be unique, personal and sentimental.

Pierre build the hardware and I developed the server using NodeJS and MongoDB. I hope we will find time to publish more documentation and do a proper release of the project.

The Noisebox and its associated objects

The main goal of theses events was to gather around the spirit of Hack people who can do things (developers, designers, makers…). I’m convinced that the meaning of “hack” is misunderstood, especially in France where it’s always associated with piracy. We tend to forget that many innovations or great companies of today come from little disruptive things hacked in a garage. For these hack days, the idea is that in the end, participants have to demo their hack, no slides are accepted, only prototypes!

Hack Le Camping

(June 24-25 2011)

logo for Hack Le Camping, designed by myself.

This first one came from an idea we had at Le Camping, the parisian startup accelerator were I built Beansight. I took the lead in the organization.

One of the goal was to let the startups from Le Camping open their APIs for the first time to developers.

The event was located at Le Camping, which is usually a place where 12 startups work everyday. So the place was not an issue and could welcome 80 guests.

With the help of others, we gathered two main sponsors. The deal was to let them promote their services before the event and be present on the printed materials, in exchange of €1000 each. This budget covered the food (3 meals) and also allowed us to print t-shirts for every participant. Because we didn’t find a great prize that could fit either a single hacker or a whole team, we decided to simply offer a prize of €500.

A hundred people registered to the event, and in the end around 40 hackers showed up for the event. I did not expect such a large difference, I think it’s due to the fact that the event was free of charge, a lot of people registered and never showed up later.

Participants hacking in Le Camping

The event went very well, the 24 hours were very intense for the participants. We added soon after the kick-off a stand up session for every project to explain what they were working on to the others.
In the end 10 projects were demoed. The overall winner was a team from Moodstocks. They created a fast-paced scavenger hunt mixing real time technologies from Dabla and image recognition: a player selects an object to look for, the first from the others to scan it with his phones takes the lead.

If you want to learn more about the event, here are the schedule of the event, the slides of my intro talk and a list of the hacks.

Hack Day Paris

(November 4-6, 2011)

Hack Day Paris logo, designed by Simon from Joshfire.

Soon after, I met with Skylar and Sylvain and we started discussing about a larger event.

The vision was to organize a large independent hack day in Paris, something that had never been done before. We targeted 150 hackers and wanted to gather a jury of renowned and respectful people. We did not wanted to impose a theme, but preferred to reward the “most brilliant” hack. We wanted people to work on what they liked, to produce something awesome.

We soon decided that tickets would be €10, not to make money from it, but to make sure that people registering were people really willing to come. In the end, around 140 hackers showed up. I think our strategy worked fine.

At first our main concerns were the place and communication. People from the co-working space La Ruche liked the project and its philosophy, so more than a place, they joined the project and helped us organize the event. We never could have done it without them. Communication was done by reaching all our networks (Paris Hackers, the startup ecosystem, schools…)

We gathered around €9 000 from sponsors and entries. This allowed us to provide quality food for everyone all along the 40 hours. We printed badges and rented additional Wifi.

Around a month before the event, a lot of effort had to be put into logistics: we had to make sure every people involved agreed on the schedule and the use of the places. Because many were involved, this was not an easy task at all.

The event went very well, as usual, as an organizer, you spend your time handling little issues here and there, making sure everything runs smoothly for the participants. We did shifts so that at any time during the 40 hours, one of the 3 organizers was awoken.

Demo time, in Le Comptoir Général, a bar next to La Ruche.

We had great feedback concerning the  location: La Ruche is not a regular place for such event, it’s made of little rooms, with outstanding decorations. This had a great impact on the spirit of the event.

Around 40 projects were demoed at the end the sunday afternoon. Here are some remarquable examples: a real time chess game (Ninja Chess), a place to give old things (Freesbee), a musical keyboard using balloons , a wine suggestion service (Wine Combinator)…
Once again, the grand prize was €1500 for the best team. Side prizes were organized by sponsors. The winners are a team who built a music box that links objects to music in the cloud. I will blog about it later.

For more info, visit the official website, have a look to the pictures of the event on the facebook page.

For sure, I will be involed in other hack days in the future. And I hope this article can help the ones of you who want to launch such events, feel free to contact me.

Track your pictures
Let’s take an example, I created this wallpaper 3 years ago:

A wallpaper using characters from Big Buck Bunny

I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution license and put it on flickr, so people were welcomed to use it.

I was pleased to see that it was used on hundreds of webpages (including WikiHow), even in languages I don’t understand like polish or finish, and most of them are giving attribution.

Similarly, a clipart of mine (released in the public domain) was used for various applications: create custom plates, make fan art of Alice in Wonderland, sell caligraphy, or cupcakes and promote a church.
Many of my wikipedia image contributions are also findable across the internet (for example to write about dinosaurs or to portrait Christophe Salengro).

Copyright infringement

Let’s take a well known copyrighted image, such as this portrait:

Google similar image for "Afghan Girl", copyright Steve McCurry

Well, seing all the Google Image results, National Geographic could easily annoy the website’s owners by asking them to remove it. That would be crazy? Well consider that this kind of removals are systematic on Youtube, and, as Eric Schmidt said at the eG8 summit in Paris, could be automated and applied to the whole internet (they have the technology, it’s called Google Search by image).

For sure, this new little feature can be very useful for photographers and artists who want to protect their creations by tracking who is illegally using them. Visually searching the entire web has never been possible before, now it’s as easy as a google search.

But let’s finish this article on a funnier note:

Facebook fakes

Friends of mine were arguing with a girl on facebook and they suspected her to be an impostor.

a suspicious facebook profile

A quick Google search by image showed us that this picture was called “Portrait of happy young lady smiling” and sold on sites like fotolia. Some minutes after briging this proof, he/she deleted his/her account. I love technology.

This beautiful blur is called a bokeh. It appears when an out-of-focus point of light is captured by the camera. Some photographers like to play with it.

Usually, the light spots make discs on the picture, but here they are hearts. How come ?
Well, the shape of a bokeh is linked to the shape of the aperture of the camera. So I bet the photographer used an heart-shaped aperture in this shot.

Of course, this effect could be computer generated, a convolution between a heart and the image does the trick, but let’s believe it’s not a fake.

my camera and hand-carved business cards

I wanted to try it at home to see if anyone can do it, it appears that it’s pretty straightforward: just carve a heart in a card and put it in front of the camera. Then point some lights and manually set them out-of-focus. Results are pretty good.

Bokeh with an usual aperture

Same scene with a heart-shaped aperture

This is not new but it keeps astonishing people when I tell them about it: Did you know that Captchas help scanning books? And they are doing it very very well.

a captcha seen on the facebook registration page

You all know about captchas: Images containing words that you are forced to type to make sure you are a human and not a robot when performing various actions on the Internet (create an account, write a comment…) in order to fight spam. Thousands of people are decoding them everyday. Everyone of them is doing a small mental effort to read the words.

a captcha from re-Captcha

And this is where the guys from the re-Captcha project had a brilliant idea: What if these thousands mental efforts could be used to actually do something useful? Like helping scanning books ?

Today, many organizations are scanning old books and transforming them in a digital format. The OCR software that transforms the scanned image to digital text may sometimes not be able to do its job correctly (however complex the software may be). re-Captcha uses the human brain to actually decode words the computer is not sure about:

• What you see when you look at a re-Captcha are two words.
• Among those two words, one is known by the server. The other one is a word the computer knows it didn’t managed to read properly.
• You being a human or not will be judged on the first word, and the result you enter for the second word will be used to decode it.
• Then we can imagine that if a certain number of users read the same for a given unknown word, it is most likely to be the right translation.
• By using this technique, the system is able to digitalize texts with a higher precision that most of the other OCR systems.

The company behind re-Captcha, its data and its market-share were acquired by Google in 2009. (what else would you have imagined)

To me this system is brilliant: it solves a problem by dividing it in such simple tasks that they can be executed by people who don’t even notice that they are working. (And what’s nicer with this one is that it helps fighting spam and digitalizing books, two great causes.)

nano jobs
I don’t know if there is another term, but I call this nano jobs.

Let us take another example of nano job: in 2006 a professor released a fun tool where you can play with a random other player: an image was displayed and your goal was to find common words describing this image with the other remote player. Of course, you quickly realize that this was only done to help labeling the image base: Today, contrary to a human, a machine has difficulties to understand what an image represents (Image recognition). The “find common words to improve your score” is just a incentive to gather a lot of data. Google did the same to help labelling its image base.

Playing the ESP game with a random player, finding common labels for a given image.

This leads us to another important point in nano jobs: game mechanics.

You cannot force people into doing small tasks, they have to do them by themselves. In the case of re-Captcha, they understand the need of fighting spam, so they accept the task. In the case of the ESP game they want to do the best score or maybe to have fun with a random web user (this reminds me chatroulette).

These games are called games with a purpose (GWAP). Imagine, the workforce that these millions of people farming like zombies on Farmville represent (Unfortunately, Farmville business model is more in selling your data and selling stupid virtual stuff than making you doing nano jobs). Then, when we hear about Google investing in social game companies, I think nano jobs are part of their motivation (not the only one of course).

My conclusion
To conclude, I think this de-centralized and effortless way of solving problems is extremely powerful. Once again, divide and conquer seams to be the strategy to adopt, even for problems that don’t seam scalable.

Some more examples

• gwap.com seams to specialize in Games With A Purpose. You can play to help tagging images, music, find synonyms, image tracing, emotions from images, image similarity and video labeling.
• GOOG-411: Google opened a vocal search phone service to provide search results by phone. It seams that the goal was for Google to gather a lot of voice records to improve their speech recognition engine. (to provide data for machine learning)
• On a similar way, Picasa performs face recognition, but it’s not perfect and you have to help it tagging your family and friends in your pictures. Well, the more you help it, the more it will be accurate later, and on a larger scale, the more Google is gathering learning data.
• Google, once again, provides a free Translator toolkit to help doing sentence to sentence translation. This tool is free, but what you may not know is that I bet we are feeding Google with translation data by using this tool.

To another extent, Amazon is providing an online service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It links nano-jobs providers with a widespread user base doing small tasks for money. I heard many companies are using this platform to help performing Human Intelligence Tasks.

So please, stop complaining about Facebook breaking into your privacy when it allowed apps to ask you to give them your phone number and address. If you want to fix your privacy leaks, start from the basics and remove yourself from phone books. Personally, I only blame Facebook for not making this sharing disclaimer clear enough.

Dawn of the Dead
We often say actors will be replaced by digital characters. I can assure you that today doing so costs a lot of money and that it will take time before these costs will be lower than fees of a not so famous actor. They won’t replace real actors, they will replace dead ones!
We saw movies with non-humans main characters (think about Jar Jar Binks or Golum). But today, technology is developed enough to be able to create virtual main human characters who do not fall in the “uncanny valley“.
But what about real actors who cannot act anymore ? Or what about dead movie legends ?
That’s why we may see some new epic Star Wars episodes with actors from the original trilogy. As an example, we recently saw Arnold Schwarzenegger acting in “Terminator Salvation”. He was entirely digital.
It raises some issues, can I decide to use Marilyn Monroe as a main character ? Who owns her image today ? Is this really ethical ? Can we credit with the real name of the dead actor ?

I bet Marilyn will be back in theatres

Dynamic content (i.e. better product placement)
Pixar constantly raises the quality of its movies. Recently I could see in “Up” that some shots were internationalized: For example, In the French version, French words were written on a crate. So I assume Pixar re-rendered this movie for every location.
Of course, this is something that can only be done using computer imagery. And what if this content wasn’t static ? What if it could be adjusted to the audience or the time dynamically?
From an artistic point of view that’s great, imagine a newspaper showing the headlines from today’s events, it improve the immersion of the spectator.
But this kind of innovation is rarely driven by art. On the contrary, advertisers will be able to do some localized product placement or advertising.
I think two actual factors will lead soon to streamed and localized content into movies:

• screens will soon be entirely connected to the internet and thus content delivered can easily be adjusted by broadcasters
• 3D image rendering operations are now cheap for broadcasters (in term of computer power needed).

The best product placement I have in mind: "The Fifth element"

It’s you, in the movie.
Then we could go deeper and imagine customizing the movie: take two or three pictures of your head, fill in some morphological details and enjoy a movie where the main character is yourself.
This can easily be done with computer generated movies. But I think it’s also feasible to replace a face in a traditionnal movie with technologies involving advanced face detection, realistic face reconstruction and complex compositing to mix the two. Example (watch until the end please):

Interactivity
It’s not new, the customization of the content can already be seen in video games.
Cinema may blend with video games, the story may not be linear. You may choose at some point the next part of the script, choose to save someone’s life or to let him die for example. (Remember this awesome Tipex Youtube advertisement ?)
This is something I experimented with in 2003 using simply Adobe Flash (in this project), and this is something that starts to be seen online now (using Youtube annotations or more complex systems)

All these ideas lead us to think about the definition of the cinema. Is it still the artist’s vision if we can change elements from the movie ?

Note: This article was drafted in November 2010, I found today that Georges Lucas announced in December 2010 to be planning to use dead actors in a movie. I guess that’s why I really need to use Beansight.

UPDATE 2011-01-24: Techcrunch spotted a German company doing custom product placement in video footage: Impossible Software – Is This What The Future Of Video Advertising Looks Like?.

Le Camping logo

Great news for my startup project Beansight: we have been selected to be part of Le Camping. Le Camping is the first French tech startup accelerator program from Silicon Sentier.

Palais Brongniart

Beginning January the 4th, we will be working everyday with 11 other startups at the prestigious Palais Brongniart. We will be mentored by great mentors that have many different backgrounds (entrepreneurs & CEOs, tech, marketing, designers…)
Only 12 teams out of 164 have been selected to be part of the adventure. I think it is a great opportunity for us to be part of the program.

Because we now have a somewhat working platform our first work will be to polish the edges of our user experience and to focus on our core algorithm. I think we can expect an initial release at the end of January.
By the way, if you want to follow more closely my work at Beansight, I invite you to follow my labs.