Academic research can be a day job for some people, including reading, writing, and reviewing papers, coding prototypes, conducting experiments, advising students, and interacting with collaborators.
But it is a leisure activity for me, more intellectually satisfying than managing and communicating about products which is my current day job, which, in turn, I wonder might be a fun activity for others.
March 2, 2024
Fun versus job
February 26, 2024
Cherry picking batch-generated results
An interactive UI that lets users manually input data and parameters to produce results is more suitable for iterative exploration (if you can wait for a few minutes) than mass production (which take take hours if not days), so I built a scripting environment from the same codebase.
I set up an experiment to run over 20+ inputs with a few values at each of the 3 parameter dimensions, and ended up with more than 4000 results which (dawned on me afterwards) are too many to examine one by one.
So I followed the path of iterating exploration as with the UI but with the already batched results without knowing for sure if I have missed any good ones.
Maybe we also need (semi)automatic tools to help us with cherry picking.
February 25, 2024
Voronoi cookies
I placed the cookie batter drops too close to one another and they expanded into Voronoi regions during baking: photo, and the “corrected” version by ComfyUI image-to-image with (de)noise value 0.5 and v1-5-pruned-dmaonly checkpoint.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/192421251/VoronoiCookies
Missed opportunity
When I boarded Caltrain 313 at San Jose on Thursday February 22, 2024, I saw a guy deep in sleep with his head resting on the window. The face constituted an excellent drawing subject but I decided to finish my dinner first. Then the train conductor came to check tickets, and the guy had none and was asked to leave the train at the next stop.
Afterwards I did a quick sketch from visual impression and produced a variation via image-2-image diffusion. Neither could catch the original face which I could better capture on spot.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/186107513/PortraitsMotoGStylus/modules/1088458927
February 21, 2024
Visualizing dreams
One main reason that I would like to be able to draw is to share what I saw in my dreams which tend to be vivid and unusual. This is difficult enough due to both the required skills and the ephemeral nature of dreams. But how about visualizing other people’s dreams based on their descriptions?
https://www.behance.net/gallery/192128691/BakeryHouseDream
February 11, 2024
Murakami monster drawing experiment
Based on a (human-sized) monster sculpture by Takashi Murakami that I saw in a recent exhibition I did a quick rough drawing via Fresco with outlines and color-fills in separate layers, and then fed the outlines-only and color-fills versions to an image-to-image ComfyUI workflow. The results are very interesting and capture the style of the original artist quite well.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/191299777/TakashiMurakamiMonsterSculpture
January 30, 2024
Group urban hike
As part of the lab offsite, we took an urban hike between 601 Townsend Street and the Mission-Dolores Park. The weather was unusually nice for January in San Francisco, and this is actually the first time I walked through the neighborhood between Mission and SoMa which has this interesting industry-under-the-highway feel.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/190359367/ExteriorMotoGStylus/modules/1076608513
January 28, 2024
A beautiful day
After finishing a demo in the morning, I drove to San Francisco, listening to Edvard Greig’s piano concerto (A minor, opus 16) on the way, and went to the Legion of Honor to see Boticelli’s drawings, which I finished on time by avoiding reading all the descriptions.
It was a beautiful day, with the sun shining and Golden Gate bridge visible from the museum.
January 20, 2024
Sleeping profile
Rainy Saturday, writing, drawing.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/189507309/SleepingProfileSofa