Archinect - News

UCLA researchers develop structural system that becomes stronger by learning from its surroundings

2022-11-01T13:20:00-04:00

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new type of material that can create adaptable, strong structures by learning from its surroundings. Dubbed a ‘mechanical neural network’ by its creators, the material uses a unique lattice structure that can improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces over time.

The mechanical neural network derives its strength from the geometries that comprise the structure rather than the properties of the materials used to create it. “Take hook-and-loop fabric closures like Velcro, for example,” explained UCLA’s Ryan H. Lee in a recent article on The Conversation. “It doesn’t matter whether it is made from cotton, plastic or any other substance. As long as one side is a fabric with stiff hooks and the other side has fluffy loops, the material will have the sticky properties of Velcro.”

The system desi...

Face-scanning to make Olympic debut at 2020 Tokyo games

2019-09-18T13:15:00-04:00

Intel is collaborating with NEC to provide "a large-scale face recognition system for the Olympics," said Ricardo Echevarria, general manager of Intel's Olympics program. The system is designed to let Olympics organizers "ensure smoothly secure verification for the over 300,000 people at the games who are accredited," he said. People using it will register with photos from government-issued IDs, he added.

Facial recognition will be used by the organizers to keep track of athletes, staff, volunteers, and other individuals involved with the event. The general public will not be involved in the effort.

The 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo will mark the first time that the event makes wide-spread use of facial recognition software.

This AI converts simple sketches into photorealistic landscapes—and architecture will be next

2019-03-20T15:10:00-04:00

Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age.

The GauGAN image creation system Nvidia presented this week is an impressive foreshadowing of AI's rapid advancement into creative fields, like art and architecture—and a frightening example of the increasing ease of producing (nearly) photorealistic inauthentic imagery.

Screenshot of the GauGAN app. Image: Nvidia.

The possibilities of this crude demo tool for future, more sophisticated architectural application are hauntingly plentiful, and the company already hints at exactly that in its announcement: "GauGAN could offer a powerful tool for creating virtual worlds to everyone from architects and urban planners to landscape designers and game developers. With an AI that understands how the real world looks, these professionals could better prototype ideas and make rapid changes to a synthetic scene."

Demonstration of Nvidia's GauGAN system. Video via Nvidia on YouTube.

Since neural networks generate creations based on the set of images they have been trained on, will the creative r...

Refik Anadol to cover Walt Disney Concert Hall with vivid data projections

2018-09-13T15:42:00-04:00

One of the most recognizable buildings in Downtown Los Angeles—the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall—will be used as a canvas later this month. To celebrate the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new season, colorful patterns will be projected onto the metallic surface of the wavy concert hall for a little more than a week, courtesy of artist Refik Anadol.

For the LA Philharmonic projection series, called WDCH Dreams, internationally renowned media artist Refik Anadol dug deep in the digital orchestra archives—nearly 45 terabytes of data—and applied Google Arts and Culture's machine intelligence to it, which parsed the files into millions of data points that were then re-categorized and, with the help of deep neural networks, made new connections between LA Phil's "memories." According to Anadol, this process awakes the metaphorical "consciousness" of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the result is a "radical visualization of the organization’s first century and an exploration of synergies between art and technology, and architecture and institutional memory."

WDCH Dreams, renderings by Refik Anadol Studio

To visualize the result of this process, Anadol will be using 42 large scale projectors, with 50K visual resolution, 8-channel sound, and 1.2M luminance in total, which should create quite a spectacular display on the stainless-steel fac...

Coachella lineup created by a neural network generates new designers

2018-01-25T16:09:00-05:00

Move over Bureau Spectacular, Ball Nogues and LOC... robots are coming for your jobs.

Botnik Studios created a hilarious (and somewhat believable) Coachella lineup using their artificial intelligence RNN algorithm to generate a list of band names and installation designers. Located at the bottom of the poster, the new designer list reads:

With large-scale art installations by

Mr. Wall
Belly Legroom
Ed the Bjown
Benus Jackson
Melon Soxprane
Aunt Luke

Personal favorites: "Creepwell, Then Sleepwell", "Boy/Boys", and of course "Aunt Luke". Will a real Aunt Luke please come forward and grace the world with large-scale art installations? Thank you.

This Man Designed an AI to Generate British Placenames

2017-07-21T12:21:00-04:00

As any American who tuned into the last British election realized, UK placenames are a bit out there (at least to American ears, that is), from Droop in Dorset to Westward Ho! in Devon. So Dan Ho decided to train a (quirky) AI to generate its own.

Here are some of the ones the computer crafted:

Ospley
Stoke Carrston
Elfordbion
Hevermilley
Ell
Elle’s Chorels
Capton Briins Forehouint Eftte Green
Waryburn Torner Midlwood
Wasts Halkstack
Kinindworthorpe Marmile
Dompton Ole
Dimmer Common
Pairinggleat
Catley Holtbridgeham Ruse
Colon-in Mead

Check out the full list, as well as how he did it, here.

Questioning urban truisms with artificial intelligence

2016-08-10T14:11:00-04:00

computer vision and artificial intelligence are the keys to a debate behind a door that’s been locked for a long time: the social impact of design in cities. [...] "Now that we have new tools to measure aesthetics, we can estimate its consequences" [...] [MIT Media Lab associate professor Cesar Hidalgo] wants to develop more empirical ways to study cities and the way they’re perceived—and, in turn, provide better science to the policy-makers who shape legislation.

More on neural networks and aesthetic quantification: