John Butler collaborates with artist Cian McLoughlin at Dublin Maker
Dublin Maker is a free, community-run, family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the maker movement. Lecturer John Butler has teamed up with artist Cian McLoughlin to showcase their work - "The Digital Mirror: AI & the Evolution of Portraiture".
The Dublin Makers stand, "The Digital Mirror: AI & the Evolution of Portraiture", is a collaboration between artist Cian McLoughlin and John Butler (TU Dublin). Together, they explore the connections between art, machine learning, and neuroscience in the context of facial recognition.
Cian has a series of paintings called "Tronies", where he overlays portraits of a single subject to freely explore the diverse spectrum of human appearance. This artistic process mirrors the way machine learning is used in facial recognition. Machine learning algorithms start by defining an average face and then subtract it from individual images to identify unique features, known as eigenfaces, which help distinguish between different people.
This method of breaking down an image and reconstructing it is akin to how our visual system works. The brain deconstructs visual information and processes it, ultimately allowing us to recognize and differentiate between faces.
Come visit the stand on Saturday 31 August and Sunday 1 September 2024 in Richmond Barracks from 10 am until 6 pm. Attendees can have their photos taken from various angles, and these images will be processed using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm to decompose their faces into eigenfaces. We will explain how the algorithm and mathematics work, linking it to concepts in art and neuroscience. Each attendee will receive a unique photo of one of their eigenfaces as a personalized piece of art to take home. Cian McLoughlin is the SFI Discover-funded Artist in residence Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience.
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