By all likelihood you’ve heard of the vodka company’s Absolut campaigns. Recently they launched Absolut Machines, a new campaign that’ll be running for a year and centers around two artificial creativity projects; AI systems that compose music on accompanying mechanical instruments and can be watched & interacted with via live video feeds.

The Absolut Machines

By visiting Absolut Machines you’ll eventually find yourself on a page with two live videofeeds, presented in an old-school, gray window system. One of the machines is placed in Stockholm, Sweden and the other in New York City. The machines at these locations are music-composing AI systems you can interact with to augment the music they generate.

The interaction sessions are recorded and you can get a compressed quicktime video of your visit sent via email or download it from the “Gallery” tab which lists all recent videos.

Think Artificial VIP Access
Dearly devoted Think Artificial readers have been allotted VIP codes that allow cutting to the front of the line to interact with the machines. Leave a comment on this entry and I’ll mail it to the address you enter in the comment form. Alternatively you can contact me directly. Note that there’s a limited supply of codes and they’ll be distributed on a first come first served basis.

Obligatory disclaimer: To participate in this giveaway you must be at least 21 years of age.

Absolut Choir

The Absolut Choir is a system composed of speech synthesizers implemented in the physical form of 10 robotic characters. Each of the machines, or choir members, has a unique voice ranging from women, to tenors and sopranos. A “mother character” virtually conducts by synchronizing and distributing sounds to the other members, each of which contains a Linux box for processing and a speaker.

As the Choir starts singing, the user may input words to the machine. As the machine receives the words, it immediately uses them to generate a musical composition and lyrics. The robotic choir follows the lead of its human partner, and with the help of generative algorithms, the machine engenders a melody, tempo, dynamics, timbre and lyrics inspired by the user-generated input. The composition is also infused with the machine’s current mood and from the most recently analyzed words input by previous users. A lot of short words with many consonants may result in a fast arpeggio-like song, while softer words may result in a slower composition. [Absolut Press Kit]

The sound feed was suffering from some technical difficulties when I tried the choir. But the video worked, and the choir was receiving my lyrics glorifying Think Artificial (I figured I’d attempt to create a themesong for us).

The video compilation I received afterwards was okay. But I discovered that the lyrics were (intentionally) rendered hieroglyphic by the choir, so it sadly doesn’t make the cut as our themesong.

Absolut Quartet

The Quartet is quite different from the Choir. The machines are three; the main one is a marimba which the system plays by shooting rubber balls into the air, aimed at the marimba keys it wants to hit — or multiple balls if the objective is to play a chord. It’s quite fun to look at.

The marimba rubber ball blaster implementation and design.

Overview of the Quartet under construction.

The second machine is a series of glasses which basically replicate the “finger on a wine glass trick”. The glasses are spun, each tuned to a various pitches, and small robotic fingers touch them to produce sounds. The third part of the installation is an automated percussion instrument.

And then there’s the fourth part, us - the users. At the beginning of a session the human user plays notes on a miniature piano. The melody played dictates what kind of music the Quartet will produce, or in other words, your input is the machines inspiration for a following 3 minute song.

The machines are brainchilds of Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman. Both of which attend at MIT and have many cool projects in their backpack that combine aesthetics, artificial intelligence, kinetic sculpting and robotics.

Looking Closer at Robotics in the Media

This project is not an academic foray into the realms of creative AI, but rather a project intended to be looked at in terms of aesthetics. That being said: The artificial creativity of the machines is very primitive. If we take for example how the Quartet works; the software takes the melody played by a human user and compares it to a pre-existing collection of songs. Once a similar match has been found the machine mixes the two together producing the ultimate outcome. What interested me more than the software implementation of creativity was the overall aesthetic appeal of the project. In addition to Jeff and Dan’s artwork, the media related to this campaign was superb (partly handled by Noise Marketing, creators of the Appleseed website).

When exploring how we are creating our world; augmenting our environment — it’s intriguing to zoom out of AI context: How we (humans) advertise and perceive products is environmental augmentation. The ultimate sentiment is to be aware of the augmentations. To study them. Be aware of their effect and purpose; and to adapt and further develop whatever it is we want to achieve.

When I saw AI-colored advertisements from a major company (a company that essentially has nothing to do with machines) I immediately wondered whether it gave an indication of the public appeal of robots in Western societies. Certainly, machines in general play a larger role in everyone’s lives than ever before; and the same can be said about robotics even though we’re still in very early stages of that development. When we note that Puma has been sporting robotic-prosthetic cyberpunk campaigns as well, I think we can at least safely venture that robotics are on the rise in terms of public interest.

Spam - the scourge of every e-mail inbox - celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet’s forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

Quick complaint

The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was sent to advertise new additions to DEC’s family of System-20 minicomputers.

It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20.

Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk’s boss to task about it.

Despite Mr Thuerk’s pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance.

It took until 1993 before it won the name of spam - a name bestowed on it by Joel Furr - an administrator on the Usenet chat system.

Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat.

The sketch ended with everyone in the restaurant, encouraged by a troupe of chanting Vikings, shouting: “Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.”

April 1994 saw another pioneering moment in the history of spam when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a commercial spam message to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups.

The Canter and Siegel e-mail is widely seen as the moment when the commercialisation of the net began and opened the floodgates that led to the deluge of spam seen today.

Since those days spam has grown to be a nuisance and is now used by many hi-tech crime gangs as the vehicle for a variety of scams and cons.

“Spam is a burden on all of us,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “What’s worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware.”<P

Adobe has announced a plan to try to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices and set-top boxes.

Dubbed Open Screen the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia handling software can be used.

Adobe will stop charging licencing fees for mobile versions of Flash and plans to publish information about the inner workings of the code.

In taking this step Adobe hopes to repeat on mobiles the success its Flash technology has enjoyed on the web.

Video deal

Adobe estimates that its Flash player is installed on more than 98% of net-connected desktop computers.

The Open Screen plan will build on Flash Lite - Adobe’s version of its multimedia player designed for mobile gadgets - that is already on millions of handhelds.

The ultimate aim of Open Screen is to make it much easier for TV and film makers to send their content to mobiles and on other devices such as set-top boxes.

It aims to do this by creating one flexible player technology that can run on any small-form device but only demands that developers write code once for it.

At the moment trying to get games or video on to different devices can be frustrating because of the plethora of hardware and software quirks on each gadget.

Adobe’s four-step plan involves ending license fees; removing restrictions on the use of files in SWF and FLV format; publishing detailed information about the program interfaces for its Flash player and opening up information about its Flash streaming technology.

The move is the latest in a series that are aiming to open up Flash and get more devleopers working with it.

It is also part of the larger plan for Adobe Air - an overarching code development system that aims to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Adobe said it was working with Arm, SonyEricsson, Nokia, LG and other gadget makers on the Open Screen initiative as well as content partners such as the BBC, MTV and NBC.

Adobe faces competition from Microsoft which is trying to get Silverlight - its answer to Air - on to mobiles too. <p

Yahoo’s German-listed shares plunged 17% after software giant Microsoft dropped its three-month-old bid to buy the internet firm.

Analysts expect Yahoo’s US shares to fall by a similar margin when Wall Street begins trading later.

The deal collapsed recently because the two sides could not agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer formally withdrew the offer in a letter this weekend to Yahoo’s head, Jerry Yang.

In Frankfurt, Yahoo’s shares were down 17.56% at 14.93 euros ($23.17) in early trading.

“Mr Yang is certainly under a lot of pressure now,” said Roland Hirschmueller, an equities trader at German brokerage Baader.

“His days are numbered, if he doesn’t manage to come [up] with an alternative strategy,” he added.

Legal action

Yahoo’s New York shares closed at $28.67 on Friday. They are listed on the technology-dominated Nasdaq index.

The stock had gained around 50% since Microsoft announced the unsolicited bid on 1 February.

Mr Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, said the firm had raised its original offer from $44.6bn to $47.5bn (£24.1bn) - $33 per share.

But he added that Yahoo had insisted on at least $53bn, or $37 a share - which was more than Microsoft was prepared to pay.

Analysts said Yahoo could face legal action from shareholders after rejecting the bid.

‘Distraction’

Microsoft had wanted to do a deal to be able to compete with Google, which dominates the lucrative market for internet advertising.

This market was worth $40bn in 2007 and is predicted to double to $80bn by 2010.

In his letter to Yahoo’s chief executive Mr Yang, which was posted on the Microsoft website, Mr Ballmer said: “We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo and the market as a whole.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5bn, Yahoo has not moved toward accepting our offer.”

“After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interestsof Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal.”

Mr Ballmer also told Yahoo’s boss that he would not pursue his original plan B of launching a hostile takeover battle, because Mr Yang would “take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft”.

Mr Ballmer told his own employees that Microsoft could achieve its goals without Yahoo, albeit at a slower pace.

Yahoo maintained that Microsoft had offered too little to buy the company.

In a statement issued after Microsoft’s withdrawal, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock dismissed the unsolicited bid as a “distraction”.

<P

We’ve covered the bizarre love/hate affair that NBC Universal has had with YouTube. It actually helped get YouTube its first burst of serious publicity in demanding the SNL “Lazy Sunday” clip be taken down off the site. It then went back (setting up its own YouTube channel) and forth (blaming YouTube for company problems) on whether or not it liked YouTube, before eventually announcing its own competing offering (in partnership with News Corp.) called Hulu. Soon after doing so, it pulled the official NBC channel on YouTube, which made little sense. Even if Hulu were fantastic, the actual eyeballs were at YouTube. It had built up a huge community. NBC Universal was making the classic content owner’s mistake of overvaluing the content, and undervaluing the platform. It figured that if it hosted the content itself, the crowds would come.

Apparently, that’s not what has happened. While Hulu surprised many critics with a well-designed site, it appears that Hulu hasn’t been able to generate the type of traffic executives expected. So, despite it being a YouTube competitor, Hulu has tucked its tail between its legs and set up its own channel on YouTube. Apparently, the “build it and they will come” philosophy of NBC Universal’s execs didn’t work quite as well as planned.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

While the RIAA has been sending threatening notices to colleges about student file sharing for a while now, it seems to have recently stepped up the attack. Various colleges are reporting a rather massive increase in these notices, despite no discernible change in file sharing activity. In some cases, they’re suddenly getting as many notices in a day as they used to get in a month. Some universities are also pointing out that they don’t see any corresponding activity in their log files that would indicate that industry insiders had actually checked to make sure these files were infringing.

One interesting theory is mentioned in the Wired article above. The RIAA has been using the number of such notices as some sort of indicator of how much piracy is occurring — and even lobbying for laws that would require any university that got over a certain number of notices to install special filtering/monitoring software. So, by showing an increase, the RIAA can try to show how “necessary” this is, even if the notices are totally bogus. As one person points out in the article, it does not seem at all reasonable to judge how much piracy is occurring (or what actions need to be taken) based on an arbitrary number that is totally under the control of the RIAA.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

In the latest of many arguments about the various rights and payments companies need to pay for streaming music online, a district court has ruled that AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks most likely owe millions to ASCAP for songs that they streamed to users between 2002 and today (and continuing on to 2009). This has nothing to do with the record labels — ASCAP represents the songwriters — but is yet another extraneous “license” where the terms are hardly clear, but basically serve to make it more difficult for anyone to play music. It was never in question that these sites would need to pay some kind of royalty — the question was how much. The odd part of this ruling, though, is that the rate set by the judge is likely to be higher than the rate that traditional terrestrial radio pays. If there ever were a formula for making companies less interested in streaming music online — this might be it. Of course, it’s quite likely that this ruling will be appealed, so it’s far from over.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Yahoo is introducing new technology to its search engine which will warn users if they are about to click on a website that hosts viruses, spyware and spam.

SearchScan uses security firm McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to warn users about “potentially risky sites”.

The service, which is switched on by default, produces an on-screen alert.

“Our goal is to protect users by allowing them to make a more informed decision about the sites they visit,” said Yahoo’s Priyank Garg.

Rival firm Google introduced similar technology in 2006.

Yahoo’s service will warn users about three types of risk:

• Browser exploits: Sites that can harm a user’s computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Any such sites or pages included in McAfee’s data will be removed from search results automatically.
• Dangerous downloads: SearchScan will display warnings next to search results for sites that offer potentially dangerous software, such as viruses, spyware or adware.
• Unsolicited e-mail: SearchScan will alert users to scanned sites that send unsolicited e-mails or inappropriately share e-mail addresses with third parties.

Viruses, spyware and adware programs are often “hidden” inside innocuous-looking programs such as screensavers and toolbars.

Industry analysts IDC estimate that 67% of all computers have some form of spyware installed without a user’s knowledge

When it comes to chronicling a trip with digital photos, getting everything organized for presentation can be somewhat of a challenge. AP’s Nick Jesdanun put Google Earth to the test to see how well it handles organizing and viewing. (May 1)

© 2008 The Associated Press

Eric Goldman has a fascinating post, pointing out that the era of sneaky adware seems to be pretty much over. For quite some time, one of the biggest annoyances online for many users were surreptitiously-installed client side adware programs that would pop up unwanted ads while you did other things. However, it appears that a combination of factors have pretty much wiped them out. Legal rulings found that the surreptitious installs (either with no notice or misleading notices) were fraud. Companies were sued, fined and went out of business. Security firms got better at catching and blocking these programs, and the few remaining firms in the space moved on to other projects (though, some are equally questionable). Either way, most folks probably didn’t notice, because they either learned to avoid the sneaky adware or they were already well enough protected from it. Yet, as Goldman points out, pretty much everyone (with the possible exception of Zango) is no longer in the business of tricking people into installing ad-spewing software.

Of course, Goldman points out that no one has let the politicians in on this news yet, as many are still pushing various anti-spyware legislation that probably doesn’t matter any more. He also points out that this doesn’t mean questionable ad activity isn’t still happening — it’s just moved on from sneakily installing an application on your harddrive. That’s why Phorm (a former client-side adware maker) is in so much hot water these days. Its behavioral ad targeting solution may not be the same as the surreptitious client side ad spewing software — but it’s still surreptitiously watching your behavior and displaying ads based on it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story