Art, AI and Google I/O 2016

What if there are interesting things waiting to be discovered where artificial intelligence meets art?

At Google I/O 2016 Ramzi Rizk told me there's a field called Computational Aesthetics. It is so nascent that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Computational Aesthetics is where computers can actually tell us if a picture is pretty or not. This is different from systems like Flickr's Interestingness because the system infers beauty from the image itself rather than from the social signals generated by people's interactions with the image. In fact there's already been research showing that social signals lead communities like Flickr to overlook hidden gems. This research raises the tantalising possibility that there may be large numbers of overlooked masterpieces hiding in the historical corpus of art.

I find this intersection of art and machine learning interesting because at scale it leads to the discovery of new tools and new perspectives on something that we consider to be uniquely human. For example the spatial visualisation used in the "Machine learning & art" talk at I/O lead me to t-SNE as a mechanism for building two-dimensional maps of high-dimensional spaces.

This raises the possibility of building pirate maps of information spaces or hypertexts and connecting that to Vannevar Bush's ideas about stigmergy in the Memex. Imagine being able to create and share your own trail through the space of all art? Or being able to reinvent the idea of the traditional slideshow of the family's holiday photos.

Today apps like Prisma merely help us make alternative versions of existing photos. At the same time apps like The Roll and Google Photos help us identify our best photos. In the future they might help photographers to create photos from scratch and tell new kinds of hypertextual stories.

Playing with #prisma (and a little bit of Clarendon) on this #latergram from #io16

A photo posted by Ade Oshineye (@ade_oshineye) on Jul 17, 2016 at 3:47pm PDT

Migrating to Google+ Sign-in in 5 minutes

Are you looking to understand the available strategies for migrating your existing Google login solution to Google+ Sign-in? Well… You’ve certainly come to the right place

If you're using OpenID1, OpenID2, OAuth1 or OAuth2Login then we have a detailed migration guide: https://developers.google.com/+/api/auth-migration

I strongly recommend reading it. Or at least skimming it since the social login market is bigger and more complicated than it seems. The following is merely a high-level restatement of the migration guide for people who aren't really sure which of the aforementioned technologies they're using.

If your existing system captures the user's email address using a Google identity solution then you can just:

• migrate to Google+ sign-in
• ask for the email OAuth scope
• fetch the user's email address using one of our recommended approaches
• look up the user in your database by email
• associate them with the existing record that matches that email address since Google guarantees that the email addresses are valid

If your existing system doesn't capture the user's email address then life gets interesting.

If you're sure you're using OAuth1+OpenID2 then you can follow the instructions here: https://developers.google.com/+/api/auth-migration#oid2 which tell you how to fetch your old identifier and find out the equivalent identifier with Google+ Sign. Once that's done you can just associate the new identifier with the existing record and the user can sign-in in future with Google+ Sign-in.

If you're using something else then you can ask the user to sign-in twice: firstly with your existing Google identity solution then with Google+ Sign-in. Now that you have both identities you can associate them in your database. Once a critical mass of your users have gone through this process then you can stop using the legacy identity solution. If you have to use this option then I would also recommend reading Michael Mahemoff's experience report from Player.fm's migration: http://softwareas.com/migrating-user-accounts-from-google-openid-to-google-oauth-to-google-plus since I got the idea from him.

The Google+ Sharelink Endpoint: doing it right

If your site has a Google+ sharing feature that uses this URL: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?url= then you're doing it wrong. You're using unsupported and undocumented functionality. Don't.

You should be using a sharing URL that looks like this: https://plus.google.com/share?url=

That's our official sharelink endpoint. It is supported, monitored and maintained. The URL you're using right now is an internal part of our +1 button's Javascript API so it's subject to change because we don't expect anyone else to be depending on it.

The documentation for the sharelink endpoint is here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/share/#sharelink-endpoint It even offers a set of standard graphics that you should be using for consistency with the rest of the web.

In short: don't be like the guy in the photo below.

Implications of being post-PC

At last night's OSJam I gave a lightning talk about the implications of being post-PC.

Those implications were:
Identity: a post-PC device needs to know its owner's identity since it can't rely on obtaining that information from a PC. At the moment all the devices are building their own identity platforms but eventually they'll start to take advantage of existing identity systems like Webfinger and PGP.

Personalisation: a post-PC device can be uniquely personalised because it's not predicated on the idea that it will be a shared device. The classic example is the experience when you buy a Kindle from Amazon. It will be preconfigured with your name and the books you've already bought. It's a small step from there to a future where the moment I bought a device in a shop it would automatically know that it belonged to me.



Cloud: post-PC devices tend to be heavily dependent on the cloud in order to store persistent state and to perform sophisticated processing. The definition of the cloud that this implies comes from Simon Meacham. He says that the cloud means treating the union of all those servers/networks/services as if they were one machine available to be used by everybody. In this vision the physical devices we own are merely portals to and caches for this metaphorical "one machine."

Mobility: if our data and services live in this cloud then all the devices I can log in to are equivalent. At this point the ability to take a device to the place I wish to use it (for instance the Kindle screen is supremely legible in bright sunlight unlike the screens of most mobile phones) and the fact a given device is ready-to-hand will trump all other considerations. Photographers have long had a saying "the best camera is the one you have with you" and the rest of the world will soon experience something similar.

Devices: new kinds of devices become possible, if not inevitable, in a post-PC future. Technology will migrate to the most convenient form and place in your life. That means computers, cameras and music players will start becoming features of watches, jewelry and clothing. That's partly because people actually like their watches, jewelry and clothing whilst they mostly tolerate their computers. The early examples of this are Nike+ and the increasing variety of smart watches. In fact several of the people attending OSJam were wearing the precursors of the smart watches of the future. Furthermore once people stop expecting technology to be delivered to them in a beige box it opens the doors to new innovators such as Arduino enthusiasts and the open source hardware community.

From OSJam 19 - Post-PC: gadgets of the now

Personal Area Networks: The logical culmination of this is the personal cloud or personal area network. This is not merely a network of devices that are physically close to one person. Instead it is a network of devices that are geographically distributed but which can connect to each other (via a variety of networks and protocols including the internet, wifi and bluetooth) and prove that they belong to the same person. The devices are tied together by the fact that they belong to a single person and therefore they can seamlessly share each other's functionality.

These are merely my guesses about what's likely to happen as a consequence of these post-PC devices. Ultimately Alan Kay is right: the only way to predict the future is to invent it.

Quadriga