Personal site of Joseph Redmon, author of the YOLO object detection system and the Darknet neural network framework.
HN links it for the YOLO work and its humorous YOLOv3 paper and resume. Commenters also cite his decision to stop computer vision research on ethical grounds.
The biggest difference between our two projects, is the effort you've put into training your own model, which I think is amazing.
One of the technical issues that you pointed out, is that a model trained on still images, shouldn't be expected to work on video. While I did not train a custom model for this this project, I'm current working on another DNN model for a completely different purpose, where I think feeding frame deltas into the model, will improve the outcome.
As a hobbyist, I would reckon for porn and the like, analysing frozen frames is probably just enough. For violence however, I would agree with you and say that some effort to encode motion would be essential.
Focussing on NSFW content generally, I would guess, depending on the scale of your project, that you will forever run into 'edge cases' for NSFW images, even before you run into the soft wall of subjectivity.
I agree that the tech is improving all the time, and I think something like this can be made to be truly useful one day. Possibly soon. But it would need a large, active development team, a great deal more compute, and a LOT of data. In much the same way that no home/garage coder can hope to put together a model like GPT3 right now, I would think that a foolproof NSFW classifier would need more resources than you or I have access to at this moment.
But things change all the time.
Thinking about what you're doing, one thing I might suggest, if you have time to develop it, is to add some kind of…
I think 200k as an average is good, since some will be making a whole lot more, and there will be the 100K per year positions too.
My equivalent to your dearth of people in the know in 2011, was studying AL (Artificial Life) in 1990s, and nobody heard of it. It included the study of ANNs, GAs, GP and AI in general (which I prefer to call CI - Computational Intelligence nowadays). The book that started it all for me [0].
There were no immediate applications aside from expert systems here and there, and the fuzzy logic appliance controllers coming out of Japan. However, now, with self-driving cars, recommender systems, image recognition (face-matching surveillance post 9/11) have big pay-offs or budgets to spend on it.
VR is having its second renaissance. I thought the first time it would have taken off even with the clunky glasses and headsets, since gaming was already such a huge money industry.
And now with modeling becoming prominent again, AL paradigms are being modified, created and repurposed for all sorts of cool things. I play with NetLogo since it is a fun environment for that [1].
My only regret is that I was in at the beginning, but left it to pursue other things, and so I am not at the level of practice to get one of those 200K jobs. I still kept studying it all these years though, and I have coded my own bits and pieces, but mainly for conceptual pieces, art and music, not practical applications. I play with Darknet [2] now, since C was my second language…
> Why is furry/anime/whatever inherently disqualifying, regardless of the quality of the technical content?
It isn't inherently disqualifying, unless it is plastered everywhere where it doesn't belong, like in the middle of a lot of unrelated conversations or in the middle of a professional technical blog post.
For example, if you just have a furry image in your website header, but the content of your technical post itself is on-point and doesn't have a bunch of unrelated furry stuff, most people will have no issues sharing your content and recommending it to others.
For a good example of that, take a look at the website of the guy who did a lot of impressive work and research and became famous for the YOLO image classifier[0]. His website features my little pony characters. He is very openly into it. His MLP-themed resume made as a halfway joke is extremely infamous on the internet. And then take a look at his technical blog posts. He writes really well and doesn't let his interests detract him from quality writing. And no one who is interested in reading about the technical topics he covers seems to have any issues with the content of his posts at all.
0. https://pjreddie.com/
> But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh.
> Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait.....
> The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
He's being funded for this. This is fantastic.
https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/
https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf
This is the kind of guy I'd love to hang out with.
There's also the funding acknowledgement in the YOLO v3 tech report (https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf):
> But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh.
> Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait....[1]
> [1] The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf
Sounds to good to be true. Also reads like that. :) A gem from this paper:
But maybe a better question is: “What are we going todo with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot ofthe people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good handsand definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal infor-mation and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactlywhat it will be used for?? Oh.Well the other people heavily funding vision research arethe military and they’ve never done anything horrible likekilling lots of people with new technology oh wait..... 1
1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.