Yeah, I just sent around the links and sorry I didn't do that last night. I don't know why I didn't go through last night. But if folks want to take a moment to read over the April 20 minutes. We'll also have to approve the agenda. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Okay, let's start with that that makes sense. So for the agenda, we'll review the minutes. Discussion on strategizing. And we also got like self education, learning around table report back from other committees. Things like that. So, can someone make a motion to approve the agenda. I make motion to prove the agenda. Jeremy, Helen doing a second. I second. One favor. Any opposed. Motion passes. Okay. So now we've got the minutes. Oh, hey. Sorry, we just started without chef. But we're just reading over the minutes. Are you back in the office line. Whoa. No. No. Well, does anyone make a motion to approve the minutes? Thanks, Michael. Serving seconds. All in favor. Hi. Any opposed. So, um, We were just talking about how, um, We didn't get to talk about the stipends at the last city council meeting that, so that'll be punted to the next one, but that we don't feel like we need to talk about that. We can just dive into the rest of our agenda, which is mostly just to discuss and strategize. About what's next. As we've been kind of in the like, hurry up and wait. You know, rush, rush, rush getting the stipends out and then. And then, you know, like, and before that too, it's not new to the stipend. But, um, I was thinking just having like an open discussion unless someone has another proposal for how to, how to have this. Well, I think we could. Just use you. You sent the presentation and I guess we could look at their recommendations and see what's left. Yeah. So that's. I can just pull that up and share my screen if that's so you're all account with the same thing. I was, I think. Kind of noting what you mentioned, Sheena. I don't know if there might be three buckets of potential. Things to consider. One is, of course, the recommendations from creative discourse, which came out of a pretty robust process. The second bucket that comes to mind is kind of emergent issues. And, you know, thinking a lot about the discussion. Around unhoused people in our community that occurred at the city council meeting. For example. And then the third thing I'm wondering about is, you know, as an advisory committee. Does the council have specific requests of us. As well. So. That's kind of how I'm, those three categories are kind of how I'm wondering about how we maybe start to. Bucket different options for us. That's good. Yeah. I mean, I, the other the, it's a kind of a matrix here because the recommendations that created discourse proposed had three different. Categories operational relational and structural. I think those are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yeah. We can. Yeah. We can create a matrix and put things in there that. You know, correspond both ways. Great. And then it's almost just kind of like, okay, Lauren. And Cameron is watching this video where, you know, staff, are there things that are happening at the city level that we want to. Or like our questions or considerations coming from the city that we want to. You know, add that like adding to this list. Outside of housing, of course, which is the, the big one. I mean, one thought that it might have gotten captured in what Jeremy said, but. Like part of. The kind of responsiveness to what's happening in the city. Like I'm thinking of. You know, like, you know, what's happening around the Elks Club property, for example. So like, how are we both helping that process, but also trying to like institutionalized practices that then it's like, we shouldn't be, it feels like we're like reinventing the wheel every time. Yeah. So how are we like getting like, okay, here's different. Like ways you can do outreach that are different than how we've done it historically and like get processes in place that city staff will be able to.  We know like this is our role and here's how we're like supporting the city in it. Or I don't know. I'm just like, how do we just like operationalize more of this and get it like built into the culture of the city and to the just practices. And like using. What's happening in the coming year as like ways to just build out the community. I'm also thinking of like the budget, like how I tried to start doing that. And like to me taking that to the next level this year should be a big priority of like, how are we really trying to embed. Equity considerations into how we actually craft the budget from the beginning. And does the city have like a participatory budgeting. Goal for next year. I remember Cameron mentioning that. I can do this. I can't remember what the city was talking about. You know, going around those lines and I can be making those words from other places in my brain. So I don't remember the city talking about it exactly as participatory budgeting. The way it's typically done. Is this. Staff kind of comes up with their. Both there are like list of just what's happening to do city operations and then like they're kind of wish list of like or might not get funded that I want to like put on the maybe list. Council's doing strategic planning which will happen in the fall and has like their wish list of things and priorities. So it's very like city staff driven and then it goes and then like there's many iterations like it's talked about at a bunch of city council meetings basically like I'll fall through January when the final budget so there's like formal budget meetings and usually December and January but the like but the conversation's informing what's going to make it in or not are happening usually I'll fall. So but there as I think there could be ways to try to figure out how do you get input in sooner because it's hard to like react once it's done you're kind of nibbling around the edges that's how I feel. Yeah yeah Michael. Lauren can you say anything about the youthfulness and maybe the further development of the equity tool that we did send to the council is that going is that the process that or is that part of the process that is now built into the budgeting discussions or do we have to is there another step that our committee should take either refining it expanding it somehow or just remind just simply reminding everybody that it's there what would you what would you say about that. Yeah I would definitely want Cameron's take on because I it's kind of her how she's using it I could see you know and maybe next meeting when we have Cameron here like is there you know this summer we try it out with a couple departments or something and like walk through like this is what we mean and like here's what the language means and here's like how you do it to get them familiar with it because I I don't think I don't think it's been extensively used yet and I I would be it would be very understandable if people don't totally get how to use it because it's new and different so that would be my guess but so I'm not but yeah Cameron would obviously know better like how she's tried to like roll it out to people and I know she's talked about wanting to use it more extensively so that could be a role where we have um could help like support that process okay and helping people like meaning helping like the public who are coming to these meetings and and recruiting like and doing outreach to try to get people to come to these meetings is that what you're I can see both I can see as well thinking about can we look at the budget process from start to finish and like where is our community participation and input opportunities and are there ways to improve that and city staff who does the vocal the work putting the budget together and has you know most of the knowledge of like what do we actually need for the different line items to like run city government how are are we helping support them and also like getting into the practice of using that um assessment when they're building their department's budgets well I guess it would be useful if we got any if we if Cameron has already used it in some of her discussions it would be useful to get some of her reactions to it and where she thinks it need it might need some shoring up or some changing or or maybe eliminating if that's necessary so I guess we we wait on that until she's back that'll be the 18th is that right there's our next meeting I'm playing at my calendar yes next week the 11th is the city council meeting and then the 18th it's our city staff meeting yep well okay so we can we I'll just put in the minutes that we'll we'll ask Cameron for a review and report a report and review on the the use of the the tool yeah Lauren I like what you began talking about with maybe our role in helping to institutionalize more participatory or different kinds of participatory practices um because that that's one thing that I kept thinking about as I was listening to the discussion about the Gorton Park structure last Wednesday is there there just seemed to be kind of a lack of shared understanding around the experience of people who are unhoused and maybe are making the most use of that space and other spaces and so I kept kind of you know my my tools and my experience particularly around like kind of community stuff is like getting people together in different ways to have conversations that change how people perceive each other and understand each other and so those are my notes like how we need a way to get like people together on these issues in a different way um so I really appreciate that potentially that could be a role for us um I would like to think more about that that's definitely something that's been very lightly pending on our to-do list for years right is I'm trying to pull it up right now and of course I'm too slow but of um um like proactive I think we've called them proactive educational events on housing races and bathrooms etc and so do we want to I mean is that kind of what you're thinking about is like a general public conversation about um the experience of unhoused folks in Montpelier and like not not even focusing on like solutions but of like having common like language and understanding about like what what's what does it look like yeah I don't I don't know if that's what I'm thinking about specifically just because um each conversation is going to require the input of even just talking about how you want to have a conversation right it needs so much expertise um so maybe I'm thinking like taking a step back more to what Lauren was saying around if we were to build a framework for you know how to do these kinds of participatory conversations events I don't know what they are yet but um that that could be a place to start and then maybe there's of course like there's the test issue that we want to kind of try things out kind of in the way of a prototype um but yeah I think I mean I think yes what you're saying Jane is is right like um bringing people together to build more of a shared understanding around issues that are affecting us I'd like to talk here about and this is this is something that concerned me from the very beginning when we were setting up the the the various panels we're we're sort of stuck I think in a a dilemma of wanting to get more voices and at the same time uh exceeding to the the insistence at least creators discourse made that insistence of anonymity and and and I don't know how to I don't know how to get beyond that I mean people want to be heard but they don't want to be identified being heard and uh or at least we're told that they don't want to be identified being heard and and I think that that makes it very difficult to get um you know across you know a lot of voices out in the open and I don't I don't know what to do with that about that I'm just supporting that out as a as a problem that I felt was central to what created discourses methodology was and how we were able how we were not able to use some of that um because the list were closed and we couldn't reach we can't reach those people they insisted that that's that's almost proprietary information which I find a little bit offensive because we paid for it um and and I think it's necessary I think we need to be able to invite people to come forward um with the understanding that if they do that they're no longer anonymous but and then they're I'll just finish this one thought it and there are other ways to do it that doesn't have to be one route to getting information we can we we can ask for people to remain anonymous um I think that weekends the the the um the authority of the information that we get if people but but I will respect people's will concern and willing and wish to be remain anonymous I would just want to say like creative discourse has said that they can send out emails to this list and things and I think you're totally right of this like and they reached out to a certain set of people and they have those you know they and they were able to participate in everything else and like I'm sure there was a ton of people who they reached out to who couldn't participate and they don't have their contacted for me you know like it's like and if we were to like hit refresh it would we would get a different list of folks and so I think we can like both ask creative discourse to send it out until like recognizing that that would be less anonymous of feedback and I think we can start I want to say start from scratch because I feel like that sounds bad it's not like it's not like we're like yeah but we can we can build our own list I guess is what I'm saying and it sounds so like we're not like building a list of people we're like getting like Shayna sorry can we do something like that can you ask creative discourse to send the email all this group and ask them okay the results were welcomed and you know we want to do more about it do you want to share your information with the city maybe some people will say yes then we can start talking that group because I've taken surveys and you know things like that and there's always option right do you want your information to be shared yes or no so I think it is okay to ask this I don't know how it might be a good start they're gonna send out an email saying like hey the statement thing is happening you should consider joining a committee and like as part of that email can also say if you want to say in the loop yeah great sorry Michael yeah well I mean you might also be able to ask people if they can recommend others if they can yeah that that can be contacted I mean that's the way great finds work right you just start with people that you know you start with things that you know when you work out from there but it still leaves you know it still leaves us kind of in the background with with see with creative discourse you know calling all the shots on who who is available and I just find that difficult to work with and and and at this point you know I think we really need to say we need to be more sort of about we need to be able to operate on our own too I don't know what to say but I just like like I've seen a similar so for one of the state government processes that I've been that's been happening over the last year like for example they were also doing affinity groups that were not open to just anyone to participate and so even though it was state government and they have all the same like public access information like requirements and stuff they were able to figure out I was wondering about like talking to them I know that they had consultants I don't know if it was a similar structure where via consultant you can do things that state government itself can't do but like I mean I could still see a role for there's some small piece where to continue being able to facilitate affinity groups where I think you do get different input than you get in other types of spaces and I think like you said there's like many different ways you can try to get information there's like public meetings there's like online surveys which could be anonymous there could be paper surveys like there's different ways I think we could get information that if people don't you know have the option and don't want to identify themselves we could still get input so I hear what you're saying and I think like to the how are we putting structures in place that can be like long-lived trying to be both limited in what would need to be facilitated by something other than the city like we should definitely be very conscious of that and maybe there is some small role where either we can figure out how you can legally do like affinity groups and things like that or does that up with if you want to keep doing that kind of way of gathering community input it doesn't always have to be through a third party I think I'd be curious of trying to figure that out I think sorry I just my understanding of why we went through this process was that you know there's a lot of um uh what it's called like FOIA requests from the state government not from this oh my god sorry there's a lot of like requests for transparent information from the for this like from the city of Montpellier by residence right and that like wanting for people to be able to share freely without fear that these um that like that like that they won't be like put on a list on Facebook of like here are the people who like made it so that we have to go through this process I'm like trying to make up like whatever it was but that like that we like made we were wanted to have like a really strong commitment to anonymity in that process and that's kind of like why we went through this process and then there's like a different I right I think it's like asking for it like being like that process is now done we're asking for your consent to participate in this like separate public process we're going to bring in new players as well um totally makes sense and I don't want to I don't think it's that like creative discourse is like holding the reins on where we go I think like I feel like we like very intentionally went through this process to kind of like divorce the like the possibility of who participated being public and um and like so we can be able to get like really clear results and just like if we're going to go through another process where it's like more of a conversation and it's open people should be able to like opt into that as well I think that like I think this makes sense of like sending out a follow-up email asking folks to participate in this more public process and I think the first round of what we did was right um I don't know I think we need to get a little bit more guidance about what the what the um the rules are what open meetings you know what the open meeting rule is and how how well it could be because the city council can go into executive session yeah yeah and and if you go to an even higher level much higher level when there are there are closed hearings that take place in congress all the time yeah I mean and I don't know that anything like that happens at the city level or even at the state level I mean I know the city council goes into executive session session and they always cite the the rule but it would be helpful to have Lauren or and or Cameron give us a little bit more coaching on that um and and I and I don't as I say I don't know if the Vermont state legislature ever uh committees go into into uh closed session hearings but we could find out about that too that's an easy enough yeah that's easy and if there are such possibilities then we could offer the same thing I mean we could have closed hearings right um the the people who attend would and they they would necessarily they would not necessarily have to know each other or be identified to each other they can be successive instead of a group um but I think there's something about group dynamics that's both helpful and harmful I mean I've been group dynamics group where the dynamic starts off in one direction it's like a snowball you can't stop it and uh and and it shuts out other voices but on the other hand if people feel more comfortable having others with whom they have an affinity of one kind or another then I guess you have to accommodate that yeah I I really um this is interesting I'm I second or third or fourth I don't know that request to get clarity on what kinds of conversations we can hold and what regulations there are rules there around them because one of the ideas again picking up off the the conversation around Wharton park you know one of my kind of quick ideas was like oh we need to get folks who use this space into like a design workshop and like understand what the issues are what the needs are um and let the people who use it dictate the design of the space like this is a kind of a design problem right um but then you get into issues like okay if we were to organize that as cjack does that mean anybody can show up and stir the pot for example or could we have it be more of a small scale intimate kind of thing so I think that's a really some clarity around that would be really helpful for that are like tactics that we want to use moving forward so I've got that we'll have group Cameron report back on that in the next meeting um should we transition to a more of like what other ideas two people have and just recognizing it's 830 now 835 um should we should we kind of put put all of all of the virtual not virtual like I'm I'm trying to make a joke and it's like working in my head and I can't get the words out of like but all the posts it goes up on the wall um so anyway um yeah do other yeah like so I guess just following the great and park red for a quick moment um what is the timing on that um do you have no I can't remember if we know but I think it's like any process that we would want to move on is probably going to be much slower than the park getting removed and like that yeah that being like an immediate tit for tat yeah yeah I was I was surprised that the structure hasn't been moved already it sounded like everybody just wanted to be done with it um so well I I walked past it yesterday and uh and there was a sign posted on it I didn't go up to read it but because I was in a hurry but I have to be downtown today I'll take a closer look but it was there was something pinned to the to the structure and I think it I think it was announcing a date when it was going to be moved but I'm not sure and I'll I'll if I find out anymore I can email all of us just as sharing information I can take a picture of it circulate I mean this may not be so dependent on the work and structure itself but um you I could imagine from kind and I'll use the I'll use the word design workshop just as a placeholder I don't know what that means but I can imagine some kind of design workshop for that particular space it it's a very significant space for a lot of reasons that people have talked about um and I could imagine a kind of you know design workshop co-design thing where people can help determine what that space is um and and kind of understanding competing perspectives um so that it perhaps is used by a lot of different kinds of people um so and I don't and I don't necessarily feel attached to that because that's a I think it needs partnerships it needs a lot of work it's not just a cjack thing um but that is an example of something we you know a kind of conversation we could we could host this has happened in the past um the the the technical term for those but it's called charrette and um and when the uh I was on the the small group that designed and sort of got found the funding for the the which I guess you'd call it the parklet in front of city hall and the problem I mean there was a clear problem right the city people thought that the kids hanging around city hall was um and was ugly and they didn't want them there and they wanted to pass loitering so no loitering uh signs and and actually um they did they did um arrest kids for sitting on the steps when was this michael what yeah um let's see my it's now probably about 30 years ago yeah like my kid was you my kid was one of those who was was brought in was was arrested oh my gosh for for loitering on the on the state city hall steps um he was probably about 10 at the time to maybe 12 um um and you know what we what we did then was okay we got um we we got a plan together about and it was money for something called iced tea at that time you had to do intermodal transit wild um and we had to get the city council's approval to submit the proposal they reluctantly did that and it was oh this sort of oh they'll never get that grant haha and we did but then we then we did a charrette and you know got and just it was an open call and we were at the space and we said what what would you like to see happen here and what are some of the ideas and you know what we got is what we got and there were a couple of things the reason there are cobblestones is because people didn't want skateboarding in front of the city hall all right so you make the surface on totally unfriendly to skateboards and that was the last reason for the cobblestones um and um and the side gates were some way to sort of separate the city halls property from the the park park kind of property and things like that and that's useful i mean um you know if you get a uh an architect who knows how to run these kinds of things you or if you get the expert in who knows what your what what the questions are then you can get a lot of good answers and it's not as if you know you're making choices at that point you're just gathering as that's where you've been talking here you're just gathering the information and gathering ideas and you put them all down and you start working in working working from that list so i think it's i think generally you're right you're right that you know trying to hold some kinds of public meeting on this on the location um i think is helpful because you can sort of take a look around and see what what can we do here um and people can see what they want to say that's so cool to hear that history thanks but i'd love to actually know more about the criminalization of kids on public basis it was it was pretty dreadful i mean every spring to have the city council say oh the spring spring is here and the kids are messing up the front of the city hall again you know so what what comes to mind too and like why this matters to cjack is i've participated in a number of shreds like that um and not all of them have been designed in a way that promotes equity um and so as i think about our role you know partnering with the experts who have the right questions around the design of you know urban spaces um is important and also you know us holding a process and even just the the way people come together that supports equity um that that seems like why i think i'm interested in it even though i have like this other kind of design interest um is like how do we make these conversations so that the people who's had the most at stake can really um participate so i mean i've been struck by the fact that people at city council have been very frank i mean that that that uh meeting that discussion about what to do with gerton park it brought out a lot of people at whose voices um we haven't heard and people we haven't seen the city city hall city council meetings so i'm not so sure that people are reluctant to you know out themselves if that's if that's the proper word um they seem to be doing okay with with it and being quite outspoken about it um last wednesday i'm putting that down as something else to ask Cameron about is like what was the outreach like leading up to these meetings and yeah how how was that shared um because yeah it was really powerful welcome back line sorry powered through um okay so we've been talking about design sorry i feel like i stopped the conversation which i didn't mean to do talking about like you know designing spaces to be able to bring in folks to be able to get all like different ideas on the table um you know having spaces where people are not just um encouraged to come but like welcomed um are are there other things that like other agenda you know future agenda items to help us lead to these bigger agenda items for you know bigger conversations about um or having conversations about you know housing and homelessness and um and bathrooms and all these other things sorry doing a bad bad facilitating trying to like participate it's hard to participate and facilitate at the same time just gonna say that okay anyway well i think the next big challenge that the city is kind of faces is how to deal with the planning for the elks uh the elks and i think we need to be you know need to remind them that we're here um and make sure that they whatever process they do set you know establish includes somebody who's going to be no knowledgeable about and speaking for you know equity issues i think that's a really important point i certainly want to wouldn't want to own that kind of public engagement process for such a no it's a big set of like it's but holding the equity accountability seems a role for us yes i and that that has lots of dimensions to it in this case i mean transportation public transportation um recreation housing how do you how do you so i i i think we we can try to push very hard to at least have some kind of representation yeah on on whatever planning committee you're his best assembled lauren is there any i mean i don't think the sale of the property is even closed but is there any thinking about next steps beyond that um we got a presentation not last meeting at the meeting before um i don't know if anyone else was there so that um mic miller yeah director was talking through essentially like a year long he estimated planning process which would be um includes a series of public input opportunities which i would love us to weigh in on and have help shape perhaps um and then you know there's like the engineering and like site analysis and the stuff of like what are what are the opportunities and what are the limitations on the property itself like what could you do with it based on that just the landscape and whatever other constraints and i assume in that would be some analysis of like transportation options and things but um but yeah so it was like that combination of work and then as they kind of hone in on okay what kind of where's their momentum um i guess starting to make decisions so that you're getting to a plan um that both has incorporating the public input and the um the site elements with engineers and architects and where all the people have to be involved in that kind of project um i mean one of the pieces of it that in addition to the like the transportation and stuff like i think this private public partnership opportunity slash like also raises some very interesting equity and access issues and like how could that be structured if that's going to move forward like should it move forward if it does how are you doing it in a way that's like ensuring the greatest access and affordability and stuff for the community that we don't end up in a place where you know if you can pay a big monthly fee you get a whole bunch of things and if you can't afford that then you're getting some or like we have less opportunity than we have now because there's a buy-in for certain things that used to be accessible through the city or something like i'm sure yeah so that one in particular i can see some issues and then of course like housing huge other issues like how do you build that in a way that's it'll be a great one for so many so many considerations you know what the timeline is for the starting so it can be like july or and like who's in charge of that process that's a good question it's been i think mostly like cameron and mike miller um what's my miller's role i'm sorry of the planning department okay yep um and yeah so he'll be the one certainly like working with like the architect engineer and um you know as a planner had like that big view of like all just the pieces that go into a project like that um i i think less so like his role is not typically like how do i maximize public like community input and stuff like that's other parts of the city would i think focus more on that but so like they already did one public meeting that pal castello had facilitated and then they were supposed to be gathering that input and putting it back out to people in some way what i haven't seen yet and then um but yeah we should get the schedule of like what what they're thinking for next steps for public engagement and then um see if we want to provide any input on that the other property that presents a similar challenge is the confluence park um i don't know where where that's going if it's going anywhere can can you remind me what that one is that's near the that's near the transit it's between the transit center and shawls as you walk the path you make that big turn and it's where the confluence of the the north branch oh yeah and and the winooski are and there's there is a plan posted up on a bulletin board there um but i don't know if it's been fine if that's the final plan and i don't know where that's going and of course that's going to raise a lot of questions about safety because it's down out of sight um from from the street level and um and the way it's been it's been designed there are issues about access there are issues about privacy there are issues about public space um and and i've heard you know there are some people who now want to i've heard just and say we shouldn't do we should not do this so but i think it's pushed along probably too far for that the budget for that got approved right that's right yeah so i'm not i'm not sure what's holding it up you it was it just waiting for spring we can be here until July for that but i mean yeah that's we're supposed to get a presentation on that at the next council meeting um okay so if anyone wants to watch that or check it out later um i mean so Vermont River Conservancy's been the partner with the city on that and they've done a bunch of fundraising that we've gotten a bunch of like some federal grants and stuff so there's a lot of money it's a many-year process so i don't i think it's been more it's been in like engineering and design and stuff i don't think it's but i think it's just held up in the way that big projects just take a long time i don't think it's been hit a roadblock or something that i know of but maybe i'll hear differently at the next council meeting um but last i the last update we'd gotten it was kind of like there was still just like fundraising and other things um but yeah i don't know in terms of like design and stuff how locked in they are if they got federal grants and stuff around a specific design or if it was more conceptual and there's opportunity for kind of like where how locked in the design is for example but there is a design and the like process has started essentially is what you're saying and so it's just like a yeah yeah at least the process of like fundraising and like yeah engineering design lines and stuff like the planning is like far is a couple years in um i mean they haven't broken ground yet or anything as far as i know so it's like coming back i really hope no one's watching this and it's like shooting like we had multiple conversations about this and i'm just like whoo i like don't remember at all just a reference sheina here's thank you we're talking about okay yeah so it's like a gradated like a kind of walking path and benches and then like they want boating access and yep that's right i mean like our river should be an asset in our city and like a beautiful part of it instead of something we try to just get over on bridges and wall off with concrete yeah and then as michael said there's complication to all there's complexity in the world that gives us i think a sufficient number of items on yeah i think that's a good idea i think we really need to realize that you know there are all there are going to be equity problems on every project that comes you know involves public money and and we need and we just have to pick and choose where do we think is other is the most critical place where we can be helpful in designing a process for for you know getting two answers you know this committee probably will go on forever because uh problems of social justice and equity are ancient yeah so i think what i'm hearing is next we'll have camera and talk to us next week next time about a bunch of different things including how the tool is being used guidance on open meeting was what kind of our recap and for the city council meetings what's the timeline for the elks lodge process and for the confluence park process and then we'll kind of take it from there because that's all right so we'll just have camera do a whole bunch of research and report back to us and then that's for usual i know we have to do this to her but i'm i feel badly that we keep dumping more projects into her lap and i mean i do think these are all things that are happening anyway right like i hope that it's not creating new work for her it is making me go like oh my god how is she doing all this work all the time yeah but i do think by asking very specific questions from her or you know that that will help her get through you know you know to focus retention on just those things instead of trying to have to create the structure of the questions for herself yep okay well thank you all anything else while we're all together i won't be able to go to the city hall meeting on the 11th or be here for seed for the cjack meeting on the 18th and those are both travel dates from me to the southwest so to and from the southwest have uh arizona right yes yeah have a good good safe travels thank you um yeah and i have to be out for an hour during that i'm just looking meaning but i'll be there um and hopefully that'll work around the presentation timing so um cool well thank you all thank you for all your work yeah nice to see you thank you bye bye see you later


This lecture is entitled Sir Joshua Reynolds. England embraces the grand manner. Now, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who we see right here in a self-portrait dating to 1776, worked primarily as a portrait painter because when he was working towards the end of the 18th century in England, portraiture continued to be the most popular form of painting in England and really the best way to make a living as a painter. And you might recall that Gainsborough really carried on this tradition and made a distinctly English form of portraiture. And Sir Joshua Reynolds carried that forward in a really different way. He did really different things with portraiture and we're gonna take a look at how he did that. But just a real quick contextualization background of Sir Joshua Reynolds who's a really interesting character. You might remember, hopefully you remember, that the English and patronized Dutch and Flemish portraitists. So that is the tradition out of which English portraiture grew. And again, Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds really declared their own English form of that. And Reynolds was really successful so much so that he became president of the Royal Academy. President of Royal Academy. And that's a really big important title. And that happened in 1768. So he is really one of the premier artists working in England. And you can definitely consider him an example of a quintessential English taste in painting. Now unlike a lot of earlier artists or some early artists, and particularly I'm thinking of Hogarth who we already looked at, Reynolds wanted English art to kind of follow in the artistic traditions established in places like France and Italy. And you may recall that Hogarth was opposed to that. So that's what this kind of subtitle of today's lecture is all about. Sir Joshua Reynolds really sought to elevate English painting to these traditions that he really revered, that the traditions of the Baroque and the classical world of Italy and basically bringing England into this larger artistic history. Now he traveled to Italy. He was very influenced by what he saw there, ancient art, Renaissance art, Baroque art. And again, he wanted to bring England into that artistic tradition. And that is where this term comes in, the grand manor, which is simply paintings in a really lofty and elevated style. Lofty, elevated. And these are paintings that artists like Poussin painted, paintings about history and the classical world, very noble grand themes. This is sort of as opposed to genre scenes, right? Still life, scenes of the everyday. That's not what a grand manor painting is. It's sort of the opposite of the everyday, the ordinary. And so when this grand manor style is applied to portraiture, the goal is, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, I think, succeeded in elevating or seeming to elevate his sitter above the ordinary into a world of grand and abstract ideas. And you might get a little hint of this when you take a look at this self-portrait, but I think some of the examples we're gonna look at show that even more. So our first example today is this image on the left. And this lady, this beautiful lady here, is the Countess of Harrington. So let's write that down. Countess of Harrington. And this portrait dates to 1779. And this image here is for the sake of comparison, something we've already looked at. So for now, just focus your attention over here. I think this is a really interesting portrait. And think about portraits we've looked at so far. This is unique. This isn't really like anything we've looked at. So what are we seeing? We see a contemporary woman. Clearly, she's a distinct individual. But the way she's set is kind of confusing and strange. It's hard to define really what this space is, where she is. And clearly we have this beautiful landscape behind her, which might remind you of Gainesboro. But there are also interesting classical features included. There's this interesting urn next to her, clearly in an antique style. We have the balustrade behind her. And also notably her dress. What she's wearing is interestingly antique looking, vaguely antique looking. It looks sort of like a toga. It doesn't look like a lot of the contemporary dress we've seen in 18th century England. So these are deliberate choices made by Reynolds. And it's very interesting, especially if you can compare this with Hogarth, right? This is Hogarth, The Breakfast Scene from Maria Jalla Mode, which we've already looked at. And hopefully you remember Hogarth's view of the artistic traditions of places like France and Italy, the classical world, and the people who patronize that kind of art. So whereas Hogarth placed his two figures here in the context of all this classical decor as a way of showing their shallowness, their desire to be social climbers, Reynolds is suggesting the opposite about our Countess of Harrington. He is flattering her, whereas Hogarth is mocking the people in his painting. And really the objects here, this urn, these little classical details, are an attempt to elevate her. And Hogarth is depicting these people as kind of small and petty. And Reynolds has made his woman through these same features kind of timeless and above petty and ordinary things. So very interesting considering your perspective, what your viewpoint of objects and ideas does to your paintings. Let's take a look at another example. And again, we're looking at this image on the left. And this is a long title. Captain George K.H. Kussmacher. And it dates to 1782. Now, I think we can see a similar approach to portraiture. We have this dignified person in an interesting landscape setting. And it's showing this captain out for a ride on his horse. He's just perhaps just gotten off his horse and he's resting against a tree in this beautiful landscape setting. But it's really hard when looking at this painting not to consider the painting here on the right, which we've looked at, which is Anthony Van Dyke's portrait of Charles I from 1635. And the reason this comes to mind is because, of course, Charles I was English and Anthony Van Dyke was very popular in England. So the similarities between a sort of gentleman out for a ride, having stepped off his horse in this quite similar landscape setting, it seems that Reynolds certainly would have known about this painting. And in referencing Van Dyke, he's kind of elevating this captain to this kingly status. But an interesting thing he also does is he's connecting his portrait with the artistic past, with the Baroque period. And kind of not only elevates this man through relationship to an important figure, but through time and history and this historical reference. So in that way, he has also made this captain here a transcendent figure. So let's take a look at both of these images kind of side by side. So again, here we have our countess, which we looked at before. Here's the captain. And then on the right, we have Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which we looked at in a previous subunit. I think it's really interesting to compare these portraits alongside one another because there's a lot that's very similar, but the end result I think is quite different.  Think of what does it work in these paintings that makes them like and dissimilar. And just to get you started, I just wanted to remind you, here we have Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, this newly married couple sitting on their estate and they're simple people, they're not overly flashy in a real place. And in Reynolds to portraits, we have real people, but I think there are some significant differences from what I mentioned with Gainsborough's portrait. So I'm not going to say much more because I want to leave it to you to make some observations and see what you think. So good luck.


So last week I uploaded an amazing glitch in which you could basically get yourself unlimited action skill points, meaning you could max out all 3 skill trees. It was a little pain to actually do because you needed to use some unsanctuary lobby where a large lag was being made to get this to work, but today I have an even easier method. Yes you still need that lag, but with this one particular item it means making a lag you need to do this has never been easier. The item I will by the way be given out via my discord. Stay tuned for more details. How's it going guys my name is DPJ and today I bring you another BR3 video if you do enjoy living a life really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. Okay so this unlimited skill points glitch was possible to do but I would admit it was difficult to do at the same time because to achieve this you needed to join a friend or at least someone who could create major lag or join someone on the other side of the planet and it's just straight up laggy for you. Now I've seen men in the comments stating even scenarios like this they still can't get it to work as the lag was just not bad enough. Well today people that changes and I guarantee you you will be able to achieve this with this said item I have. So firstly for those that do not know how this is done when you are in or apart of that lag someone else's sanctuary obviously and that lag is crazy. Going into your inventory after you're spanking and spamming points into your skill trees sometimes when the lag is that bad the points are being spent but at the same time you ain't actually spending any as you'll see your skill trees are filling up but your points are not moving they're staying at that same number. When this happens it's working perfect for you but there are a few things you can do to also help create even more lag for yourself and what I tell people to do is to get this to work properly when you are spending those points spamming them into that tree to create even more lag simply press those bumpers a few times this creates more lag and it makes this work a lot easier because what can sometimes happen is that lag misses a beat so to speak and the game catches up with what's happening and the points you have spent actually then get deducted from that total points available if this happens you will have to respect and start a game so create more lag by spamming those bumpers then what you need to do is while that total available skill points number is still frozen spam your bumpers quickly then and then quit out of the game because it has got a habit of that lag catching up when you press start and going down to quit so quickly spam those bumpers then quit out of the game upon you loading back up into your own sanctuary if you check within your inventory if this has worked you will notice you have skill points spent but your total number skill points still available hasn't changed now if you respect it takes the points spent and adds them to that total if you simply rinse and repeat this process you'll quickly get enough points to fill all three skill trees again though you need to use someone else's lobby to do this as you cannot do it by yourself and use lag created by them or lag created within their sanctuary now this is where it gets a ton easier for you people who have tried this in the past because I have this said item which was sent to me ages back which I never really used because I just don't like these crazy OP mudded items which for me they take away from the game they take the fun away from the game and if I'm honest so does this this is something I ain't actually using myself but I know a lot of my following loves this kind of thing and that's why I'm bringing you guys this video but this item it's the perfect item to create lag because what it actually does is once you throw a grenade it spawns an unlimited amount of gas cool ghosts you throw this thing in sanctuary throw a couple of these things in sanctuary you wait a couple of minutes and you will notice the lag will be coming to a point we can't even move this is where it's perfect for obtaining unlimited skill tree points people so using this grenade in a front sanctuary throw a couple of times where until those frames drop like mad obviously respect first then go into your inventory and just test the waters to see if it works if not respect and wait a little longer you can also have the host of the sanctuary spam the bumpers inside his inventory too for even more lag again though when you get it to work remember spam those points until you can't spam anymore sometimes it stops at 58 sometimes it don't but spam them until you can't spam no more then you quickly need to quit out I do suggest here though spamming your bumpers then quit it out do this fast and when you load back up into your own sanctuary you will notice you'll have points spent but you'll still have points to spend respect and the ones you spend will get added to the total number of points you have available now to get this item I will be doing an open loot lobby within my discord which if you're not a part of you'll find it within the video description I play on xbox right now but I'm certain I can also get someone who can do this for my ps4 followers so I jump on my discord people for updates on when this open lobby will happen which like I said I will give this thing out for you guys if you want to do this glitch that's completely up to you but on that note we have come to the end of the video this is how you get unlimited skill tree points and this is how you get an item which creates crazy lag so you can obtain this a lot easier than the original method if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out if you're new around here and want to see more ballads be sure to subscribe and if you're never going to miss a video upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video hopefully I will see you on that next one


This lecture is part of an online course on Galois theory, and it will be about examples of the Galois correspondence. So we recall what this is. So we have a Galois extension of fields, which we will take to be finite. And do you remember there's a one-to-one correspondence between subfields of M containing L and subgroups of the Galois group of M over K. And the correspondence went as follows. For a subfield L we associate the group of automorphisms of M that fix all elements of L, which is the Galois group of M over L. On the other hand, if we've got a subgroup of the Galois group H, the field corresponding to it is the set of elements of M fixed by H. And in the next lecture we will show that these correspondences are bijections, but in this lecture we're just going to work out several examples of them to see what's going on. Let's start off with a trivial one just to warm up. Here we're just going to take the reals contained in the complex numbers. And in this case the Galois group just has two elements, which are one and complex conjugation. And there are two subgroups, and there are obviously two subfields of C containing C and R, and the subfields are the complex numbers itself and the real numbers. And these correspond to the following subgroups. The complex numbers correspond to the trivial subgroup, and the real numbers correspond to the subgroup containing one and complex conjugation. And this is rather trivial. The only thing to watch out for is that the larger field corresponds to the smaller subgroup. And as I mentioned, this is one of the biggest source of errors in Galois theory of thinking the bigger field should correspond to a bigger subgroup. So let's do a slightly more interesting example. So let's take the field Q contained in Q with the cube root of 2 added. Well, as we saw earlier, this isn't actually a Galois extension because the other cube roots of 2 aren't in it. So we should extend it a bit and take Q with the cube root of 2 and also add an omega where omega is a cube root of 1. Omega squared plus omega plus 1 equals 0. So this is now a Galois extension, and its Galois group G is isomorphic to S3, which is just the group of permutations of the three cube roots of unity. So we have the cube root of 2, cube root of 2 times omega, and the cube root of 2 times omega squared. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write out all the subfields we can think of and all the subgroups we can think of. So let's do the fields. So we've got the first one, we've got the full field up here, Q with the cube root of 2 and omega added, and down at the bottom we've got the rational numbers. And in between them, well, there's a field extension of order 2 generated by omega and there's a field extension of order 3 generated by the cube root of 2. But then there are two other cube roots of 2 generating other fields. So we have two more fields here. So we've got the cube root of 2 times omega and the cube root of 2 times omega squared. So these fields are embedded in each other like this. And we can put down the relative degrees. So the relative degrees here are 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2. Now let's write down the subgroups of the symmetric group S3. And this time we should remember to put the symmetric group S3 on the bottom, not the top. And we have a trivial subgroup there. And the symmetric group S3 has six elements which are 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2. So it's got some elements of order 2 and some elements of order 3. And you remember from group theory the subgroups of this aren't terribly difficult to figure out. First of all there's a subgroup of order 3 which consists of 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2. So that's generated by the elements of order 3. And then it's got 3 subgroups of order 2 generated by these elements. So we've got the subgroup generated by 2, 3, subgroup generated by 1, 2, and the subgroup generated by 1, 3. So here we've got subgroups and we can write down the index of each subgroup in the other subgroups. So the indices here are 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3. And you notice this lattice of subfields looks just like this lattice of subgroups except of course the inclusion gets reversed. And we can also do things like write down which fields are normal in other subfields. So which extensions are normal? Well this extension is normal and so are these two. And this extension is normal and this extension is normal because it has a degree 2. But these extensions are not normal. You remember this extension is the standard example of a non-normal extension. Similarly we can write down which subgroups are normal. Well any subgroup next to is normal so these are normal and that's normal and this is normal. And these three are not normal subgroups of S3. In fact you notice that the subgroup S3 permutes these three subgroups under conjugation. So this is a conjugacy class of three subgroups. And the Galois group similarly permutes these three subfields under conjugation. And again you can see normal subfields correspond exactly to normal subgroups. I didn't mention by the way that this is a normal subgroup of the full group and this is a normal extension of Q. But I don't have room to draw in absolutely everything. So this is an example of the Galois correspondence. If you've got a Galois extension then the lattice of subfields looks just like the lattice of subgroups up to duality or something. So now let's look at the example of the field of order 2 contained in... Well it's either the field of order 4 or it's order 16 or a field of order 16 depending on whatever. And the first thing we want to do is to work out what is the Galois group. So can we find any automorphisms of the field of order 16? Well there's one obvious automorphism which just takes A to A squared. You remember that the map taping A to A to the P in characteristic P is a homomorphism because A plus B to the P is equal to A to the P plus B to the P and AB to the P is equal to A to the P, B to the P. So this is the famous Frobenius endomorphism and it acts on here. And we can ask what its order is. Well you notice that phi squared takes A to A to the 4 and phi cubed takes A to A to the 8 and phi to the 4 maps A to A to the 16 which is equal to A. So we see that phi to the 4 is equal to 1. So phi generates a cyclic group of order 4. On the other hand we know that the order of the Galois group has to be the degree of this extension. The degree of F16 over F2 is just 4. So we found the full Galois group. The Galois group is just generated by phi and is order 4. And you notice there's nothing special about the field of order 16. You find that similarly if you take Fp containing Fp to the N, the Galois group is cyclic generated by A goes to A to the P. Incidentally this is one of the reasons why finite fields are really easy to deal with. It's because not only are all extensions of finite fields Galois extensions, but their Galois groups are cyclic and cyclic groups are of course particularly easy to deal with. So finite fields are easy because cyclic groups are easy. Anyway, let's draw a picture of the subfields and the corresponding subgroups. So subfields aren't very difficult to figure out. There's only one subfield other than the obvious maximal and minimal ones which look like this. And the full Galois group contains 1, phi, phi squared and phi cubed. And the trivial subgroup corresponds to the full field. And this is one subgroup of order 2 which is just the elements 1 and phi squared. And here all extensions are normal and all subgroups are normal. So there's nothing terribly exciting to say about this. By the way in here that the chain of subgroups and the chain of subfields is linear, of course that's not always true. For instance if we took the Galois field of order 2 to the 6 for example, then we would have a Galois field of order 2 cubed and a Galois field of order 2 squared. And these would contain the Galois field of order 2. Similarly we would have a cyclic group of order 6 and here we would have a group of order 1 and here we would have a subgroup of order 3 and here a subgroup of order 2. My notation isn't very good but anyway. So the subfield lattice of a finite field isn't always linear but it's always very easy to work out. So for the next example I'm going to look at the field over the rationals generated by a seventh root of unity. So zeta to the 7 is equal to 1 and zeta is equal to e to the 2 pi i over 7 or some power of it. Well of course the polynomial x to the 7 minus 1 is not irreducible. It's equal to x minus 1 times x to the 6 plus x to the 5 plus x to the 4 plus x cubed plus x squared plus x plus 1. And you remember there's a sort of trick of showing this is irreducible using Eisenstein's criteria and if you change x to x plus 1 which I won't bother repeating. So this is an irreducible polynomial. And now if zeta is one root of this the other roots, well if zeta is a seventh root of unity so zeta squared, zeta cubed, zeta to the 4, zeta to the 5 and zeta to the 6. So in particular this extension is separable because it's character 6-0 and it's normal because it's a splitting field of a polynomial so it's a Galois extension. And there's nothing special about seventh roots of unity here. We could do something fairly similar for at least any other root of unity of prime order for composite order we need to be a little bit more careful. So what's its Galois group? Well any automorphism must take zeta to one of the other roots so it must take zeta to zeta to the i for i equals 1, 2, up to 6. And what's the group operation? Well if we take zeta to the i and then apply the automorphism raising things to the jth power this is just zeta to the ij. So as you see from this the Galois group is just the non-zero elements of the integers, sorry, the integers mod 7 under the operation of multiplication because here the composition of these automorphisms just corresponds to multiplication. So the Galois group has six elements which can be denoted by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the group operation is multiplication mod 7. And we remember that this is cyclic of order 6 and of course 1 is not a generator of this group, it's the identity element. So a generator might be 3 because if you look at the powers of 3 we have 3 to the north equals 1, 3 to the 1 equals 3, 3 squared equals 2, 3 cubed equals 6, 3 to the 4 equals 4 and 3 to the 5 is 5, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So it's a cyclic group of order 6 and a cyclic group of order 6 has just four subgroups. So let's write out the subgroups and the subfields. So the subgroups look like this, there's a subgroup 1 and there's a subgroup 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, the whole group and then there's a subgroup of order 2 which is generated by the cube of the generator and there's also a subgroup of order 3 generated by, consisting of the elements 1, 2 and 4. So it looks like this and we can write down the indexes of all these groups so that is index 2, that is index 3, that is index 3 and that is index 2. And these correspond to fields so let's write down the fields. First of all up here we have the fields Q of zeta and down here we have the field Q of course and here we have a field generated by the elements 1 and 6. Well what does the element 6 correspond to? Well this takes zeta to zeta to minus 1 which is the complex conjugate of zeta. So this element here is really just complex conjugation looking at the elements of this field that are fixed under complex conjugation in other words the real elements and it's sort of pretty obvious what that's going to be. It's going to be the element Q zeta plus zeta to minus 1 and you remember this is 2 cosine 2 pi over 7 and we studied this field quite a bit in several examples earlier except we used the element cosine of 2 pi over 7 instead of 2 cosine 2 pi over 7 but that doesn't really make any difference. So anyway the indices of these fields are like this and then we've got one other field so we've got a sort of mystery field here and if you haven't seen this example before it's probably not at all obvious what this field is so what the Galois theory is telling us is that there's a subfield of this which is a degree 2 extension of the rationals well what on earth is it? Well how do we find it? Well it consists of the elements that are fixed under this group here so how can we find an element of this field? Well let's take an element zeta and we're going to have zeta plus zeta squared plus zeta to the 4 and you notice this is obtained by you start with zeta and then you act on zeta by all three elements of this group and add them up and that's obviously going to be invariant under this group so this is a good candidate for a generator of this field okay so this should be q of alpha but what is alpha? I mean we know that any quadratic extension of q should be generated by the square root of something so what's the something that this is generated by a square root of? Well let's play around with alpha a bit so you can find that alpha squared is equal to zeta squared plus zeta to the 4 plus zeta to the 8 which is just zeta plus 2 zeta q plus 2 zeta to the 6 plus 2 zeta to the 5 and then you notice that here we've got zeta squared plus zeta to the 4 plus zeta which is just alpha again and here we've got 2 times the things that aren't in alpha and if you sort of fit around with it a bit you notice that alpha squared plus alpha is now going to be 2 times every power of zeta except for zeta to the nought so if we now add on a 2 we get this is 2 zeta to the nought plus zeta to the 1 plus zeta squared plus all the way up plus zeta to the 6 and now the sum of all these powers of zeta is just 0 so this is just 0 so now we've found out what alpha is it's a root of this equation here so alpha, well we can solve this using the formula for quadratics it's just minus 1 plus minus the square root of 1 minus 8 which is minus 7 over 2 so we can now see what this field is it's q of root minus 7 and again it's index 2 over q and index 3 in this field here so just as before we can see the subgroup the lattice of subfields is just like the lattice of subgroups and of course all groups here are abelian so everything is normal and there's no need to mark the normal ones so what we're going to do next lecture is actually prove the fundamental theorem of Galois theory showing that we always get such a correspondence between lattices and sorry between subfields and subgroups and then we'll give a few more examples


Hey, my name is Khan McDonald. I'm an artist working mostly with code. And I wanted to say thanks again to Irene and Lynn and everyone else who's organizing for having me here. First day that left me speechless was a chatbot named Megahal. I read this typical training session with its creator, Jason Hutchins, when I was in high school. Tu parles vous, tu parles les Français. Agasso, parlez-vous Français. In 1793, the French king was executed. Ha ha ha, correct. Although executed, it has multiple meanings. Very clever, again, like the other bots. The revolution started on July 14. It's 14 degrees Celsius here. Another revolution was carried out by Lenin in Russia in the year 1917, while Lenin read a book. I was in awe. It turns out Megahal was basically a sleight of hand. It would pick a word from the previous line and run a Markov chain forward and backward from that word. But reading these transcripts had a really big effect on how I saw computers. I decided I'd study AI in college. And I started a degree in philosophy and science. Halfway through undergrad, I started doing research at an AI lab. I'd skipped most of my CS classes to sit in on art and music classes. And in lab meetings, where we were supposed to be talking about natural language search techniques, I spent most of the time proposing ideas about computational creativity or automating online activity and identity. And after a few too many of these interjections, the director sat me down after a meeting and said, Kyle, I think you might be an artist. It wasn't a compliment, but I took it to heart. And I went on to do an MFA. And since then, I found myself in this regular pattern, learned about a new tool or field of research, explored it conceptually and technically through small studies, and eventually craft a new artwork that integrates recurring things from themes from my practice. And previously, I focused on tools like 3D scanning or face tracking. And most recently, I'm stuck on machine learning. But it's not my first time with this obsession. Outside of the AI lab, I was building my own side projects, programs that tried to understand and improvise around rhythm you were clapping or tried to finish drawings that you started. I explored everything from clustering to genetic programming. But my favorite tool was neural nets. At the time, they were small and out of fashion. But in the last five to 10 years, they really returned stronger than ever fueled by new research, new kinds of data, huge amounts of it, faster computers, new toolkits, and new communities. And this last year, the last two years, I guess, I've been getting back into machine learning and AI and rediscovering a lot of the things that drew me to it in the first place back in college and even in high school. So I'm still in that getting familiar, making small studies phase of my art practice that comes before making any new artwork. But I wanted to share some of that process today. So I'll cover three general topics, convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and dimensionality reduction. And I'm really grateful for your presentation because I was worried that some of this would be a little too quick. So on June 16, 2015, Reddit erupted in a furious debate over this image of a puppy slug posted anonymously with the title Image Generated by a Convolutional Neural Network, which I'm pretty sure was leaked from someone at Google. Machine learning researchers and hobbyists were quick to argue over whether it could possibly be the work of a neural net as claimed, or if it was in fact some other algorithm, or even handcrafted somehow. And the deleted comments littering the thread only added to the mystery of the image's orange origins. About a week later, a Google research blog post appeared titled Inceptionism, going deeper into neural networks with other similar images, basically confirming the origin of this puppy slug. Soon after Google released some code called DeepDream that anyone could use to recreate these images. And journalists were quick to ascribe the psychedelic artwork to Google's AI as if there was some one massive digital brain in an underground layer that Sergei is secretly feeding photos and a few dozen posts from Google+. While DeepDream may have been the first moment a neural net captured the public's imagination so visibly, they've seen plenty of success in everyday life. Convolutional neural nets or congnets in particular have been used for reading checks since the 90s and powering recent search by image systems, auto-tagging images and demonstrating exactly how homogenous many research groups are. About a year before DeepDream, I'd seen some other applications of deep learning and was surprised at how much had changed since I had left them in college. So my first step was to look for a toolkit written in some kind of language I was familiar with. I found this library, CCV, Computer Vision Library that ships with a pre-trained congnet and a flexible license. And I made a wrapper for a toolkit open framework to try and recognize things in real time. So I haven't done this switch before. Let's see what happens. This is gonna be, let's see. So here's an example of, how to do. Lighter, flute. It tends to think I'm a Band-Aid a lot of the time. Maybe iPod, good job neural net. That'll do, that'll do, that'll do. I've done a lot of computer vision work before, but this was totally beyond everything I was familiar with. This wasn't color matching or feature tracking. Even if I got some things totally wrong, the uncanny labels were still purely just inspiring. And it made me think back to the story of AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, assigning MIT first year undergraduate summer project in 1966. Solve the problem of computer vision. I was wondering what would he think about these techniques? After watching Jeff Hinton's Coursera on Deep Learning, I started dreaming of new applications in artwork, but building and training my own nets with CCV seemed a little daunting due to the lack of community and examples. Looking into other toolkits, I learned the big contenders were Cafe, Theano and Torch, written in C++, Python and Lua, respectively. And now there's TensorFlow, of course, which is one of the biggest. And there were plenty of less recognized toolkits and wrappers written in Python. Even Cafe had a Python wrapper, so I decided to start practicing my Python. It's turned out to be great investment due to the huge ecosystem, and especially with tools like scikit-learn. So the first thing I tried tackling was a problem I've tried before, smile detection. Smile detected great for when you want to automatically inject emoticons into your chat or take screenshots of things that make you laugh or make some kind of other interactive installation. And you can get a decent estimate with really simple metrics like the relative distance between the corners of the mouth. But I was curious how Connet would do in comparison. So I found a few thousand examples of smiling and neutral faces and modified an example meant for a handwritten digit recognition and turned it into a smile detector. Rather than asking if this is a small image is a hand drawn zero, one, two, three, et cetera, I asked if it was a smile, one or not, zero. Besides changing the input images, output size, I didn't make any other modifications. Let's see what this actually looks like in practice. And I'm gonna try something incredibly irresponsible and train a convolutional neural net on stage. So right now I'm starting up this tool, Keras, which is a wrapper for, it's a wrapper with multiple back ends. You can run Theano, which has been around for a while, or TensorFlow. The first thing I would do normally is download the data, but I did that in advance. I'd load all the images in, and I'd convert them to a slightly different format. So I have them in one really big matrix or tensor. And that can take a few seconds. But once they're in that format, and I made sure that they're right for the neural net, a lot of these techniques need 32 bit floating point, and if you give them something else, they get really mad at you. We can take a look. Cool, images look good. I'm gonna save these to disk, and we're gonna move on to the next step, training. So we'll load the data in using NumPy, and we'll start up Keras and say, we wanna have these two classes, like I said just a moment ago, instead of 10, we've got two. We shuffle all the data around so that we don't use, that we don't train on one part of the data and then try to validate on data we've never seen before. And then I start up with a GPU on my computer, which could go terribly wrong. But normally this takes about 10 seconds, and we're lucky this time. And then we actually define the neural net. So this is like the sort of textual description or the textural corollary of the graphs that we were seeing in the last presentation. And working with TensorFlow looks pretty similar. This is just via Keras, and now here we go. So we can see it's got about, I'll just start. Crossing my fingers. All right, okay, we're off to a good start. So it's taking about eight seconds per epic, which means it takes about eight seconds to go through all the data once. And in our first round, ooh, it wasn't that good. We're at 73% accuracy, but it's going up. Now we're at 83% accuracy. Our validation's about the same, it's a little better. And I'm only gonna run it for five epics, and then we're gonna save it and do a quick test. You can see this net's got like 800,000 parameters that define it, and most of those are in almost the last layer where these dense connections. Cool, it worked. We're gonna save that and take a look. That's the way you want things to look. That's great. Cool, accuracy's going up, loss is going down. Whoops, oh. All right, we're coming back, here we go. Last step, evaluation. All right, I'm gonna load the model back in again, start up the GPU again. This could also go terribly wrong if something wasn't like, you know, something was not unlocked correctly. And we're gonna evaluate this on one image. Okay, it says that this image is like a little more towards neutral than smiling, which I'd say it's about accurate, but let's try it on something that's a little more intense. I just made this little app that feeds my face in in real time to, if anyone's used this tool, like if anyone uses Jupiter and Python, you realize that this is ridiculous, but. All right, here we go. Hey. Yes. Oh man, I don't think my heart's been racing that fast before for a presentation. Cool, thanks for sticking with that. So let's talk about what's going on here a little more detail. We got a lot of that from the last presentation, but confidence or simultaneously learning, basically two things. There's these image patches that help discern categories and what combinations of these patches make up a given category. So first the next net detects things like edges and spots, then a combination of like an edge and a dark spot that might make up an eyebrow and an eye.  Sometimes it's hard to disentangle where a net's detecting features and where it's detecting combinations, but this is still one way that researchers conceptualize the otherwise murky inner workings of this technique. The deep dream images are based on reversing this process. So for example, let's say you start with a picture of a squirrel, like we saw before, and a network that's been trained to detect a thousand different categories of objects. Deep dream first runs the squirrel image through the net and identifies what's happening on the output. Is it, are there edges, are there spots, are there eyes? Sorry, what's happening kind of inside the network? Are there edges, spots, eyes, et cetera? Once the activity is identified, deep dream is the process of modifying the original image so that it amplifies that activity. Just like we were looking at a minute ago with taking something and making it look more like a frog or more like a bird or more like a plane. So if you have some vaguely eye-like shapes in the image, they start really looking like eyes. Or if you have a vaguely dog-like shape, it starts to turn into a dog. And this happens a lot because many of the thousand categories that researchers are training on happen to be different dog breeds. Through this process, you can also ask deep dream to visualize a specific category. So instead of looking at the inside of the net, you just look at that output. And this is how researchers have discovered that according to neural nets, a dumbbell is only a dumbbell when it's attached to an arm. When Google released code implementing deep dream, I started to explore this by applying it to a large number of images from classics like Man rare Michelangelo, to my personal collection of FBO glitches, testing with different settings or networks trained on different categories, or making animations out of a series of images. And then about two months after the inception is imposed, researchers from university Tübingen in Germany posted a neural algorithm of artistic style. In this paper, they show how to imitate an artistic style when rendering a photo using a neural net. And it looks impossible. Like the sort of thing that should require carefully trained humans who have undergone years of study and practice, but they're taking a single photo and recreating it in all these four styles automatically. So my first experiments with that technique were to try something harder, reversing the technique. Maybe if we could remove the painterly filter and turn something into a photo, we'd discover what Vincent van Gogh was actually looking at. Results were mixed and uninspiring. So I posted a hoax to Twitter instead, based on another artist's work and moved on with other experiments. But as with Deep Dream, I learned the most by processing a huge combination of different images from mostly from Western art history that I was familiar with, plus a few carefully tuned portraits. And I slowly learned that style transfer really meant something more like texture transfer. But there's still a lot to explore here, from animation to improvisation, inventing new styles, interpolating between styles. A few months ago, there's been some even more impressive results that were published. And last month, some researchers just posted a new article saying that they can do this in real time, whereas normally it takes about five minutes per frame. One of my favorite things about techniques like Deep Dream and style transfer is that they visually communicate an intuition for some very complicated topics. Not many people understand how a neural net works from front to back, including all the justifications of the code, architecture, and mathematical choices that went into the system, but everyone can look at a puppy slug or fake van Gogh and have some intuition about what's happening behind the scenes. Techniques like Deep Dream provide basically a human intuition for machine intelligence. One of the other interesting things about neural nets is that it's easy to develop a feeling for manipulating them once you have an understanding of the basic concepts. So a neural net's just addition and multiplication or weighted sums like we saw a minute ago. The training process is about figuring out which weights will give you the answers that you're expecting. And one modification of this setup is to take the current state of the net internally and feed it as input to the next state of the net. This is called a recurrent neural net. While a comp net usually predicts a fixed size output from a fixed size input, like a thousand categories from a small image, a recurrent net is meant for modeling sequences of data, a variable length, by predicting one time step for every prediction. Things like pen movements from handwriting, a sequence of characters and text, notes in music, or temperatures from the weather. And I think the Deep Dream moment for recurrent nets is Char RNN, an example published by Andre Karpathy in May last year. If you feed Char RNN, a few megabytes of example text will start generating novel text in that style. And Andre gives a number of compelling examples after feeding the collected works of Shakespeare. So drop upon your lordship's head and your opinion shall be against your honor or feeding Wikipedia naturalism and decision for the majority of Arab countries. Capital Laid was grounded by the Irish language by John Clare or Linux kernel code, even with the arcane comments. And if you're familiar with other text generation techniques, like Markov change, you'll notice the recurrent net has a surprising ability to balance syntactic correctness with novel text. With Markov change, you normally have a trade-off between copying your source material exactly and producing incorrect output. But recurrent nets find this middle ground by capturing a deeper structure to the data. So what happens if you combine a comp net and a recurrent net? Let's try this. If you combine a comp net with a recurrent net, oh, is it cropped at the top? I think it's cropped. If you combine a comp net with a recurrent net, even weirder, the font is not loaded on that screen. That's the weirdest thing I've seen in a while.  A man in a suit and a tie is holding a wine glass. Wow, we're back to the wine again. And now we know what, I would really be happy if it said video feedback. But that's not it.  I'm curious, what does it know about everyone here? Oh, I think I just crashed it. Yeah, that's a crash. Let's see, are we still? So, I'm so many dangerous demos. Okay. My first experiment with Charron N was not the image captioning, but feeding it a dictionary and generating new words. Charron N captures some basic structure like part of speech falling a word and numbers coming sequentially. Sometimes it provides a correct inflection or vaguely topical definition. And then inspired by Megahal's requirement to repeat a word from the previous line, I added this constraint to the output of another net trained on phrases from a 1917 book of thousands of useful phrases. And some of these were really lovely. I love how it finishes. Flipping love, flipping with every memory of the acknowledgement, the moon, and memory of her bright as the grave, the moon of the stars of the soul. Then I tried a more personal direction feeding it some chat history.  Yeah, we only hear it out since that you were kind of because it could be last year. So, he was quickly saying that might be real time. Mmm, I guess it would ever want to trash supportive general, smiley face. His once word mids, yeah. Get hub link, Twitter link. The lines are the right length. The smiley feels like it's in the right place. I write, yeah, Lauren writes YA. The URLs aren't real, but they look exactly like the kind of links we would send each other. The output seems to occupy this liminal space between modes of awareness, kind of like between dreaming and waking attention. And it has the look and feel of the thing without having the content or the meaning of the thing. I even constructed, handcrafted, artisanal, small data archive of pickup lines. And I got this. How is the, you're beautiful, getting to hand a Bible at last year. Loomed you a love every time I was in your dad's. When your name, you manged to our stars with a heart because I'm milling in on the say, can'ts trace. You're so falling, have a half pile of friends and when havers sees with my most and rom. There wasn't quite enough text in the database to learn English, so. It sounds kind of drunk, which I guess is appropriate. But I wonder how long will it be until a machine is more seductive than a human? Next I tried around 220,000 lines from a huge movie dialogue database, but it was almost completely nonsensical and I assumed I needed a bigger network. And sure enough, a few months later, Google published some amazing results based on movie subtitles and it was awesome. The last really big data set I've tried is 20,000 drug experiences from Arrowid. And with such a huge collection of texts, the output's much more grammatically correct with proper spelling, punctuation. Conceptually, I'm kind of curious, like what happens when an algorithm passes that uncanny valiant becomes a perfect mimic of this kind of text. And if humans are unable to distinguish a generated drug experience from a real one, is the machine now some kind of philosophical zombie, something that could be describing an experience that it could never have, but so perfectly that we can't tell the difference? And it's not just about text in the sense of natural language, but anything that can be encoded as a sequence is perfect. So another kind of text that's not natural language is a SVG file, looks like this, right? This is an example from Twimoji, the emoji library provided by Twitter. And I collected all of them, which is about 875 files and two megs. And I asked the net to predict names for some new emoji and give me some new SVG files. This one is titled Clock Face 9. And here's a bigger collection to show you the variety and the output. And it's really amazing to see how the big circles that go along with faces consistently find their way into the mix and other barely recognizable shapes are scattered throughout. And the colors are really the most consistent since Twimoji uses this pretty restricted palette and Char R&N memorizes it exactly. If you like the way this looks, check out Smiling Face with Face by Allison Parrish or Glitch Logos by Darius Kazemi. All right, finishing up here, I wanted to mention something that's a little separate from deep learning, but has been a huge inspiration to me because it's something I've always, it's a tool I've always wanted, but has only made sense to me recently. So one way to think about abstractions is called dimensionality reduction. So for example, if you have a 10 by 10 pixel grayscale image that's 100 numbers or 100 dimensions, but if each image contains a handwritten digit, maybe a more useful representation is a 10 dimensional representation, like how much it looks like each digit, strong for the first value, if it's a zero strong for the second value, it's a one, et cetera. 10 dimensions might be useful for describing the categories of the images, but it's hard to visualize a 10 dimensional space as we saw with the six or 32 dimensional space earlier. So we can take this farther and try to embed the 10 dimensional space or even the higher dimensional space into just two or three dimensions. And we can draw something that's a little easier to interpret like a point cloud. Different dimensionality reductions that solve this problem have different kinds of abstractions or arrangements that they create. One of my favorite algorithms for this is called T-SNE. It tries to embed similar data points close to each other, but doesn't worry too much about keeping points that are really different too far from each other. This allows it to have structure at multiple scales. At the largest scale, you can see here it's placed different digits. These are all the handwritten digits from a database called MNIST. It's placed all the different digits in different clusters, like one cluster per digit. And then at a smaller scale, you can see patterns in things like how slanted the handwriting is, and gradients in stroke and weight. Let me keep going. Unfortunately, some of the most interesting data doesn't have numeric representation, but we can learn a numeric representation from context a lot of the time. Word to VEC is an algorithm for converting words to a set of representative numbers. And it looks at what context a word usually occurs in and uses the context to determine which word should have similar or did similar representations. It's usually trained on hundreds of thousands or millions of unique words scattered throughout millions or hundreds of millions of articles, like news articles, and returns 300 numbers for each word. Each of these numbers does not really have a clear representation, like a pixel value or a category. But you can do basic comparisons between them. Like you can look at distances. So words that are similar have smaller distance. In this case, Monday through Friday are similar to each other, but different from Saturday and Sunday. Or months of the year are roughly divided into March through July and August through February. I don't totally get this one, but you can tell that the consecutive months are more similar than distant months. And you can do analogies too. So like the closest vector to Moscow minus Russia plus Japan is Tokyo. All these relationships are going the same direction. So even though each dimension is not clearly interpretable, the general direction and location of each vector encodes its meaning. If we look at a bunch of country, capital pairs and 2D like this, we can see this relationship pretty clearly. So now that you know we can get a vector for every word, we can take any list of words and run it through T-SNE. Yes. So here's 750 words related to moods. And I used color to indicate corresponding 3D embedding instead of just the 2D embedding that was used for the positions. And this helps kind of visually group the clusters a little more. Some obvious variants in here are things like happy and glad and green right next to each other or eager and anxious. But other connections are kind of surprising. Like even though they occupy the same general category, they have opposite valence, like doubtful and hopeful are two examples above. They're right next to each other because they're kind of interchangeable in the middle of a sentence. They just mean the exact opposite thing. This got me interested in antonyms and comparing antonym relationships rather than the words themselves. Is the forward slash backward pair more similar to happy slash sad or future slash past? And maybe this changes between languages too. And sometimes these relationships end up being easy to interpret like unintelligent slash intelligent is right next to uninteresting slash interesting and other un-antonyms. But most of the time it's very difficult to interpret what the antonyms in a cluster have in common. One lesson might be that antonyms capture a lot of different types of relationships and there's no single relationship encoded in language as opposite in this. Well, actually no. Instead of creating vectors for words, it's common to make vectors for documents to using topic modeling. And we can do t-sne on every page in a book for example to watch the thematic content of the book develop over time. Or we can run t-sne on the internal state of a conf net after it processes an image. So instead of feeding an image through a conf net and then taking that and feeding it through a recurrent net to generate a caption, we can use that as like a description in itself, the internal state. So abstract concepts like green background, blue sky, circular objects, eye shapes, feathery textures, they all get grouped together. Let me open up this. So I worked with some researchers from Rhizomatix, interactive agency in Japan, exploring the Itzuo Sakane archive which is about 800 hours of footage from media art history that's been recorded over the last 30 years or so. And we use this technique to kind of put similar images from the data set next to each other. You can see here like all of the psychedelic frames we took like one frame per minute of video. All of the psychedelic minutes end up next to each other. Some of this like kind of sci-fi looking blue against black stuff ends up next to each other.  Or like at the bottom left, this is where all the faces end up. Relax that you can see it a little better. And when there's one video that has like a bunch of frames that are exactly the same, they end up right next to each other. And you can see like duplicates in the archive like these two videos are the same video turns out. Cool. But I'll finish up with, so there's one more demo. For me, I got into interactive art through experimental music. And a lot of this exploration with machine learning has been about finding my way back into making sounds. But I guess I just realized I don't know if we have, I guess this is a visualization conference, huh? But maybe if we're really quiet, here's what happens when you apply these techniques to spectrograms instead of images. It works. Yeah, maybe like half that volume. Is it where? Yeah, it says no. It says no volume control. Okay, so there was a nice guitar somewhere. Whoa, I was not expecting that. We can see all this like the snares end up in the same area. I'll try and move slowly. T-Sne was like, you know, all these cowbells are basically the same. So.


After a 25-year career in law enforcement, one man is finally hanging up his badge. Bemidji Police Department Captain James Marcott is retiring. The retirement party was held today at the police station to recognize his achievements. Marcott has been with the Bemidji PD for 15 years and spent the last five as captain. I've served my community for 29 years here in the US Marine Corps or with another local police agency and 25 years in law enforcement. It's time for me to move on and pass the reins to the next generation. Marcott says he'll most miss the people and the sense of family as part of the force, but he does plan to stay in Bemidji. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.