summer. I could definitely imagine go-
ing into industry after my PhD, given
that there seem to be many opportu-
nities where you can still do research
and publish the work. But I haven’t
made any decisions yet and am very
excited to see what opportunities the
future may bring.
Do you think future neural networks
will ever be able to develop their own
style?
Leon Gatys
of how perceptual systems perform
complex information processing tasks.
So I knew I wanted to do my PhD with
him and then we just developed a pro-
ject together once I was there.
What are you currently working on?
Do you have plans for future career
directions?
We have just recently published a pa-
per that further develops the Neural
Style Transfer algorithm by allowing
a more fine-grained control on the
stylisation outcome [1]. We believe
that this pushes the technology to a
quality that is acceptable for profes-
sional media editing and possibly we
will see digital artists using it for all
sorts of stuff in the future (e.g. just
recently our Neural Style Transfer was
used in a short film by this Twilight ac-
tress [2]).
Most of the work was done while I
was an intern at Adobe Research last
Yes I believe so, at least in a sense that
the machine can find ways to satisfy
certain pre-defined criteria, which can
be very high-level. So I could imagine
that eventually you could ask your
computer something like “Make me an
image that feels warm and dynamic’.
And then the algorithm creates some-
thing like that for you. The only thing it
needs for that is an image-based no-
tion on what feels warm and dynamic
for you, which could be learned from
data. So in that sense we can have
‘creative’ machines that will generate
images that mean something to us.
Celia Foster graduated from
the Neural and Behavioral
Sciences master’s program in
2015. She is currently a PhD
candidate in the Recognition and
Categorization lab of Dr. Isabelle
Bülthoff.
Do you have a favourite deepart cre-
ation to date? Are there any notable
successes?
Together with the local Wirtschafts-
förderung in Tübingen we had a pro-
ject where they put posters of stylised
scenes from Tübingen into the shop-
ping windows in the Neckargasse.
Some of them are really quite fasci-
nating. This article features three of
my favourite (see below).
[1] Gatys, L. A., Ecker, A. S., Bethge, M.,
Hertzmann, A. & Shechtman, E.
(2016). Controlling perceptual factors in
neural style transfer. arXiv
[2] Joshi, B., Stewart, K. & Shapiro, D.
(2017). Bringing impressionism to life iwth
neural style transfer in Come Swim. arXiv
May 2017 | NEUROMAG |
15