Neuromag May 2017 | Page 15

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