More neural style, less surveillance

I frequently need to go on Zoom due to academic and extracurricular obligations.

I aim to use paintings generated by neural style transfer to replace my physical presence in videoconference streams.

Table of Contents

Selfies

Today (Dec. 14, 2021) I am preparing a presentation on federated learning for my Applied Math seminar.
Instead of including still/moving images of my face in the slides or the livestream, I will use these paintings generated by neural style transfer to fill in for my physical essence.

How I generated them

I downloaded this Python wheel: neural-style

I ran this in Deepnote:
neural-style -style_image ~/work/style.jpg -content_image ~/work/hi.jpg -model_file nin_imagenet.pth -gpu c -original_colors 1 -seed 123 -content_layers relu0,relu3,relu7,relu12 -style_layers relu0,relu3,relu7,relu12 -content_weight 10 -style_weight 500 -optimizer adam -output_image ~/work/me2.png

and I got this image after 1000 epochs:



I ran this in Deepnote:
neural-style -style_image ~/work/style.jpg -content_image ~/work/hand.jpg -model_file nin_imagenet.pth -gpu c -original_colors 1 -seed 123 -content_layers relu0,relu3,relu7,relu12 -style_layers relu0,relu3,relu7,relu12 -content_weight 10 -style_weight 500 -optimizer adam -output_image ~/work/me1.png  

and I got this image after 1000 epochs:

Why I generated these paintings

I deleted Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram a while ago. I am bothered, however, by the ubiquity of cameras in my life. I don't like photographs so I don't like that when I walk down the streets of NYC, complete strangers photograph me without my consent.

I am recorded on security cameras when I go outside. In the privacy of my room, my ISP is logging my Internet history. When am I ever truly alone?

I've been having problems in my personal life where I feel like I am always performing for an invisible audience. Even though I got rid of the likes, the retweets, and the subscribers, I always feel like there is someone watching my next move.

I hope my professor will be understanding of my preference to reclaim some little crumb of privacy from Zoom.

Further reading