Students from SoCS had the opportunity to attend an international seminar given by Prof. Bart Lamiroy from the Universite de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France on July 19th, 2022. The topic of seminar is AI, Serendipity and Inspiration. Machine Learning for Artists. About 182 students participated in this online seminar, Some of them are particularly interested in this topic, thus they gave insightful questions to Prof. Bart Lamiroy .

Not only as a full professor, Prof. Bart Lamiroy is also a researcher at the CReSTIC laboratory in Reims. He has been working on graphical document analysis, and more particularly in graphical information retrieval, text-graphics data mining and indexing, and more recently on generic topics related to Machine Learning and Classifier performance analysis.

In this seminar, Prof. Bart introduces what AI is and its problems, and future of opportunities. Prof Bart also shared with students examples of the application of AI in art. It is Craiyon.com, a AI Website. Craiyon is an AI model that generates images from text. We can enter a text prompt (what we want to see) and Craiyon then goes about creating it. It was developed as a lighter version of OpenAI‘s DALL-E, and was initially named DALL-E Mini.

The  other focus shared in this seminar is Prof. Bart’s projects. He shared his experience working in the La Muse project. La Muse is a joint project between artists and Machine Learning academic scholars. It aims at building pictorial compositions in order to provide sources of inspiration to assist painters in their process of creation. It relies on Artificial Intelligence, mainly based on various artificial neural networks, used for object recognition and style transfer. La muse can take into account the visual universe of a painter, their artistic references, personal inspiration sources and preferred visual codebooks to create suggestions of painting subjects the human artist can then use as a source of inspiration for actual creation. Code developed in this project is Open Source and a free-to-use demonstration website is publicly accessible. In this opportunity, Prof .Bart also invites student to be able to contribute to the development of the La Muse project.

By attending this seminar,  we hope  students can get inspiration to develop skills in the field of AI. And hopefully that in the future students can also conduct research in the field of AI.