This week is Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition annual conference.
I actually didn't know that until I received an email from one of the many meetup groups I'm a member of.
Went to this workshop organized by Intel.
They are promoting their AI ready chips and to show off this chip, they created various software tools that are in demo today.
One of them is OpenVino toolkit, completely open source, made to run on local machine with limited resources. Here, you can see the 512x512 image produced from my prompt. This is its 4th try which I liked. The previous 3 are nice too. It took a little over 5 seconds. Quite fast. A poet with a typewriter and some writing paper with onion fiber sat at a corner. He can type up a poem at your request, and then you can feed the poem to OpenVino to get an image. Another demo is by Voxel 51 for animal classification. There is aother vision demos built in house at Intel.
The workshop is only 30 minutes long. They ran it twice in the same afternoon. I went there late, so joined the 2nd group, which was maybe 8 people (only occupied 1/3 of the seats). 30 minutes is barely enough to go through each step, but no time understanding it, or even looking through the code. At the end, we were given a "dev-kit", basically a new Asus NUC (with a so-called AI chip), and 2 drink tickets. If you want to take this NUC home, need to sign an agreement (so no re-selling, or commercial use, allow Intel to contact us). Food was laid out just before this 2nd workshop, available to all, with or w/o attending the workshop. Later, they brought out some calamari.
6/20, Thursday evening. The same guy who organized this Monday workshop hosts a happy hour at the same place (Fonte Bar at Rainier Tower). I arrived late, almost no food was left. Drink tickets were given out at will. Good that I ate before coming over. A lot more people (most with conference badge). Same demos, but no workshop.
