Is it conceivable that neurogenesis, neural Darwinism, and species evolution could all serve as inspiration for the creation of evolutionary deep neural networks?

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are built using artificial neural networks. They are part of machine learning methods that are capable of learning from data that have been used in a wide range of applications. DNNs are mainly handcrafted and they usually contain numerous layers. Research frontier has emerged that concerns automated construction of DNNs via evolutionary algorithms. This paper emphasizes the importance of what we call two-dimensional brain evolution and how it can inspire two dimensional DNN evolutionary modeling. We also highlight the connection between the dropout method which is widely-used in regularizing DNNs and neurogenesis of the brain, and how these concepts could benefit DNNs evolution.The paper concludes with several recommendations for enhancing the automatic construction of DNNs.

Color Counting for Fashion, Art, and Design

Color modelling and extraction is an important topic in fashion, art, and design. Recommender systems, color-based retrieval, decorating, and fashion design can benefit from color extraction tools. Research has shown that modeling color so that it can be automatically analyzed and / or extracted is a difficult task. Unlike machines, color perception, although very subjective, is much simpler for humans. That being said, the first step in color modeling is to estimate the number of colors in the item / object. This is because color models can take advantage of the number of colors as the seed for better modelling, e.g., to make color extraction further deterministic. We aim in this work to develop and test models that can count the number of colors of clothing and other items. We propose a novel color counting method based on cumulative color histogram, which stands out among other methods. We compare the method we propose with other methods that utilize exhaustive color search that uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and K-Means as bases for scoring the optimal number of colors, in addition to another method that relies on deep learning models. Unfortunately, the GMM, K-Means, and Deep Learning models all fail to accurately capture the number of colors. Our proposed method can provide the color baseline that can be used in AI-based fashion applications, and can also find applications in other areas, for example, interior design. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind that addresses the problem of color-counting machine.

Towards an Interoperable Data Protocol Aimed at Linking the Fashion Industry with AI Companies

The fashion industry is looking forward to use artificial intelligence technologies to enhance their processes, services, and applications. Although the amount of fashion data currently in use is increasing, there is a large gap in data exchange between the fashion industry and the related AI companies, not to mention the different structure used for each fashion dataset. As a result, AI companies are relying on manually annotated fashion data to build different applications. Furthermore, as of this writing, the terminology, vocabulary and methods of data representation used to denote fashion items are still ambiguous and confusing. Hence, it is clear that the fashion industry and AI companies will benefit from a protocol that allows them to exchange and organise fashion information in a unified way. To achieve this goal we aim (1) to define a protocol called DDOIF that will allow interoperability of fashion data; (2) for DDOIF to contain diverse entities including extensive information on clothing and accessories attributes in the form of text and various media formats; and (3)To design and implement an API that includes, among other things, functions for importing and exporting a file built according to the DDOIF protocol that stores all information about a single item of clothing. To this end, we identified over 1000 class and subclass names used to name fashion items and use them to build the DDOIF dictionary. We make DDOIF publicly available to all interested users and developers and look forward to engaging more collaborators to improve and enrich it.