John Butler represents School @ Dublin Maker
Dr John Butler, Head of Mathematics Learning and Support, once again represented the School at Dublin Maker on the 22nd and 23rd of August at Leopardstown Racecourse. Dublin Maker is a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the maker movement with over 12,000 attendees.
Alongside artist Cian McLoughlin, he continued their ongoing collaboration, Digital Mirror. Young and young-at-heart attendees got to learn hands-on about the overlap between art, machine learning, and maths.
First, participants sketched different emotions, delighted, happy, sad, and the ever-popular "sick" face. Cian explained his creative process, showing how he draws out the differences and similarities between faces and emotions by focusing on how the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth change. Some participants even got to draw directly on Cian's portraits, illustrating how he layers images on top of one another to represent the different versions of a person.
John then sketched his own rough emoji-style emotions to demonstrate how they can be encoded as 0s and 1s. Using this, he showed that multiplying a happy face by a happy face gives you a happy face, but multiplying a happy face by a sad face leaves you with just the eyes. This was animated using a micro:bit, illustrating how maths can be used to identify similarities and differences between faces.
Participants then saw how this same process is used in computing for facial recognition. They acted out a range of emotions for 12 seconds, which was converted into 300 images. These were processed using principal component analysis, mathematically known as eigenvectors and eigenvalues. This showed how the algorithm breaks down the layers of an image to identify similarities and differences.
Everyone left happy with their sketches, stickers, and their very own eigen-portrait.