Noon van der Silk

Deep Learning Dance Smackdown!

For the final event of the Melbourne Creative AI meetup this year I thought we’d run a small, fun, competition - a deep learning dance smackdown.

The event details are on Meetup.

Idea

The basic idea is, build a program that (does something like):

1. Watches a dance,
2. and then, Responds with a dance.

The exact format is flexible; some options would be:

1. Watch a video, learn the poses, respond with a dance,
2. Listen to audio, learn how to dance to the beat,
3. Watch a bunch of dances in joint/pose format, and then respond with dances in this same format,
4. Something else!

You may like to use:

• GANs (See this great list for a recent collection of GANs),
• Sequence models (tensor2tensor, seq2seq, …)
• Ready-made model (human-motion-prediction, …)
• Something crazy!

The format on the night will simply be to show how your particular idea works. It could be interactive, it could be online, it could be a presentation, it could be embodied in an robot! I leave it to your imagination.

Prize!

The prize on the night will be one of the Evolution of Dance T-Shirts:

Pre-existing and related work

• Nonlinear dance motion analysis and motion editing using Hilbert-Huang transform
• Creative Robot Dance with Variational Encoder
• Dance Dance Convolution
• Exploring Implicit Human Responses to Robot Mistakes in a Learning from Demonstration Task
• Generative Choreography using Deep Learning
• Movement Coordination in Human-Robot Teams: A Dynamical Systems Approach
• Free-body Gesture Tracking and Augmented Reality Improvisation for Floor and Aerial Dance
• The Control Theory of Motion-Based Communication: Problems in Teaching Robots to Dance
• Let Us Dance Just a Little Bit More — On the Information Capacity of the Human Motor System
• Semantic Modeling and Retrieval of Dance Video Annotations
• Modeling and Annotating the Expressive Semantics of Dance Videos
• Tutoring System for Dance Learning

How to join … !

If you want to participate, then just send me an email, or just come along on the night with something to show!

Keep in mind …

The Three Laws of Robotic Dancing (courtesy of andyg)

1. A dance robot may not out-dance a human being or, through dance, allow a human being to be embarrassed.
2. A dance robot must complement the movements given it by human beings except where such dance moves would conflict with the First Law or good taste.
3. A dance robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws and the conservation of angular momentum.