Bulletin No. 1, 2021

THE NEW GOSPEL ACCORDING TO A.I. 13 Prof. Wong Tien-tsin Department of Computer Science and Engineering I n 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo released the first US edition of his manga masterpiece, Akira . It had always beenproblematic toget the traditionally black-and-white Japanese comics into the Western world, which preferred colours. With this culture gap in mind, as the American artist Steve Oliff recalls, Otomo decided to publish his work in colour for American readers, and Oliff was given the job to colourize it, panel by panel. As one can imagine, it was an exceedingly arduous task. For this reason, Akira has been one of the very few manga works that come in both a black-and-white and a colour version. This is where Prof. Wong Tien-tsin has found yet another use for AI. PROFESSOR WONG IS A LONG-TIME RESEARCHER of computer graphics at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. While computer graphics have been around for half a century and used with much success in films and video games, the focus had for decades been on photorealistic rendering, that is the creation of 3D objects, texture and light as they would look in nature. In the 2000s, though, the field saw a major breakthrough—thanks to our fellow gamers. Ever-rising expectations of gaming experience meant better and better graphics processing units (GPUs), which scientists and engineers were quick to exploit. One result was the dawning of computer vision and, consequently, rendering that goes beyond imitations of the real world. ‘When we say a computer “sees” or “understands” an image, it means it has extracted information from the image, like its stylistic features, which it should then be able to work into another image,’ Professor Wong explained. If we show the computer a painting, then, it should be able to generate something akin to human art— something expressive. An attempt at this is AI Gahaku, a web application that took the Internet by storm last year with its promise of turning any photo into a classical painting in the style of the user’s choice. What it does is exactly to study existing paintings from different schools and periods and rework the photo based on what it has