Business software startup exploring ways customers will use artificial intelligence

Rippling Introduces AI-Based Tool to Evaluate Employee Performance - Bloomberg

Rippling

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10 Questions with Shrav Mehta, Founder and CEO at Secureframe via [The Startup Founder Interview Template]. HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words? Shrav Mehta: Security compliance automation software provider. Why is now the time for your company to exist? SM: Several years ago, everything to do with compliance was completely manual. There were no APIs to integrate with. If you looked at HR systems like Gusto or Rippling for example, there were no APIs to pull the data that you needed as part of the compliance process. AWS didn't have a robust suite of APIs to pull evidence. But as technology and APIs evolved, automation became much more possible in the compliance process. Over time, that allowed Secureframe to automate so much of the compliance process that it’s now about three to four times faster than it was a few years ago. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? SM: When we were first building Secureframe, many of the big auditors told us that automating compliance was not really possible. They believed that the complex and nuanced nature of compliance tasks made them unsuitable for automation. However, my team and I thought otherwise. We realized that many of the manual tasks we were doing, such as screenshotting an AWS dashboard or a GitHub repo to pull down information, could be streamlined through automation. Despite the skepticism we faced, we were convinced that with the right approach and technology, many parts of the compliance process could indeed be automated. We recognized that the belief that it couldn't be done was more of a preconceived notion rather than a fact. Drawing from our experiences at previous startups, we knew that other companies were facing similar challenges and were actively seeking automated solutions to simplify their compliance efforts. This further motivated us to develop Secureframe and provide the much-needed automation in the compliance space. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? SM: I would definitely be interested in building something in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity and AI are probably the two fastest-growing spaces in software technology today. Cyber threats will continue to evolve and get more complex. There will always be bad actors out there and you will always need good cybersecurity products and tooling to fight those bad actors. I think there are an infinite number of opportunities in cybersecurity. Secureframe is where I'm focused right now, but if I were to do anything else, I would almost certainly work on something at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics? SM: Every company has one key metric that they're evaluated on. For most venture-backed companies, it's revenue-focused. For Secureframe, the number one metric we look at is ARR (annual recurring revenue). The next big one is NDR (net dollar retention), which is the number of our existing customers that are growing and expanding. Our third most important metric is NPS (net promoter score), which measures the happiness of our customers. And the fourth most important metric is CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback period. For example, if I had $1 billion to spend on marketing, I'm sure I could increase our growth rate a lot, but there would be no constraint. So, we aim to spend marketing and sales money in the most efficient way possible in order to generate more revenue. That’s one reason why CAC payback period matters, because it puts an efficiency cap on your resources. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom? SM: Secureframe's platform helps organizations achieve and maintain compliance with standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and NIST frameworksto name a few. We automate risk assessments and monitor third-party vendors' compliance status, ensuring they adhere to necessary security and privacy standards. Our platform also streamlines internal risk management processes, including identifying vulnerabilities, implementing controls, and continuously monitoring for nonconformities. We assist companies in preparing for audits and our customers range from startups to large global enterprises, with our platform flexibly adapting to their specific compliance needs. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? SM: The thing we're really excited about is the traction we're seeing with enterprise customers. Most enterprises still have the same problems with security and compliance that they’ve always had — the process is too slow and very manual, and they need deeper levels of automation. But there are so many frameworks and regulations that they need to comply with. The problem is just much bigger than it is for smaller companies, but it’s one that Secureframe is able to solve. Where do you think your growth will be next year? SM: Our biggest growth goal is to double our revenue year-over-year. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year. SM: Our first paying customer was actually before we even had an MVP (minimum viable product) built for Secureframe. We were exploring a couple different ideas within security and I started asking people in my network if they would be interested in tools to automate some of the SOC 2 process. And a bunch of people said yes, but we didn't really know how serious they were. Our first customer called me back a month later and asked where the product was. I said, "Oh, I didn't know you were that serious about it!" So, I quit my job that week and started building the MVP for what is now Secureframe. We got the customer done with their SOC 2 and they were incredibly happy. And that was the impetus for why we decided to focus on this idea — clearly it was something people needed. We had 40+ companies on the waitlist by the time we actually had an MVP that we could utilize with all these customers. The moment we launched it, they started to pay us. Over the next year, we plan to double our revenue. What's your biggest threat? SM: I think if we don’t get ahead of it, AI could be one of the biggest threats to both software and cybersecurity. But if we get ahead of it, it will be one of the biggest opportunities. At Secureframe, we're utilizing AI where we think it'll really help our customers, which we believe is risk remediation and vendor management. We’re using it to make the whole compliance process even faster and easier. We also support a broader range of frameworks, including the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (NIST AI RMF) and ISO 42001, enabling teams to automate their compliance protocols. Get Interviewed by HackerNoon via the Startup Founder Template 10 Questions with Shrav Mehta , Founder and CEO at Secureframe via [ The Startup Founder Interview Template ]. Shrav Mehta Shrav Mehta Secureframe Secureframe The Startup Founder Interview Template HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words? HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words? Shrav Mehta: Security compliance automation software provider. Why is now the time for your company to exist? Why is now the time for your company to exist? SM: Several years ago, everything to do with compliance was completely manual. There were no APIs to integrate with. If you looked at HR systems like Gusto or Rippling for example, there were no APIs to pull the data that you needed as part of the compliance process. AWS didn't have a robust suite of APIs to pull evidence. But as technology and APIs evolved, automation became much more possible in the compliance process. Over time, that allowed Secureframe to automate so much of the compliance process that it’s now about three to four times faster than it was a few years ago. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? SM: When we were first building Secureframe, many of the big auditors told us that automating compliance was not really possible. They believed that the complex and nuanced nature of compliance tasks made them unsuitable for automation. However, my team and I thought otherwise. We realized that many of the manual tasks we were doing, such as screenshotting an AWS dashboard or a GitHub repo to pull down information, could be streamlined through automation. Despite the skepticism we faced, we were convinced that with the right approach and technology, many parts of the compliance process could indeed be automated. We recognized that the belief that it couldn't be done was more of a preconceived notion rather than a fact. Drawing from our experiences at previous startups, we knew that other companies were facing similar challenges and were actively seeking automated solutions to simplify their compliance efforts. This further motivated us to develop Secureframe and provide the much-needed automation in the compliance space. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? SM: I would definitely be interested in building something in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity and AI are probably the two fastest-growing spaces in software technology today. Cyber threats will continue to evolve and get more complex. There will always be bad actors out there and you will always need good cybersecurity products and tooling to fight those bad actors. I think there are an infinite number of opportunities in cybersecurity. Secureframe is where I'm focused right now, but if I were to do anything else, I would almost certainly work on something at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics? At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics? SM: Every company has one key metric that they're evaluated on. For most venture-backed companies, it's revenue-focused. For Secureframe, the number one metric we look at is ARR (annual recurring revenue). The next big one is NDR (net dollar retention), which is the number of our existing customers that are growing and expanding. Our third most important metric is NPS (net promoter score), which measures the happiness of our customers. And the fourth most important metric is CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback period. For example, if I had $1 billion to spend on marketing, I'm sure I could increase our growth rate a lot, but there would be no constraint. So, we aim to spend marketing and sales money in the most efficient way possible in order to generate more revenue. That’s one reason why CAC payback period matters, because it puts an efficiency cap on your resources. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom? In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom? SM: Secureframe's platform helps organizations achieve and maintain compliance with standards like SOC 2 , ISO 27001 , HIPAA , and NIST frameworks to name a few. We automate risk assessments and monitor third-party vendors' compliance status, ensuring they adhere to necessary security and privacy standards. Our platform also streamlines internal risk management processes, including identifying vulnerabilities, implementing controls, and continuously monitoring for nonconformities. We assist companies in preparing for audits and our customers range from startups to large global enterprises, with our platform flexibly adapting to their specific compliance needs. SOC 2 ISO 27001 HIPAA NIST frameworks What’s most exciting about your traction to date? What’s most exciting about your traction to date? SM: The thing we're really excited about is the traction we're seeing with enterprise customers. Most enterprises still have the same problems with security and compliance that they’ve always had — the process is too slow and very manual, and they need deeper levels of automation. But there are so many frameworks and regulations that they need to comply with. The problem is just much bigger than it is for smaller companies, but it’s one that Secureframe is able to solve. Where do you think your growth will be next year? Where do you think your growth will be next year? SM: Our biggest growth goal is to double our revenue year-over-year. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year. SM: Our first paying customer was actually before we even had an MVP (minimum viable product) built for Secureframe. We were exploring a couple different ideas within security and I started asking people in my network if they would be interested in tools to automate some of the SOC 2 process. And a bunch of people said yes, but we didn't really know how serious they were. Our first customer called me back a month later and asked where the product was. I said, "Oh, I didn't know you were that serious about it!" So, I quit my job that week and started building the MVP for what is now Secureframe. We got the customer done with their SOC 2 and they were incredibly happy. And that was the impetus for why we decided to focus on this idea — clearly it was something people needed. We had 40+ companies on the waitlist by the time we actually had an MVP that we could utilize with all these customers. The moment we launched it, they started to pay us. Over the next year, we plan to double our revenue. What's your biggest threat? What's your biggest threat? SM: I think if we don’t get ahead of it, AI could be one of the biggest threats to both software and cybersecurity. But if we get ahead of it, it will be one of the biggest opportunities. At Secureframe, we're utilizing AI where we think it'll really help our customers, which we believe is risk remediation and vendor management . We’re using it to make the whole compliance process even faster and easier. We also support a broader range of frameworks, including the NIST AI Risk Management Framework ( NIST AI RMF ) and ISO 42001 , enabling teams to automate their compliance protocols. we're utilizing AI we're utilizing AI risk remediation risk remediation vendor management vendor management NIST AI RMF NIST AI RMF ISO 42001 ISO 42001 Get Interviewed by HackerNoon via the Startup Founder Template Get Interviewed by HackerNoon via the Startup Founder Template

"Our Biggest Growth Goal is to Double our Revenue Year-over-Year," says Secureframe CEO Shrav Mehta

সিকিউরফ্রেমের সিইও শ্রভ মেহতা বলেছেন, "আমাদের সবচেয়ে বড় প্রবৃদ্ধির লক্ষ্য হল আমাদের আয় বছরে দ্বিগুণ করা"

„Unser größtes Wachstumsziel ist die Verdoppelung unseres Umsatzes im Vergleich zum Vorjahr“, sagt SecureFrame-CEO Shrav Mehta

"Nuestro mayor objetivo de crecimiento es duplicar nuestros ingresos año tras año", afirma el director ejecutivo de SecureFrame, Shrav Mehta.

« Notre plus grand objectif de croissance est de doubler notre chiffre d'affaires d'une année sur l'autre », déclare Shrav Mehta, PDG de SecureFrame.

सिक्योरफ्रेम के सीईओ श्राव मेहता कहते हैं, "हमारा सबसे बड़ा विकास लक्ष्य साल-दर-साल अपने राजस्व को दोगुना करना है।"

「当社の最大の成長目標は、前年比で収益を2倍にすることです」とSecureFrameのCEO、シュラブ・メータ氏は語る。

SecureFrame CEO인 Shrav Mehta는 "우리의 가장 큰 성장 목표는 전년 대비 수익을 두 배로 늘리는 것입니다."라고 말합니다.

“Nossa maior meta de crescimento é dobrar nossa receita ano após ano”, afirma Shrav Mehta, CEO da SecureFrame

«Наша главная цель роста — удвоить выручку по сравнению с прошлым годом», — говорит генеральный директор SecureFrame Шрав Мехта.

SecureFrame CEO'su Shrav Mehta, "En Büyük Büyüme Hedefimiz Gelirimizi Her Yıl İkiye Katlamak" diyor

Giám đốc điều hành SecureFrame Shrav Mehta cho biết: “Mục tiêu tăng trưởng lớn nhất của chúng tôi là tăng gấp đôi doanh thu so với cùng kỳ năm trước”.

SecureFrame 首席执行官 Shrav Mehta 表示：“我们最大的增长目标是实现收入同比翻一番。”

A lone boy stood, staring at the star-speckled sky, his mind drawn to the girl just a few feet from where he lay. She was a beauty, that one. He couldn’t believe she was his. Every single thing she did screamed Art. The way she linked her fingers together, the way she smiled. The one girl who knew so much about him, yet… she didn’t shy away from his questionable past. As the emotions threatened to pull him under, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and face what was before him. “A shooting star!” She screamed in excitement as she pointed at that far-off speck in the sky, becoming larger and larger by the second. “That is no shooting star.” He managed to say, fear clogging his throat. He took in the lush grass swaying in the night wind, the beauty of the stars that more or less blotted out the sky. Then, he turned to look at the girl on the ground a few feet away. She was sitting up by then, fear morphing her once beautiful features into something unspeakable. “What is that?” Her voice quaked as she asked, and he closed his eyes momentarily to stop the bile from going up his throat. “Our death.” He said, not mincing words. His throat bobbed with unspoken words and something else underlying. “I’ve always loved you. I just- I just wanted you to know. This once.” He squeezed the words out of his mouth, wrangling them like one would do to a piece of wet cloth. “You? I’ve always seen you as just a friend.” She turned towards him then, his eyes red from tears. But he was grateful for that moment. He got her to look at him finally. And her eyes shone with regret. The screams came first as the she saw earlier was big enough to blot out the stars in the sky. And the heat. God, the heat. He felt as though he was being cooked from the inside out. shooting star The sky boiled like a cauldron; giant drops of fire rained down from the clouds, turning the lush green grass into something out of Hades’s fantasy. Blades of grass crumbled before his eyes. Withering without as much as a touch from him and fizzing out of existence, flames taking its place. The greenery is overtaken by the force that darkened the universe and turned rivers into lakes of fire. She screamed the most. He didn’t. He just watched the shooting star fall and gave a small smile. She was never his to own anyway. * Darren. That was his name. The man-boy with the power to manipulate space at his whims. He was a prodigy even among his peers in Earth 75. They had hoverboards to trapeze through space. That’s right, hoverboards. Fuelled with nothing more than gravel and sand. “Gloating again? That’s not very of you.” He rolled his eyes at the voice that came from just behind him. Glenna. His childhood friend. If you can count a hundred years as childhood. Before they settled—before the metamorphosis, they never grew older than the teenage age. But, after settling for five years and being a pain in the butt for half of those he called his cadre, he realized that he was ready for metamorphosis. But then, Glenna wasn’t. Hence, he had to stop halfway and wait for her to be. ladylike “I’m not a lady, for crying out loud. This is argument number what? Five thousand and seven?” He groaned, using flawless fingers to massage his forehead. Glenna just laughed as she walked towards him. Or, more like, she glided. She had more interest in the hoverboards than he did. The room was no larger than two children’s playroom, yet it had enough space due to his meticulousness. Not a strand of space is out of place, exactly how he wanted it to be. “Number five thousand and eight. You missed one.” She laughed, planting a wet kiss on his skin. He would have gone as red as beetroot if she didn’t deftly move the conversation elsewhere. “So, I need to weave a new dress. You’ve been called a genius for so long that it has become music to my ears. I need a strand of space to weave into a cloak I’m almost done making.” She tendered her request before him, and he took in her presence. She was young, after refusing the metamorphosis for the third time. Yet.. she had eyes of peace. The brown of her irises reminded him of worlds he hadn’t dared to touch for fear of breaking them apart. He’d seen them in his wakings. They were peaceful and oh, so beautiful. The serenity in them was what drew him to them at first. “Okay, I will. But why just a strand? Why not a whole chunk?” He asked as she raised her eyebrows at him, and he almost melted into the chair he sat on. If you can call it sitting. It was a haphazard view, an upturned table, yet he was upright. The world he’d come to know extended universes and eternities. It was a world of madness, but at least it was his. “One sec.” He said, raising his hand in mock surrender. Then, everything stopped. As his concentration cleared the level of the primordial beings, he tore a portal through the world. It was a red wiggly thing struggling to close, but he held it open with sheer willpower alone. When he found out that portals were alive, he decided to lord over them one way or another. They didn’t make it easy for him, though. While it wiggled, he stretched a hand into the portal and drew a strand out of that limitless vastness, loping it through his fingers like a struggling worm. It shimmered in and out of existence, blue like the untold skies, red as fiery dragons and demons of worlds he’d only read about. “Got you.” He smiled as he held a strand. Then, the world went to hell. Before he could remove his hand from the portal, it yawned like a gaping chasm and swallowed him whole. He was screaming, but Glenna was still in timeless mode. She wouldn’t know what happened. That is mercy. That has to be. Then, the world shut itself as the portal consumed the world he’d known all of his existence and winked out of reality. The screams didn’t come. Nothing did. * Carrion. That was his name. His name. His name. He tried to hold on to it, but it slipped out of his grasp like an eel, and he followed after it, crawling after his name with it on the tip of his tongue. What was his name again? Ca.. Ca what? What was his name? The man with scars lining his body like the universe's stars was lost. He tried to think. He tried to remember where he was. Yes. He was fighting Archanoid—the mother of spiders. One could even call her a deity. He dodged an incoming web made of madness and silk, woven with anger and hate. She was large, towering above him like he was a pesky fly. He hated that. He was the warrior who battled nightmares and abominations. He had to win. But then, what was his name? His name.. what was it again? He flew out of the way as an incubator shattered where he stood one second earlier. She wasn’t playing. “Foolish mortal. Do you think you can harm me? It doesn’t matter who you are, World Walker. You can’t escape from me.” She spoke, venom dripping out of those pincer-like things. They made a clanging sound as he swallowed, looking into those red eyes that had intelligence to them, something beyond the years. “One last chance. I will give it to you. Remember, pride and ego cannot win this war. Maybe you and the others can.” And then, before he could ask what she meant.. a scary sharp finger elongated from her finger, and she him out like a fly. flicked There was screaming. And then, there was nothing. * He woke up with a groan. There were several groans across him, and he was shocked to realize that he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t scorched. But he didn’t remember what his name was. He remembered her, recognized the girl who took him as a friend before the world became a sea of fire. Why, then, was he unhurt? The others stood on shaky feet, an otherworldly feel to them. There was something he just couldn’t place. They wore things he’d never heard of, or perhaps the dark skins rippling with fire and the darkness of the deep. Maybe it was the blades of darkness in the place where teeth were meant to be, but there was something.. out of place. One of them wore nightmares on his skin; he could see death. Death rippled with muscles and scars that seemed to blot out the skin. But strangely, he didn’t feel fear. “So, an explanation is in order?” He said to no one in particular. Even the being who looked as though he was 25 and 15 at the same time. As though the world couldn’t decide on his age and let him be both instead. He noticed that this being wasn’t standing on his two feet. He was.. hovering. “We’ll see soon enough.” A boy his age spoke, and he stared at him in wonderment, wondering how alike they were. The way the boy squinted made it glaring that he used glasses to see. Same with him. Even though he didn’t even know their names, they were about ten. Some had hands for feet, and others weren’t even walking on the bare ground. They just.. existed. There was no way to explain their existence, so he didn’t bother. “An explanation.. for this. All of this.” Another boy spoke, and he didn’t balk this time. He just waited. “Here it comes.” The boy who spoke was already running. “Here, what comes? What?” He asked, but everybody else had cleared out of that barren field. The world he was in was empty. There is no sign of green. No sign of brown either. It was as though the world was drained out of colour, and no matter where he looked, despair loomed. He felt them before he saw them. He knew who they were before they spoke. And even without an introduction, he knew everything about them. The Destroyers Of Worlds. They smiled; one hovered just like that man-boy. One had skin with uncountable scars. And then, he saw himself. That cruel smile, that deadly presence. He felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Someone dragged him by the scruff of his hood, and he felt.. everything. There was no other way to describe what happened. Then, he turned to stare at the other him with a cruel smile as that being let out an inferno where he was standing a moment before. It was… hot. But strangely, he wasn’t burning. He wasn’t even singed. He was.. okay. The man-boy dropped him on the ground unceremoniously, and he muttered his thanks, but the others just raised their eyebrows, staring at the beings beyond them. Beings with their faces. Beings with enough power to destroy universes. It was them. Ageless. Timeless. With a snap of a finger, they were gone like they didn’t just lay waste to a large expanse of space. “I think I know what’s going on…” A tenacious finger went up, and the squinted boy was allowed to speak. “That is us. Timeless us. And.. we destroyed our universes. Now.. we have to fight against the us that are world destroyers.” “We don’t have a choice to decline?” The man-boy asked. “We have doomed worlds. This.. is penance.” The boy spoke again, his eyes filled with trepidation and resignation. “So, we were summoned here to kill our future selves? That’s a sick sense of humor.” “This world is sick, and when the Arachnoid told me, I didn’t believe it.” The man with the scars spoke, and his scars seemed alive, melding with his body. “Can you tell us what an Arachnoid is?” Another asked. So, he told them. Everything. “Pride and ego, huh?” A guy spoke, and they finally understood what they had to do. “This is depraved. All of this. Depraved. What the hell?” He spoke, shaking with anger. “Hell doesn’t exist, apparently. Future us made sure the world became it.” A brittle laughter from the man-boy. “This is it, then? We die in a land of no name? Our names were stolen from us. I can’t dredge up a single memory.” The scarred man said, eyes smouldering. I could tell he was pissed off. “This is our penance.” The squinting boy said again, and I was tempted to throw him out of the universe. Such a goody two shoes. “I don’t care. Whatever I have to do, I will do it. And it doesn’t matter who’s on the line. I have to go back home. Also, you can’t fight fire with water. Not in my world, anyway. It takes a monster to kill another. We will take the unorthodox approach. Did they want to seclude us and destroy us? World Walkers, indeed. Bastards more likely. I won’t take that. Neither should any of you. We have the power. Can’t you feel it? We can change things.” The man-boy spoke fervently, his eyes filled with loss, anger, and something else. “That’s right. We won’t let them decide for us. If we have to die, we might as well raise hell before we do. Now, we need a name.” The hooded boy spoke, and the others nodded in approval. “How does sound?” There were hoots of approval, some going as far as clapping. Then, they stared at the sky at once. Drained of colour. But then, the World between Worlds had always been a resting place for World Walkers. The Restorer of Worlds They had to fight. And this time, they had to fight themselves. Their memories returned, and they could see themselves in the past, present, and future—the Destroyer of Worlds. No more. They decided not to make the same mistakes. Not again. This time, they’d restore all they destroyed. As the squinty-eyed kid said, it was penance.

PENANCE 

Now—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end?

THE POLE.

THE EVIL EYE

THE SONG OF THE MOTH

Imagine glancing at a picture of a tree blowing softly in the wind or a candle flickering quietly on a table. Even though it's a still image, you can envision how the leaves and flames are swaying and oscillating. What if we could actually see them come to life as videos? Well, researchers from Google on a technique to do exactly that using "neural motion textures." recently published a paper In this post, we'll cover how it works, why it matters, and the possibilities it unlocks for . Read on to learn how still photos can be animated with realistic motion from just a single static picture. generative AI The Challenge of Video Generation Thanks to rapid advances in AI over the past few years, we now have systems that can generate highly realistic synthetic images from scratch based on text descriptions. However, generating equally realistic videos has proven far more difficult. Naively extending image generators to produce videos often results in artifacts like flickering textures or objects that don't move properly and violate physical constraints. That's because video adds the complexities of modeling motion and maintaining coherence over time. Humans are exceptionally good at interpreting motion signals and imagining how a scene could play out. Replicating that remains an open challenge in computer vision and graphics research. Neural Motion Textures for Animation To address this problem, researchers from proposed using "neural motion textures" to animate photos. Their key insight was that for many common real-world scenes with natural repetitive motions like swaying trees, flickering flames, or rippling water, the dynamics can be represented as a stochastic "texture" in the frequency domain. Google Brain Essentially, they model scene motion using mathematical functions that characterize the oscillating trajectories of each pixel over time. This builds on prior work in graphics that represented motions like human cloth simulation with low-frequency Fourier basis functions. The researchers leverage recent advances in generative AI to learn a model that takes a single still picture as input and predicts a neural motion texture depicting plausible dynamics for that specific scene. Specifically, it uses a conditional latent diffusion model, trained on thousands of videos of natural motions, to output a "stochastic motion texture." This texture captures multi-modal distributions over possible motions for each pixel in a compressed frequency-space representation. Generating motion textures instead of raw pixel values allows the sampling of temporally consistent long-term motions needed for video generation. It also enables fine-grained control over properties like speed and magnitude. Turning Still Photos into Video To actually render video frames, an image-based neural rendering network uses the predicted neural motion texture for guidance. It begins by transforming the frequency representation into a sequence of pixel displacement maps over time using an inverse Fourier transform. Then, it warps and blends the input photo guided by the displacements to synthesize each output frame. This approach explicitly modeling scene motion gives the system more understanding of the underlying dynamics compared to treating video as simply a sequence of individual frames. Advantages Over Prior Techniques In experiments, videos generated using neural motion textures significantly outperformed other state-of-the-art single-image animation methods across quantitative metrics and human evaluations. The motions and textures also appeared more natural and realistic to human viewers compared to approaches that directly output raw pixel values. That's because modeling dynamics provides better coherence over longer time horizons. Representing scene motion also enabled creative applications like controlling speed, applying motion transfer, or adding interactivity. For example, they showed how users can grab and jiggle objects in still photos to simulate dynamics. Limitations and Future Work Some limitations are that the approach works best for smoothly oscillating motions rather than abrupt, sudden movements. Also, image-based rendering can degrade if there are large dis-occluded regions not visible in the original photo. Nonetheless, neural motion textures demonstrate a promising . Modeling the stochastic dynamics of our visually rich world unlocks new capabilities in image and video editing tools. It also moves us closer toward artificial intelligence that more deeply understands motion and physics. new technique for generative AI The researchers suggest several exciting directions for future work, like extending the approach to model non-repetitive motions, generating sound from motion, or applying similar ideas to 3D scene dynamics. Overall though, animating still images illustrates rapid progress toward replicating human imagination with AI. Also published . here

Breathing Life into Still Photos: Exploring Neural Motion Textures

116 Stories To Learn About Art

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . Nethercoats here Nethercoats. We will leave Mrs. Greenow with her niece and two sisters at Yarmouth, and returning by stages to London, will call upon Mr. Grey at his place in Cambridgeshire as we pass by. I believe it is conceded by all the other counties, that Cambridgeshire possesses fewer rural beauties than any other county in England. It is very flat; it is not well timbered; the rivers are merely dikes; and in a very large portion of the county the farms and fields are divided simply by ditches—not by hedgerows. Such arrangements are, no doubt, well adapted for agricultural purposes, but are not conducive to rural beauty. Mr. Grey's residence was situated in a part of Cambridgeshire in which the above-named characteristics are very much marked. It was in the Isle of Ely, some few miles distant from the Cathedral town, on the side of a long straight road, which ran through the fields for miles without even a bush to cheer it. The name of his place was Nethercoats, and here he lived generally throughout the year, and here he intended to live throughout his life. His father had held a prebendal stall at Ely in times when prebendal stalls were worth more than they are at present, and having also been possessed of a living in the neighbourhood, had amassed a considerable sum of money. With this he had during his life purchased the property of Nethercoats, and had built on it the house in which his son now lived. He had married late in life, and had lost his wife soon after the birth of an only child. The house had been built in his own parish, and his wife had lived there for a few months and had died there. But after that event the old clergyman had gone back to his residence in the Close at Ely, and there John Grey had had the home of his youth. He had been brought up under his father's eye, having been sent to no public school. But he had gone to Cambridge, had taken college honours, and had then, his father dying exactly at this time, declined to accept a fellowship. His father had left to him an income of some fifteen hundred a year, and with this he sat himself down, near to his college friends, near also to the old cathedral which he loved, in the house which his father had built. But though Nethercoats possessed no beauty of scenery, though the country around it was in truth as uninteresting as any country could be, it had many delights of its own. The house itself was as excellent a residence for a country gentleman of small means as taste and skill together could construct. I doubt whether prettier rooms were ever seen than the drawing-room, the library, and the dining-room at Nethercoats. They were all on the ground-floor, and all opened out on to the garden and lawn. The library, which was the largest of the three, was a handsome chamber, and so filled as to make it well known in the University as one of the best private collections in that part of England. But perhaps the gardens of Nethercoats constituted its greatest glory. They were spacious and excellently kept up, and had been originally laid out with that knowledge of gardening without which no garden, merely as a garden, can be effective. And such, of necessity, was the garden of Nethercoats. Fine single forest trees there were none there, nor was it possible that there should have been any such. Nor could there be a clear rippling stream with steep green banks, and broken rocks lying about its bed. Such beauties are beauties of landscape, and do not of their nature belong to a garden. But the shrubs of Nethercoats were of the rarest kind, and had been long enough in their present places to have reached the period of their beauty. Nothing had been spared that a garden could want. The fruit-trees were perfect in their kind, and the glass-houses were so good and so extensive that John Grey in his prudence was some times tempted to think that he had too much of them. It must be understood that there were no grounds, according to the meaning usually given to that word, belonging to the house at Nethercoats. Between the garden and the public road there was a paddock belonging to the house, along the side of which, but divided from it by a hedge and shrubbery, ran the private carriageway up to the house. This swept through the small front flower-garden, dividing it equally; but the lawns and indeed the whole of that which made the beauty of the place lay on the back of the house, on which side opened the windows from the three sitting-rooms. Down on the public road there stood a lodge at which lived one of the gardeners. There was another field of some six or seven acres, to which there was a gate from the corner of the front paddock, and which went round two sides of the garden. This was Nethercoats, and the whole estate covered about twelve acres. It was not a place for much bachelor enjoyment of that sort generally popular with bachelors; nevertheless Mr. Grey had been constant in his residence there for the seven years which had now elapsed since he had left his college. His easy access to Cambridge had probably done much to mitigate what might otherwise have been the too great tedium of his life; and he had, prompted thereto by early associations, found most of his society in the Close of Ely Cathedral. But, with all the delight he could derive from these two sources, there had still been many solitary hours in his life, and he had gradually learned to feel that he of all men wanted a companion in his home. His visits to London had generally been short and far between, occasioned probably by some need in the library, or by the necessity of some slight literary transaction with the editor or publisher of a periodical. In one of these visits he had met Alice Vavasor, and had remained in Town,—I will not say till Alice had promised to share his home in Cambridgeshire, but so long that he had resolved before he went that he would ask her to do so. He had asked her, and we know that he had been successful. He had obtained her promise, and from that moment all his life had been changed for him. Hitherto at Nethercoats his little smoking-room, his books, and his plants had been everything to him. Now he began to surround himself with an infinity of feminine belongings, and to promise himself an infinity of feminine blessings, wondering much that he should have been content to pass so long a portion of his life in the dull seclusion which he had endured. He was not by nature an impatient man; but now he became impatient, longing for the fruition of his new idea of happiness,—longing to have that as his own which he certainly loved beyond all else in the world, and which, perhaps, was all he had ever loved with the perfect love of equality. But though impatient, and fully aware of his own impatience, he acknowledged to himself that Alice could not be expected to share it. He could plan nothing now,—could have no pleasure in life that she was not expected to share. But as yet it could not be so with her. She had her house in London, her town society, and her father. And, inasmuch as the change for her would be much greater than it would be for him, it was natural that she should require some small delay. He had not pressed her. At least he had not pressed her with that eager pressure which a girl must resist with something of the opposition of a contest, if she resist it at all. But in truth his impatience was now waxing strong, and during the absence in Switzerland of which we have spoken, he resolved that a marriage very late in the autumn,—that a marriage even in winter, would be better than a marriage postponed till the following year. It was not yet late in August when the party returned from their tour. Would not a further delay of two months suffice for his bride? Alice had written to him occasionally from Switzerland, and her first two letters had been very charming. They had referred almost exclusively to the tour, and had been made pleasant with some slightly coloured account of George Vavasor's idleness, and of Kate's obedience to her brother's behests. Alice had never written much of love in her love-letters, and Grey was well enough contented with her style, though it was not impassioned. As for doubting her love, it was not in the heart of the man to do so after it had been once assured to him by her word. He could not so slightly respect himself or her as to leave room for such a doubt in his bosom. He was a man who could never have suggested to himself that a woman loved him till the fact was there before him; but who having ascertained, as he might think, the fact, could never suggest to himself that her love would fail him. Her first two letters from Switzerland had been very pleasant; but after that there had seemed to have crept over her a melancholy which she unconsciously transferred to her words, and which he could not but taste in them,—at first unconsciously, also, but soon with so plain a flavour that he recognised it, and made it a matter of mental inquiry. During the three or four last days of the journey, while they were at Basle and on their way home, she had not written. But she did write on the day after her arrival, having then received from Mr. Grey a letter, in which he told her how very much she would add to his happiness if she would now agree that their marriage should not be postponed beyond the end of October. This letter she found in her room on her return, and this she answered at once. And she answered it in such words that Mr. Grey resolved that he would at once go to her in London. I will give her letter at length, as I shall then be best able to proceed with my story quickly. Queen Anne Street, –– August, 186––. Dearest John,— We reached home yesterday tired enough, as we came through from Paris without stopping. I may indeed say that we came through from Strasbourg, as we only slept in Paris. I don't like Strasbourg. A steeple, after all, is not everything, and putting the steeple aside, I don't think the style is good. But the hotel was uncomfortable, which goes for so much;—and then we were saturated with beauty of a better kind. I got your letter directly I came in last night, and I suppose I had better dash at it at once. I would so willingly delay doing so, saying nice little things the while, did I not know that this would be mere cowardice. Whatever happens I won't be a coward, and therefore I will tell you at once that I cannot let you hope that we should be married this year. Of course you will ask me why, as you have a right to do, and of course I am bound to answer. I do not know that I can give any answer with which you will not have a right to complain. If it be so, I can only ask your pardon for the injury I am doing you. Marriage is a great change in life,—much greater to me than to you, who will remain in your old house, will keep your old pursuits, will still be your own master, and will change in nothing,—except in this, that you will have a companion who probably may not be all that you expect. But I must change everything. It will be to me as though I were passing through a grave to a new world. I shall see nothing that I have been accustomed to see, and must abandon all the ways of life that I have hitherto adopted. Of course I should have thought of this before I accepted you; and I did think of it. I made up my mind that, as I truly loved you, I would risk the change;—that I would risk it for your sake and for mine, hoping that I might add something to your happiness, and that I might secure my own. Dear John, do not suppose that I despair that it may be so; but, indeed, you must not hurry me. I must tune myself to the change that I have to make. What if I should wake some morning after six months living with you, and tell you that the quiet of your home was making me mad? You must not ask me again till the winter shall have passed away. If in the meantime I shall find that I have been wrong, I will humbly confess that I have wronged you, and ask you to forgive me. And I will freely admit this. If the delay which I now purpose is so contrary to your own plans as to make your marriage, under such circumstances, not that which you had expected, I know that you are free to tell me so, and to say that our engagement shall be over. I am well aware that I can have no right to bind you to a marriage at one period which you had only contemplated as to take place at another period. I think I may promise that I will obey any wish you may express in anything,—except in that one thing which you urged in your last letter. Kate is going down to Yarmouth with Mrs. Greenow, and I shall see no more of her probably till next year, as she will be due in Westmoreland after that. George left me at the door when he brought me home, and declared that he intended to vanish out of London. Whether in town or out, he is never to be seen at this period of the year. Papa offers to go to Ramsgate for a fortnight, but he looks so wretched when he makes the offer, that I shall not have the heart to hold him to it. Lady Macleod very much wants me to go to Cheltenham. I very much want not to go, simply because I can never agree with her about anything; but it will probably end in my going there for a week or two. Over and beyond that, I have no prospects before Christmas which are not purely domestic. There is a project that we shall all eat our Christmas dinner at Vavasor Hall,—of course not including George,—but this project is quite in the clouds, and, as far as I am concerned, will remain there. Dear John, let me hear that this letter does not make you unhappy. Most affectionately yours, Alice Vavasor. At Nethercoats, the post was brought in at breakfast-time, and Mr. Grey was sitting with his tea and eggs before him, when he read Alice's letter. He read it twice before he began to think what he would do in regard to it, and then referred to one or two others which he had received from Switzerland,—reading them also very carefully. After that, he took up the slouch hat which he had been wearing in the garden before he was called to his breakfast, and, with the letters in his hand, sauntered down among the shrubs and lawns. He knew, he thought he knew, that there was more in Alice's mind than a mere wish for delay. There was more in it than that hesitation to take at once a step which she really desired to take, if not now, then after some short interval. He felt that she was unhappy, and unhappy because she distrusted the results of her marriage; but it never for a moment occurred to him that, therefore, the engagement between them should be broken. In the first place he loved her too well to allow of his admitting such an idea without terrible sorrow to himself. He was a constant, firm man, somewhat reserved, and unwilling to make new acquaintances, and, therefore, specially unwilling to break away from those which he had made. Undoubtedly, had he satisfied himself that Alice's happiness demanded such a sacrifice of himself, he would have made it, and made it without a word of complaint. The blow would not have prostrated him, but the bruise would have remained on his heart, indelible, not to be healed but by death. He would have submitted, and no man would have seen that he had been injured. But it did not once occur to him that such a proceeding on his part would be beneficial to Alice. Without being aware of it, he reckoned himself to be the nobler creature of the two, and now thought of her as of one wounded, and wanting a cure. Some weakness had fallen on her, and strength must be given to her from another. He did not in the least doubt her love, but he knew that she had been associated, for a few weeks past, with two persons whose daily conversation would be prone to weaken the tone of her mind. He no more thought of giving her up than a man thinks of having his leg cut off because he has sprained his sinews. He would go up to town and see her, and would not even yet abandon all hope that she might be found sitting at his board when Christmas should come. By that day's post he wrote a short note to her. "Dearest Alice," he said, "I have resolved to go to London at once. I will be with you in the evening at eight, the day after to-morrow. "Yours, J. G." There was no more in the letter than that. "And now," she said, when she received it, "I must dare to tell him the whole truth." About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Anthony Trollope (2006). Can You Forgive Her?. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19500/pg19500-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

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