Here’s a program that creates new ‘Star Wars’ plots

Even if the Expanded Universe is no more, fan fiction is alive and well in the Star Wars galaxy. But why write  a new story when a droid could do it for you?
At the spring edition of HopHacks over the weekend, one team sought to create a way to generate new scripts, rather than writing them. The Force Ghost Writer was inspired by the team’s fascination with two recent releases: Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Google’s TensorFlow API.
The system uses a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model, which reads scripts for all Star Wars films and tries to predict the next character.
“We want to generate predictions for what the next character is going to be, based on what we’ve already seen,” said Conan Chen, adding that it can also predict pages of text.
The team, which also includes Akshay Srivatsan and Vamsi Chunduru, built the system using TensorFlow, which allowed them to have a “strong amount of control over our network’s architecture,” they said.
The network doesn’t read language, but interprets each letter in the script one at a time. A hidden layer within the architecture contains all of the context the network has seen before.
“We trained it to the point where we can actually generate scripts and basically dialogue between characters that are novel and we created on our own,” said Chunduru.
Below are a few more projects from the weekend. (Check out the full slate here.)
https://twitter.com/HopHacks/status/696391931509739521
HandE

• An app that uses a laptop camera to track the motions of the hand during hand therapy.

Visionar.io

• A system that provides haptic feedback to a blind person to guide them: “We wanted to see a world where the blind could travel through the streets safely and easily,” the team wrote. “No walking sticks, no service dogs, all technology.”

Lexicon

• An app that assists in language learning by providing words that are useful in specific situations. The app is designed to interpret where a user is — such as a coffeeshop or library — and provide vocabulary necessary to speak in that situation.