Copying stroke for stroke is a different thing altogether. There is a whole industry for this. http://www.artsstudio.com/ Price ranges with quality. Genuine paintings done by hand go from $200 to somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000 I think. They are not priceless. There is something about human nature the values the original. The price of art is a pure economic ideal. It is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, so you can't really argue that someone overpaid.

The high end copies entail using the same techniques and materials which can be quite laborious. Some material are hand made and recreation requires a lot of specialized knowledge practice. Working with the material also takes lots of skill and practice. Glazing techniques, etc take a long time are more that stroke copy. Even if the robot can make the exact marks, the materials will come from someone else,

So if the robot is very good a stroke for stroke copy it would be better than what the low end people are producing. However, making the material and some techniques are probably outside a stroke for stroke copy. So I estimate the value at $500.

As a someone with a Masters of Fine Art in painting, I can tell you there is not a lot of interest relating to art.

First: "Our hypothesis is that painting ... can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content" is off base
All the lines in all the work are all the same length and thickness. Almost no artist simple distributes color. Artist chose details and focus.In this case David is being helped because it is using composed photography to copy.

Second: Even if they could get close to copying human style, it is not that interesting precisely because it is following an algorithm. The idea "the machine might enable new techniques since labor plays no role any more" is pretty weak. Artists typical employ computers to do what a computer does well, not to imitate humans. It is quite possible someone will actually do precisely what the authors suggest and use the machines ability for work without rest. There are always artist who find ways to use tools in new ways or to use them to make commentary on the process. This puts the robot in the same league as a chainsaw for carving wood, or paint that drips down from a rope.

As someone who as worked with machine learning a bit, there is not a huge amount of interest here either.

All in all it was probably fun and interesting to work on, but not all the interesting to read about or watch.

Comparing the maps side by side, the most noticeable difference is the font size and the thickness of the route lines. This makes it seem more organized and less squeezed together. But in reality, to be able to read it from the same distance it would have to be in a larger format.

You can probably "improve" the current map by the same techniques and not have the same level of distortion. Maybe, a more detailed version can be put in pamphlet form and large station kiosks and the current form can go in each train.

I don't think they care about me, but they are not using the heavy hand yet. I think they are still targeting what the believe to be genuine threats to public safety. If the government paranoia reaches the point that they start viewing political challenges as threast then we are all in trouble.

What they will do when the next wave of McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism arrives really scares me. They probably still won't care about me, but I might fall into a target demographic. Major damage my befall vast numbers of innocent people. I don't think it takes that much for a government to become an oppressive regime. I think the power they have through technology, and their abuse of it, pushes the tipping point that much closer.

It sounds like you want to work with a scientific group as a programmer, not be doing your own independent research. If this is true there are a variety of positions out there. My experience is in life sciences and imaging. There are research institution like the Broad Institute http://www.broadinstitute.org/ or HHMI Janelia Farms http://www.janelia.org/ that staff a fair number of programmers. Also, many Universities have core imaging facilities and there may be similar types of facilities in other scientific areas.

There also a significant number of companies that do research. Bioinformatics is a big topic for example pharmaceutical companies so big data experience is important. There are plenty of biotech companies too, some are providing research, some are trying to develop profitable technologies such as new tools for discovery and bio fuel etc. A number of companies that provide instrumentation and software to do research. There are a number of large players, such as Thermo Scientific, GE and Dananaher companies such as ABSciex, Beckman and Coulter. Obviously any company will be profit driven, so you will have to decide whether it is for you, but the jobs will contribute to research one way or another.

My suggestion is to get some scientific journal in you field of interest. Look at the advertiser and institution that do interesting things. Then go the websites of these places and see what openings may be out there. If you find something really interesting in a research paper that clearly involves computing you should directly contact them and see if they are interested in hiring. Most researcher are interested in the research problem and don't want to spend all there time coding. Often they are not good at finding developers just like developers are not good at finding these small research position. They may welcome someone who is interested enough in their researcher to seek them out. They might also point you to someone who will.