Artificial intelligence researchers have studied how humans learn and applied it to computers with the goal of helping both. emember that brainiac kid in class, viagra canada the one who understood what the teacher was trying to explain after seeing just a few examples on the board? That is exactly what researchers have been shooting for, malady as they have developed an algorithm to help computers grasp concepts more quickly and be able to use them more creatively. Researchers from New York University, the University of Toronto and the Massachusetts Institute studied how humans learn quickly with a view toward helping people and machines alike. “There’s all sorts of things that people can do with concepts that computers haven’t been able to do,” says Brenden Lake, a fellow at New York University and lead author of the study published Friday in Science Magazine. “We wanted to better understand human learning from a computational perspective.” Humans, even children, can see a single example of an alphabet letter, digit, or machine and recognize it immediately. They use prior knowledge tounderstand a new concept and even sketch or apply the newly seen object to another situation later. “Before they get to kindergarten, children learn to recognize new concepts from just a single example, and can even imagine new examples they haven’t seen,” Joshua Tenenbaum, an MIT professor and study author, said in a news release. Such agile learning has been one of the major gaps between what people do regularly and what the best computers have failed to do, Mr. Lake told the Christian Science Monitor. “It has been very difficult to build... read more
Andrew Moore, ailment the Dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and a former Vice President at Google, case just told me something exciting. Moore predicts that 2016 will see a rapid proliferation of research on machine emotional understanding in machines. Robots, smart phones, and computers will very quickly start to understand how we’re feeling and will be able to respond accordingly. “When it comes to things like advertising, this may feel uncomfortable. I have a background in internet advertising and if I wasn’t busy being a dean I would be launching a startup to enable your tablet to watch you while you read web pages in order to see if you’re reacting positively or negatively.” It’s not difficult to see how valuable that information would be to advertisers, nor is it likely that the technology will advance without heavy scrutiny and criticism. Because humans give off a number of discernible cues about how they’re feeling, both consciously and unconsciously, research in this area has taken several parallel paths. Voice patterns can reveal stress and excitement and the movement of facial muscles provides a revealing map of a person’s inner state. One of the biggest breakthroughs for emotional sensing by machines is actually rather mundane. “Cameras are now higher resolution. High res cameras can track slight movements on the face and even individual hairs.” Roboticists and computer scientists have applied advances in machine vision to an existing body of research from the field of psychology on emotional cues. At present, most emotionally intelligent machines are picking up on the same types of emotional cues that humans pick... read more
We’ve already told you about the Amazon Echo’s smart home chops, troche but Jeff Bezos’ digital assistant is about to get some competition from a small company called Ivee. The company has taken to Indiegogo with its own digital assistant, called Ivee Voice. The company has taken to Indiegogo with its own digital assistant, called Ivee Voice. Like the Echo, Ivee Voice will give you on-demand traffic and weather updates, and can also control smart home products. Even though the Ivee Voice isn’t available just yet, it’s already compatible with many products and services that the Echo can’t match, including Logitech Harmony, Lowe’s Iris, Spotify, and Uber. In addition, Ivee says the device will work with Belkin Wemo, the Nest Learning Thermostat, Philips Hue, SmartThings, and Wink. You can even contact emergency services using Ivee Voice. On top of all these product integrations, Ivee Voice also features multi-room support, allowing you to put interconnected Ivee devices in different rooms of your home. That means you can control your home from just about anywhere. The company is also touting the future ability to order delivery via Ivee. Combined with Uber integration, that’s a big feature win over the Echo. The fact that you can only re-order Prime-eligible products and buy music with Echo seems like a missed opportunity (though understandable) on Amazon’s part. The biggest obstacle Ivee Voice will have to overcome is time—the product isn’t expected to ship until June 2016. That gives Amazon plenty of time to expand on the Echo’s feature set, and it isn’t wasting any time. Just recently, it added support for... read more
