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Your Digital Self: Artificial intelligence is creeping into our everyday lives

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We live in an era of intelligent technology. Our watches tell us not only the time, but they also remind us to exercise. Our phones recommend the best places to dine, and our computers predict our preferences, helping us to do our daily work more efficiently.

Still, all of these digital assistants demonstrate only a tiny sliver of artificial intelligence (AI), and its plain to see how were still ages away from Skynet and Blade Runner scenarios.

Or are we? What about Apples AAPL, +0.48% Siri or Cleverbot?

Most of the consumer-level artificial-intelligence applications were interacting with today can barely be classified as such. These apps are usually designed to search for patterns in user behavior and then to react to them in various, albeit predictable, ways. Theyre also programmed to use accumulated data stored in their databases to improve a reaction to inputs, which leads to a better response within predetermined parameters.

One good example is Cleverbot, a light-hearted online AI experiment you can chat with. Although it is fun at times, it can by no means hold a meaningful conversation. Cleverbot may provide a simple back-and-forth correspondence, but should you decide to break the flow of conversation, more often than not, it gets confused and unable to provide suitable feedback.

That is because AI sees chat more like an isolated chess problem, instead of a real conversation. Just as a chess program builds its database of possible moves, Cleverbot has its own database of answers and algorithms from which it picks the most optimal solution for every situation. However, Cleverbot and its ilk fail to grasp higher concepts, like the overall tone of the conversation, wider context, metaphors or emotional overtones.

Although there is a huge potential in whats already been achieved with these existing models, we are still far from developing apps capable of genuinely autonomous artificial thought or knowledge processing. Still, this may change sooner than you think.

Cycorp, an Austin, Texas-based company, is taking a radically different approach to the development of real artificial intelligence. Unlike previously mentioned AI models, which can only use isolated question-answer data models without any genuine understanding of higher concepts behind it, Cycorps Cyc is designed to respond to users input on a wider, semantic level. (The company says its the worlds largest and most complete general knowledge base and common sense reasoning engine.)

Cyc can not only recall the data in its databases, it can also come to knowledge-based conclusions. This ranges from having common-sense knowledge (pigs cant fly), to behaviorally conditioned responses (knowing how to recognize and, thus, interact differently with a nervous or a confused user). All these conditions are taught to Cyc as its knowledge base expands, enabling it to communicate on an almost human level.

What could go wrong, right? The closer we get to building truly semantic and autonomous systems, the more complex the consequences of their abuse and malfunction.

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Your Digital Self: Artificial intelligence is creeping into our everyday lives

Is it time for your business to implement an artificial intelligence strategy?

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For decades the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) has loomed over the business world. Often warped and distorted by its depiction in fiction, there's been a certain stigma associated with the use and the potential impact of AI. From Skynet enslaving the world to psychotic computers threatening astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the concept of AI has been taken a long way from the fundamental point of having a software which can independently carry out rudimentary tasks. But there are real benefits it can bring that can make life easier and more enjoyable for workers and citizens alike.

You will often hear business leaders talking about maximizing productivity and driving efficiency in their organizations. Yet, when you look at some of the typical wastage that goes on at companies, a lot of it comes from the standard admin and menial tasks none of us like doing. We recently asked workers, who are often targeted in these productivity drives, if they thought a little automation could help them in their day to day work. Over half said they believe predictive software will be capable of doing 10 per cent of daily admin work in the very near future.

It would seem strange, given the depiction in fiction, that people would be so willing to allow AI into their working lives. Yet when we take a closer look at the results, there is very much a generational difference in willingness to embrace this kind of technology. Millennials -- those who have grown up with Siri and smartphones -- are in general the most in favor of incorporating AI into their future work lives, whilst the over 55s need a bit more convincing. The millennial generation, which might have played games like Halo, from which Microsoft has taken the name of its upcoming rival to Siri, Cortana, have been weaned on the benefits rather than the threats of what AI could bring.

Will AI ever be able to replace workers in all their roles? Highly doubtful. We could be over 100 years away from the day when a cognitive AI service could be totally independent, and even that is a generous prediction. So the idea that people's jobs would be on the line if what is available now were to be brought into our workplace is not really credible.

Even when a genius like Stephen Hawking has his doubts about AI, saying, "Creating artificial intelligence will be the biggest event in human history.... it might also be the last", we are clearly a long way from this happening. In the meantime, we can take advantage of what is and what will be soon available to handle some of the more mundane tasks, allowing us to focus on more important things.

Given this groundswell of opinion and expectation of AI's incorporation into our working lives, it's another consideration CIOs and IT managers should be contemplating as part of their IT strategies in the years to come. When you look at businesses that could benefit most from this, certain industries stand out. Take a big service company which already utilizes automation to share information to the various departments. What if you took the level of automation even further? How much better would it be for all concerned when a customer request is lodged with a company for an engineer to come and fix something that is then automatically built into the engineer's schedule. The parts that are needed will be instantly ordered and ready to go.

At the moment, you can ring a call center and lodge your query. That is then passed onto the service team. That is then passed onto the resource manager. That is then passed onto the engineer. It's quite a prosaic approach when, with a little bit more automation, the whole process could be made far slicker. This can, of course, be accomplished by human intelligence, but when it is something as precise and repetitive as a good chain of command, why not delegate a piece of central AI to better plan the course of events that need to unfold?

The key to success for this will be identifying the areas within a business or industry that could most benefit from automation. For example, if you run a field service team, a lot of data is analyzed and examined before travel routes and staff rosters are created. There are millions of calculations and considerations that need to go into this process, including factors such as equipment, skill sets and staff holidays, as well as day to day occurrences like traffic jams and sick leave. Wouldn't it be better if those calculations were automated and the optimum result was worked out by an AI function -- saving time, reducing cost and eliminating the risk of human error?

Working back from the problem, you can see how one day we can expect more AI products on the market which solve problems that businesses have faced for years. Staff can benefit too, when menial or time-consuming tasks can be taken off their hands. Companies don't tend to employ staff for the accuracy of their admin skills, instead they want them to focus on their primary functions. AI gives businesses and employees the possibility to finally optimize the roles they are doing and potentially take on new skills and functions that will ultimately be to the benefit of the business they are working for.

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Richard Frisch explores the promise and perils of artificial intelligence

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Westonite Richard Frisch presents Artificial intelligence: What is it? What is it becoming? Exploring its promise and its perils at the September meeting of the Trumbull PC Users Group of Connecticut.

The talk takes place Thursday, Sept. 11, at 7:45 p.m. at the Trumbull Public Library, 33 Quality Street, Trumbull.

Mr. Frisch explains how the world is suffused with artificial intelligence (AI) agents. AI helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the smart in your smartphone and will soon drive your car. AI makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure, he said.

Artificial intelligence has a dark side, too. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we imagine, Mr. Frisch said.

Participants will learn more about what AI is doing today and what it may become tomorrow.

Mr. Frischs previous presentations to TCPUG were Charles Babbage: The Man Who Invented the Computer (2012), and Apples Post-PC Era Explained (2011).

Mr. Frisch is the chief technology officer for Global Strategy Group, a national public affairs firm, and for Karlinsky LLC, a New York City-based law firm. He also runs RHFtech, a tech support firm for small businesses and Connecticut municipalities. He is a past president of FCUG and an active member of CTPC, making frequent presentations and running the CTPC Random Access meeting program.

Mr. Frisch and his family have lived in Weston since 1987.

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Richard Frisch explores the promise and perils of artificial intelligence

Researchers advance artificial intelligence for player goal prediction in gaming

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that is significantly better than any previous technology at predicting what goal a player is trying to achieve in a video game. The advance holds promise for helping game developers design new ways of improving the gameplay experience for players.

"We developed this software for use in educational gaming, but it has applications for all video game developers," says Dr. James Lester, a professor of computer science at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work. "This is a key step in developing player-adaptive games that can respond to player actions to improve the gaming experience, either for entertainment or -- in our case -- for education."

The researchers used "deep learning" to develop the AI software. Deep learning describes a family of machine learning techniques that can extrapolate patterns from large collections of data and make predictions. Deep learning has been actively investigated in various research domains such as computer vision and natural language processing in both academia and industry.

In this case, the large collection of data is the sum total of actions that players have made in a game. The predictive AI software can then draw on all of that data to determine what an individual player is trying to accomplish, based on his or her actions at any given point in the game. And the software is capable of improving its accuracy over time, because the more data the AI program has, the more accurate it becomes.

"At some point that improvement will level off, but we haven't reached that point yet," Lester says.

To test the AI program, the researchers turned to an educational game called "Crystal Island," which they developed years earlier. While testing Crystal Island, the researchers amassed logs of player behavior (tracking every action a player took in the game) for 137 different players. The researchers were able to test the predictive AI software against the Crystal Island player logs to determine its accuracy in goal recognition. In other words, they could tell the AI everything a player had done in Crystal Island up to a certain point and see what goal the AI thought the player was trying to accomplish. By checking the AI's response against the player log, the researchers could tell whether the AI was correct.

"For games, the current state-of-the-art AI program for goal recognition has an accuracy rate of 48.4 percent," says Wookhee Min, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of the paper. "The accuracy rate for our new program is 62.3 percent. That's a big jump."

The paper, "Deep Learning-Based Goal Recognition in Open-Ended Digital Games," will be presented at the Tenth Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, being held Oct. 5-7 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-1138497 and IIS-1344803.

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The above story is based on materials provided by North Carolina State University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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So you want to be a music producer? Just switch on your laptop

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Researchers at Birmingham City University are able to turn the complexity of a mixing board with its hundreds of dials and settings into a simple piece of software that takes minutes to install and understand. Photograph: Birmingham City University

Budding and confirmed musicians alike will soon be able to produce professional-sounding recordings of their work using a piece of free software presented yesterday at the British Science Festival in Birmingham.

In music, the path to perfection is a long and winding road, with years of practice before arriving at a memorable piece. After that, you have to pay a seasoned music producer a lot of money to mix it and take it to the next level. Or do you?

Not any more, according to Dr Ryan Stables, a lecturer in audio engineering and acoustics at Birmingham City University. He has developed a free software package that will allow you to make your music sound crunchy, saturated or fit to any other acoustic style that takes your fancy.

Of course there are many digital audio workstations already available online, such as the popular Garageband for Apple computers. However, they come with predefined filters that are meant to apply across all musical genres.

In contrast, Dr Stables code is a machine-learning instrument, which trains computers to understand the language used by musicians. Its knowledge is based on the cumulative expertise of thousands of music producers

who are providing their own settings, sound arrangements and musical landscape descriptors.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence based on pattern recognition in large datasets. For example, Google Translate does not really speak scores of languages. Instead, it sifts through millions of human-translated documents to identify sentences close to your translation request.

Similarly, Dr Stabless software relies on an ever-expanding library of music and human perceptions of music. It will identify the musical genre of your guitar solo and then answer your request to make it sound metallic by drawing on and learning from its huge knowledge library.

Music production should not necessarily cost a lot of money nor take years to learn, says Dr Stables, who is a musician and a producer in his spare time. Our project aims to give music production novices the ability to be creative with their music.

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So you want to be a music producer? Just switch on your laptop

Hawking predicts end?

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Published September 08, 2014

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking speaks at his official welcoming ceremony at Perimeter Institute For Theoretical Physics in Kitchener in June.REUTERS/Sheryl Nadler

Stephen Hawking, who once cautioned that both artificial intelligence and invading aliens could wipe out the human race, now has another dire prediction the Higgs boson, or God particle, might destroy the universe. In a preface to a new book, Hawking describes his concern that if the particle became unstable, the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, according to the U.K.s Sunday Times.

Hawkings gloomy theory appears in the forward to Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space, a collection of lectures by noteworthy astronomers and researchers. In the piece, Hawking writes that the particle has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GEV), reports CNET.

According to Hawking, the vacuum decay could expand at the speed of light and that this could happen at any time and we couldnt see it coming. While that statement might be cause for alarm, Hawking acknowledges in the essay that this threat is highly theoretical. A particle accelerator that could even reach 100bn GEV would need to be larger than the Earth itself, and would unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

While this cataclysmic scenario is unlikely to happen any time in the near future, Hawking writes that looking into the Higgs bosons potential instability sheds light on insights into the universe.

Hawking writes that the possible destruction of the Higgs boson places important constraints on the evolution of the universe, reports the IB Times.

Fellow scientists have long looked at some of Hawkings darker predictions with skepticism. Beyond the fears over alien invaders and warnings about the uprising of smart machines, he also stated in 2012 that human life has only about 1,000 years left on Earth before being wiped out by man-made viruses, according to Mic.com.

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John Wilkins – Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience & Mind Uploading – Video

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John Wilkins - Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience Mind Uploading
AI, Neuroscience, Mind Uploading - Thoughts from a philosopher - http://evolvingthoughts.net John is fascinated by science. It allows us to do things no ancient Greek (or West Semitic) thinker...

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John Wilkins - Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience & Mind Uploading - Video

Computer Scientist Charlie Volkstorf shows Artificial Intelligence expert Nick Bostrom who’s smarter – Video

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Computer Scientist Charlie Volkstorf shows Artificial Intelligence expert Nick Bostrom who #39;s smarter
Artificial Intelligence expert Nick Bostrom asks at Harvard if machines will ever exceed man, but Computer Scientist Charlie Volkstorf points out that man ca...

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Wipro to invest in robotics, artificial intelligence

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Company identifies areas like cognitive technologies, artificial intelligence, man-machine interface, robotics

Wipro, the Bangalore-based information technology major, is trying to boost internal innovation. The countrys third largest IT services company has identified focus areas for initiatives in this regard and has also allocated budgets for these. Among others, it is investing in innovation in cognitive technologies, artificial intelligence, man-machine interface, robotics, smart devices and open source. The company believes these could become revenue-accretive in two to five years.

Historically, companies have focused on run the business and change the business. With the disruption around us today, innovation has become of key importance. That is the reason why at Wipro, innovation is now directly under the chief executives radar, K R Sanjiv, chief technology officer (CTO), told Business Standard.

If in doubt, innovate

Adding: Typically, the investment budgets for companies used to be 60 per cent for running the business and 40 per cent for the changes that are visible in the marketplace today. Now, we are also seeing a direct budget allocation for innovation. This is happening at Wipro as well. While run the business refers to the core bread-and-butter IT services work, change the business means new technologies like analytics and big data. These are seeing some traction in the market but are not yet huge revenue churners.

Wipro says it has no plan for a separate lab on these, unlike some peers such as Infosys. The company says it wishes to ensure no internal silos or divides. You will not see a Wipro Labs as a separate entity. The CTOs office has a charter for driving change and the strategy office has the charter for building ecosystems. Both will be very strongly intertwined with the business units, said Sanjiv.

Experts believe jugglery between running core businesses and preparing for the future is crucial for Indian IT service companies. Especially with the not-so-successful example of Infosys, the second largest in the sector. It had launched Infosys 3.0 a few years earlier, to prepare it for technologies of the future. However, it lost sight of its core business, resulting in the growth rate dropping to record lows. Once a sector bellwether, Infosys is struggling to return to industry-level growth.

Over recent months, Wipro has increasingly shown interest in benefiting from innovation in the technology system. A few months earlier, it followed the footsteps of some global peers by setting up a venture capital fund to look at investing in early-to-middle stage technology start-ups globally.

The initiative is being driven by chief strategy officer Rishad Premji, also the elder son of chairman Azim Premji. The initial corpus of $100 million will be invested in opportunities in start-up companies focused on niche technologies such as data, open source and industrial internet.

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Baidu, Inc. Wants to Become a Leader in Artificial Intelligence

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"Chinese companies are starting to dream," said early investor in Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) and managing partner at GGV Capital Jixun Foo. Foo's proclamation was made in an in-depth article by MIT Technology Review, which examined the Chinese search giant's new effort to change the world with artificial intelligence. The company's new AI lab does, indeed, accompany some lofty aspirations -- ones big enough to hopefully help Baidu become a global Internet powerhouse and to compete with the likes of Google in increasingly important emerging markets where the default search engine hasn't yet taken the throne.

But what are the implications for investors? Fortunately, Baidu's growing infatuation with AI looks like it could give birth to winning strategies that could build sustainable value over the long haul.

Even Baidu's home page mirrors Google's. Image source: Baidu.com.

Finding an identity Often referred to as the "Google of China," Baidu is known for unashamedly copying Google's winning tactics in China where it is the dominant search engine and where Google is banned. But as the company looks to emerging international markets, where Internet users are only up and coming, Baidu needs to begin finding its own identity. Baidu's AI push seems to fit the bill.

Baidu first announced its bigger plans for AI in May when it announced the hire of Google's Andrew Ng, who founded the rival search giant's Deep Learning team. Widely regarded as a leading figure in AI, Ng alone brings identity to Baidu. More importantly, his knowledge brings with him an opportunity for Baidu to play a leading role in AI.

Baidu's Silicon Valley AI lab has one "key quest," according to MIT Technology Review's Robert Hof: To create "software that can, in a real sense, learn on its own." In other words, Baidu wants to be the leader in deep learning. Deep learning, a new form of AI that attempts to build algorithms that reflect high-level human learning, is likely to play key roles in the future for companies with infinitely growing sums of data at their fingertips.

But Ng won't stop at deep learning. Heading up all Baidu research, Ng aims to help Baidu stand out in many aspects.

"It's Ng's job to develop cutting-edge technologies that will leave no doubt who is ahead," said Hof.

Ng's contributions over the coming years will likely be instrumental to Baidu's future. As Baidu expands internationally into markets where the company will go head-to-head with the likes of Google and Microsoft in vying for online search traffic, Ng could be the difference between new technologies that set Baidu ahead of competition. Further, the technologies Ng will work on are only those that could "significantly influence" the lives of at least 100 million people, he told MIT Technology Review -- ones that give a company a "lasting base to build on."

A growing number of affordable smartphones and the proliferation wireless Internet is helping bring new active Internet users to the global market. Baidu thinks its experience with new Internet users gives the company an advantage in emerging markets. Image source: Baidu.

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Will Future Students Be Taught By Artificial Intelligence? – Video

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Will Future Students Be Taught By Artificial Intelligence?
You asked for it in the comments, so here it isthis week we #39;re talking about the future of education! As students across the country are getting ready to go back to school, it #39;s the...

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Will Future Students Be Taught By Artificial Intelligence? - Video


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