Monthly Archives: March 2017

AI is touted to change the world in the same way electricity did. But are we moving too fast? While AI has created impact in some sectors, there are some documented instances of enterprises claiming to have automated systems, but actually relying on humans behind the scenes. For our future to stay bright, the real AI startups will need to stand up.

On March 22, 2017, Andrew NG, who had been heading Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts at Chinese tech giant Baidu, announced that he was resigning from the company. Within a few hours of his announcement, Baidus stock dipped by about $1.5 billion, showcasing the value that his work in AI brought to the company. Andrew is also one of the co-founders of Courseraand has taught machine learning classes online to over 1,00,000 students. He had earlier led the Google Brain project, which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms at Google. So, we can take his word, when he makes this prediction,

Just as electricity transformed many industries roughly 100 years ago, AI will also now change nearly every major industry healthcare, transportation, entertainment, manufacturing enriching the lives of countless people. I am more excited than ever about where AI can take us

Data may be the new oil, but AI seems to be the tool of choice to drill and leverage it. Almost every major company in the world, from Google to Facebook and Microsoft, is arming itself for the new AI-powered race that is almost here.

But like any new technology, there are alot of misconceptions surrounding AI, and the potential impact that AI-powered startups and enterprises will have on the world. Many startups around the world, and in India, are looking to innovate in this space, and VCs,too, are swooping in to invest in AI-powered startups.

YourStory referred to multiple industry reports and also spoke to startups and VCs in this space to better understand where AI is headed and how startups could benefit from it. Here is an overview.

Defining AI in the modern context is a tough task. Ben Thompson, the well know media analyst, recently noted on Stratechery that AI could be categorised into two main categories-

Machine learning, on the other hand, could be described as a type of AI that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. This can be broadly classified into two categories- supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Most of the major mainstream progresses in AI, so far, has been under supervised learning.

AB or supervised systems have been progressing rapidly, and the best ones today are built with a technology called 'deep learning' or 'deep neural networks', which were loosely inspired by the brain and how it works. Andrew NG noted in aHarvard Business Review post,

Todays supervised learning software has an Achilles heel: It requires a huge amount of data. You need to show the system a lot of examples of both A and B

Getting large volumes of good quality data is one of thebiggest challenges for AI startups today, as the quality of input data has a direct impact on the results. Apart from machine learning some of the other important focus areas where AI advances are happening include speech, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision and knowledge graphs.

The rise of AI has also brought multiple misconceptions in the market. Talking to YourStory, Ashwini Asokan, Co-founder of Mad Street Den, feels that the biggest myths include-

AI is automation

Ashwini noted, Automation is automation Machines performing repetitive tasks in not necessarily AI. Many use the terms interchangingly.

APIs make an AI company

The AI community around the world is vibrant, and many researchers open-source their research and code. Ashwini noted that there are some startups that plug in these AI APIs into their system and then claim to be AI startups. Building AI-based applications by leveraging APIs and other tools and building AI systems from the ground-up are different feats, and she believes that not many are aware of the difference.

AI needs to be invisible

Some startups and businesses are generally secretive about what goes on under the hood at the venture, and they have a right, if they so wish. But Ashwini believes that making AI invisible and not wanting people to know that your startup is leveraging AI behind the scenes may not be a great idea. Being open and transparent about what aspects are AI-powered is generally better to set the right expectations from customers.

According to a report from CB Insights, over 550 startups using AI as a core part of their products, raising $5 billion in funding in 2016. Since 2012, deals involving AI startups have been on the rise, and 2016 was a record year for startups globally. The US accounts for about 61 percent of the funds raised, while India is fifth on the list, at 3.5 percent.

While the funding dollars may not reflect the current situation, there are many interesting AI startups and projects in India. Some prominent and interesting Indian or India-focused startups include Mad Street Den, Niki.ai, Neuron.me, Locus.sh and Artifacia (more popularly known as Snapshopr).

On the other side of the table, many VCs and angel investors are keeping a close watch on the AI space, according to the general pulse that YourStory has been able to sense. Predicting a lot of growth in this space, Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni founded pi Ventures, an AI-focused fund for India. They recently closed $13 million of their $30 million AI-focused fund, and also invested or co-invested (with others) in three startups- Ten3t, Zenatix and Sigtuple.

In an earlier conversation with YourStory, Manish had noted that he had seen a lot of great applications in the AI space, in sectors such as healthcare and energy. About the maturity of the space, he had said,

Whether it is winter, spring, or summer, enough stuff is happening in the AI space in India. There is enough critical mass now.

Given that some VC firms have burnt their fingers from the funding boom during 2015, VCs are more cautious nowand do a lot more due diligence before writing a cheque. Talking to YourStory, Anurag Ramdasan, an investor from 3one4 Capital, noted that when it comes to investing in startups that are tech-heavy, his team ensures it spends sufficient time with the startup team to understand what they do. He noted,

It is really important for VCs to be able to understand the details of what the startup is building, including their publications and source code. This is what makes it challenging to be a VC investing in the AI space, as it requires very focused competencies to gauge the startups' novel progress, and to remain on the cutting edge.

Anurag opined that startups that deal with AI can be broadly categorised as models that use AI as enablers to the core value proposition, or the ones that conduct AI research to push the boundaries of the field. He also noted that AI need not always be the best approach to solving a problem. He said,

For the ones that use AI as an enabler for its features, it is more important to understand the need for AI, and the optimisations that it delivers as opposed to the implementation itself. If a non-AI solution delivers a more optimum result, then an AI-based implementation is unlikely to get any special consideration.

But given that AI is still in its nascent stages, and not completely understood, VCs may have to pay special attention to the Reverse Turing Test, where a human pretends to be AI to fool a fellow human into thinking he/she is a machine. This is a variation of the more popular Turing Test, where a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human is tested.

There are some documented instances of enterprises claiming to have automated systems, but actually relying on humans behind the scenes, thus giving cause to paraphrase Eminems hit single from 2000 to, 'Will the real AI startups please stand up?'

The general public has likely interacted with AI only in a few avenues, with chatbots being the most prominent ones. But based on Andrew NGs belief that AI is the new electricity, almost every sector will face disruption. Ashwini agrees with this view and believes it is more a matter of time rather than 'if it will happen'. Talking about India, she believes that we have enough talent and resources to catch up and leapfrog ahead to a better position in the global AI race.

Anurag of 3one4 Capital noted, While covering disruption, always look out for the blast radius instead of the impact centre. The effects are usually far more spread out than you would imagine.

Citing a CrunchBase report, Anurag elaborated how advances in the driver-less cars space could impact other sectors like insurance, cab aggregators and the airline industry, among others.

But there is currently a big pushback against the adoption of AI because of the impact it could have on the global workforce. At a recent event in Bengaluru, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella had spoken about the impact AI will have on jobs, and how people should cope. He had said,

Predicting the skills needed for mid-level jobs in the future won't be easy. To better prepare people, we will need to help them get life-long learning skills.

Bill Gates believes that a good way to make the transition to an AI-powered world is to tax AI or robots. In an interview with Quartz, Gates noted, Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level.

So in the long term, startups leveraging AI for gain may have to heed to strict guidelines and regulations. AI beings too will likely have to follow rules and regulations. Taking a page out of Isaac Asimovs playboook, a futuristic representation of his Three laws of Robotics, applied to AI startups could be-

The rest is here:

Will the real AI startups please stand up? - YourStory.com

Watch enough science fiction movies and youll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time. Whether its HAL 9000s murderous meltdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynets sadistic self-preservation tactics in the Terminator franchise, artificial intelligence usually comes off as a well-intentioned attempt to serve humanity thatthrough some overlooked technical flawends up trying to extinguish it.

The latest dystopian prophecy arrives Friday with the release of Ghost in the Shell, one of a few major releases this year to feature AI prominently in its plot. The filmbased on the 1995 anime movie and Kodansha Comics manga series of the same nametells the story of a special ops humancyborg hybrid known as the Major (Scarlett Johansson). She leads an elite crime-fighting task force whose main mission is to protect a company that makes AI robots. Ghost depicts a technologically advanced society in which a persons brainincluding the Majorsis susceptible to hacking, and ones consciousness can be copied into a new body. Over time the Major begins to question whether her memories are real or were implanted by someone else.

Hollywoods vision of AI is often entertaining, generally pessimistic and rarely realistic. With that in mind, Scientific American asked several prominent real-world AI researchers which movies, if any, have come closest to hitting the mark over the years.

[An edited transcript of the interviews follows.]

Selmer Bringsjord, director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutes Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Laboratory

Year after year I keep holding out hope that someone will make a film to compete with the predictive power ofBlade Runner, but it never happens. The point of my [1992 book] What Robots Can and Can't Be can be distilled to this stark but, by my lights, accurate claim: We are sliding inexorably toward a time when AI will supplydespite demanding tests of unmasking [like the movies VoightKampff test]creatures behaviorally indistinguishable from human persons, such as Blade Runner's replicants. People used to object to this claim by saying: No, Selmer, there isn't any point in making embodied AIs look like us, so you're wrong there. Well, not a lot of people express that objection any longer, and just as the long-term job prospects of driving for a living are dismal, the same prospectsas the Westworld television program showsare in place for the oldest profession, in which what one looks like can be regarded important by clients. This theme is more than touched upon in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which I also regard to have an almost uncanny level of predictive power. It fails as high art despite the pretensions (and reputations) of some who brought it to life, but even a cursory scan today of the world of lifelike toys, and its history, shows plainly what track we're on.

Brian David Johnson, a professor at Arizona State Universitys School for the Future of Innovation in Society

The narrative is typically that once you create something thats sentient, it rises up and kills you. I look at what movies are giving us a different narrative. One recent example is Robot and Frankthis guy gets a health care robot, and he and his robot go and rob places. Another is Herit wasnt about a robot, its about an AI thats awarebut didnt rise up and kill us. Instead it breaks up with us and moves on. Its about a person whos healed by his relationship with AI. The last Ill mention is Interstellar, in which robots with humor/honesty settings give the robot a personality. In that movie the characters are having social relationships with robots, even though they know they are robots. It shows you can have a working relationship with artificial intelligence and still be aware that its AI. Those types of movies matter because they set our mental model for how we see our future.

Daniela Rus, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a visionary story about reprogramming the human brain, and how such a development could impact how we understand ourselves and interact with the world. The movie raises the question of what it would mean to reprogram our brains as if they were machines. Computer memory can be added, manipulated or wiped clean. Could similar things be done one day with human memory? Imagine if veterans could overcome their PTSD by forgetting battles or if abuse victims could unexperience traumas. Like any new technology, of course, it would be up to us to decide how to use it responsibly to help rather than harm. The film inspired me to think more about the nature of memory, and how unlocking its mysteries could help us better understand our own behaviors and motivations.

Yann LeCun, director of Facebook AI Research and founding director of the New York University Center for Data Science

I think one that reflects what might well happen, although not exactly, is Her. Theres no major blatant mistakes that I saw in that movie. Of course, were extremely far from having technology thats shown in the movie. We dont have truly intelligent machines, and I dont know how long it will take for us to get anywhere near that. But the idea that you would have a personal virtual assistant that you interact with, and with whom you have a relationship like a digital friendthat is something that is actually fairly realistic. Then theres a list of movies that depict all kinds of crazy stuff that theres no way in hell will happen. Thats pretty much every movie that portrays AIThe Terminator, The Matrix, all the popular ones. Ex Machinathats a beautiful film, but the AI depiction is completely wrong.

Manuela Veloso, head of Carnegie Mellon Universitys Machine Learning Department

I like Bicentennial Man and the television program Humans, without the complicated bad robots/synthetics. Robots coexist with people and are helpful. And I like Robot and Frank, except for the fact that the robot learns to rob.

Timothy Persons, chief scientist at the U.S. Government Accountability Office

I thought Steven Spielbergs A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001 was powerfulnot in the sense that it portrayed a dystopic, post-apocalyptic world. The context was dystopic, but it wasnt like the machines were all out to kill us or anything like that. Particularly compelling was the idea of having the machine be able to understand what youre feeling, and you being able to have love and affection for your machine. The powerful thing that Spielberg captured was the human compassion dimension to that, even when its a machine.

Yoshua Bengio, head of the University of Montreals Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)

2001, A Space Odyssey. Most of the recent science fiction movies about AI are not very good. Less bad than others: Her.

Andrew Moore, dean of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and former director of Google Pittsburgh

I like Robot and Frank, which, like all great AI movies, is really about humans. It gently portrays a world that has intelligent devices in it and looks at the mismatch between what a naive engineer would consider a useful device versus what a real user values.

Stuart Russell, director of the University of California, Berkeleys Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence

My favorite movie AI is TARS, the robot in Interstellar. TARS does exactly what humans need it to do, including sacrificing itself to save the humans. Theres no danger of confusing it with a human, and little temptation to think of it as consciouseven though the humans have a hard time letting it commit suicide. My favorite AI movie is Ex Machina. It is very effective in portraying some of the unanswered questions about consciousness in machines and our own reactions to machines, including the way those reactions are conditioned on our built-in response to the human forma really good reason not to build humanoid robots! The movie also conveys the difficulty of controlling a machine that can easily outwit you if its designed with objectives that are eventually in conflict with yours. And it does all this with a seamless, low-key narrative that operates at several levels.

Tuomas Sandholm, creator of Carnegie Mellons Libratus, the AI that recently outplayed four top poker pros

I liked Her for many reasons. It was refreshing to see an AI movie that was not about violent robots and raised many interesting AI issues in the broader public spheresuch as scalability (dating at massive scale), the realistic and sad aspect of human loneliness being filled by machines (already happening in China via chatbots) and the issues that arise as AI surpasses human intelligence. I also liked Blade Runner, a fun action movie that addressed the question of what it means to be human versus machine, and how one could tell, even about oneself.

Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

That is the hardest question youve asked me today because, for example, Ex Machina is fun in terms of discussing issues around the Turing test [in which a machine tries to convince an interrogator that it is human]. There are a lot of movies that Ive enjoyed, but if you ask me what movie has done a good job depicting AI, Im still waiting for that to come outif only because its easy to cast AI as the villain. Ask me the three movies in the past 20 years where AI was the good guy, and I can think of WALL-Eabout a robot thats trying to create peaceand then I draw a blank. If theres any Hollywood producers out there reading this, call me and well put together a script where AI does good things. There are very real possibilities, whether its avoiding traffic accidents or preventing medical errors. I think thered be a good script out there. At least it would be refreshing.

Read more:

Ghost in the Sell: Hollywood's Mischievous Vision of AI - Scientific American

Folk music is part of a rich cultural context that stretches back into the past, encompassing the real and the mythical, bound to the traditions of the culture in which it arises. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has no culture, no traditions. But it has shown great ability: beating grand masters at chess and Go, for example, or demonstrating uncanny wordplay skills when IBM Watson beat human competitors at Jeopardy. Could the power of AI be put to use to create music?

This is not entirely unprecedented: an artificial intelligence co-wrote a piece of musical theatre, from the storyline to the music and lyrics. It premiered in London in 2016. The advancement of AI techniques and ever-larger collections of data to use to train them presents broad opportunities for creative research. The AI co-wrote its musical based on an analysis of hundreds of other successful musicals, for example. There are other projects aimed at providing creators of art and music with new artificial intelligence-based tools for their craft, such as Googles Magenta project, Sonys Flow Machines, or British start-up Jukedeck. And long before those was The Illiac Suite, a string quartet programmatically composed by a supercomputer in 1957.

Our research examines how state-of-the art AI techniques can contribute to musical practice, specifically the Celtic folk tradition of session music. Enthusiasts transcribe versions of folk tunes using ABC, a reduced form of music notation developed by Chris Walshaw of the University of Greenwich, using text characters as a rough guide to the musician. We trained our AI system using more than 23,000 ABC transcriptions of folk music, crowd-sourced from the excellent online resource thesession.org. And at our recent workshop at the Inside Out festival we had accomplished folk musicians performing some of this machine folk music.

Our AI is trained so that given one ABC symbol it can predict the next, which means it can generate new tunes that draw upon patterns and structures learned from the original tunes. We have generated more than 100,000 new machine folk tunes, and its interesting to see what the AI has and has not learned. Many tunes have the typical structure of this style: two repeated parts of the same eight-bar length, that often complement each other musically. The AI also shows some ability to repeat and vary musical patterns in a way that is very characteristic of Celtic music. It was not programmed to do this with rules it learned to do so because these patterns exist in the data we fed it.

However, unlike a human the system isnt immediately able to generalise these properties beyond the immediate context. Much of what we originally thought the system learned about basic musical features (for example how rhythm works) in fact it hadnt learned it was simply able to reproduce those conventions. Venture slightly outside the conventions of the data and the system begins to act unusually. This is where things can get musically interesting:

To evaluate the AIs compositions we consulted the experts: folk musicians. We asked for feedback on The Endless Traditional Music Session, and later about a volume of 3,000 tunes generated by our system. Feedback from members in the thesession.org forums shows divided opinions: some found the idea intriguing and identified machine folk tunes they liked and could work with. Others were dead against the entire notion of computer-generated music.

One obstacle was that not only was this music composed by computers, it was also played by computer synthesis, and so lacking the interpretation and expressivity of human musicians who bring each tune to life elements not incorporated in the data the AI had trained on. So we recruited professional folk musicians and asked them to look at our volume of 3,000 tunes. One musician observed that about one in five tunes are actually fairly good.

By their nature, folk tunes are less fixed in nature and are treated as a frame upon which to elaborate: performers develop their own version and change elements in performance. The musicians found interesting features and some patterns that are unusual but work well within the style. Perhaps there are regions of this musical space that humans have not yet discovered and can be reached with the help of a machine.

Much discussion around AI focuses on computers as competitors to humans. We seek to harness the same technology as a creative tool to enrich, not replace.

A concert, Partnerships, on May 23, 2017, will feature music co-created by humans and computers.

See more here:

'Machine folk' music shows the creative side of AI - The Conversation UK

March 30, 2017 Canadian PM Justin Trudeau said the government would spend $30 million on a new artificial intelligence research center in Toronto, Ontario

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his hopes Thursday of making Canada a "world leader" in artificial intelligence and so-called "deep learning" research and development.

The government, he said, would spend Can$40 million (US$30 million) on a new artificial intelligence research center in Toronto, Ontario.

The Ontario provincial government will also contribute Can$50 million to the new Vector Institute, which will be led by Geoffrey Hintona British-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist at the University of Toronto, who also works for Google.

In its recent budget, Ottawa had also earmarked Can$125 million over five years to bolster clusters of scientists in Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto devoted to the "futuristic-sounding" research that hopes to create machines that learn like humans.

It is hoped these will lead to collaborations and breakthroughs in artificial neural networks and algorithms that seek to mimic human brain functions.

As well, the government aimed to broaden education in the field and create new AI research chairs at universities across the country.

"In the same way that electricity revolutionized manufacturing and the microprocessor reinvented how we gather, analyze and communicate information, artificial intelligence will cut across nearly every industry," Trudeau said.

"It will shape the world that our kids and our grandkids grow up in," he said.

The field of artificial intelligence dates back to the mid-20th century when a group of scientists held the first conference devoted to the subject at Dartmouth College in the US state of New Hampshire.

Interest and investment in AI accelerated in the last decade alongside advancements in robotics and automation.

A 2013 University of Oxford study concluded that of the 700 trades in the United States, 47 percent of them were likely to become automated.

"In the years to come, we will see this leadership pay dividends in everything from manufacturing improvements to health-care breakthroughs, to stronger and more sustained economic and job growth," Trudeau said.

Explore further: GM to add 700 technical jobs in Ontario, Canada

2017 AFP

General Motors will add at least 700 engineering, software development and urban mobility jobs at three sites in Canada.

Google said on Monday that it had agreed to buy British artificial intelligence start-up company DeepMind for an undisclosed amount.

Ford Motor Co. will hire approximately 400 employees from software company BlackBerry Ltd. as part of sizable new investments in Canada that include a connected-vehicle research center in Ottawa, company officials said Thursday.

n the quest for reliable artificial intelligence, EPFL scientist Marcel Salath argues that AI technology should be openly available. He will be discussing the topic at this year's edition of South by South West on March ...

Canada will impose a national minimum carbon price in 2018, an effective tax, to meet the landmark Paris commitment on climate change, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday.

Major technology firms have joined forces in a partnership on artificial intelligence, aiming to cooperate on "best practices" on using the technology "to benefit people and society."

Spotting a face in a crowd, or recognizing any small or distant object within a large image, is a major challenge for computer vision systems. The trick to finding tiny objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, ...

A major update to Microsoft's Windows 10 system will start reaching consumers and businesses on April 11, offering 3-D drawing tools, game-broadcasting capabilities and better ways to manage your web browsing.

Most people look for a place to hide when a typhoon is on the horizon, but Atsushi Shimizu hopes that the fury of nature may one day help resource-poor Japan tackle its energy woes.

Samsung seems to be playing it safe at least with its batteryas it unveils its first major smartphone since the embarrassing recall of its fire-prone Note 7.

US lawmakers voted Tuesday to roll back rules that would block internet service providers from selling user data to third parties, following a heated debate over privacy protections.

Not content to reach for Mars and dethrone fossil fuels, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Tuesday is turning his focus to delving into people's minds.

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Original post:

Trudeau looks to make Canada 'world leader' in AI research - Phys.Org