Monthly Archives: June 2017

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Watch Out: You're in Ai Weiwei's Surveillance Zone - The New York ... New York Times Surveillance images from overhead cameras are projected on the floor as part of Hansel & Gretel, an installation at the Park Avenue Armory created by Ai ... Ai Weiwei Gets Artsy-Fartsy About Surveillance | WIREDWIRED Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei Examine the Threat of ...ArchDaily all 4 news articles »

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The best artificial intelligence still has trouble visually recognizing many of Homer Simpsons favorite behaviors such as drinking beer, eating chips, eating doughnuts, yawning, and the occasional face-plant. Those findings from DeepMind, the pioneering London-based AI lab, also suggest the motive behind why DeepMind has created a huge new dataset of YouTube clips to help train AI on identifying human actions in videos that go well beyond Mmm, doughnuts or Doh!

The most popular AI used by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other companies beyond Silicon Valley is based on deep learning algorithms that can learn to identify patterns in huge amounts of data. Over time, such algorithms can become much better at a wide variety of tasks such as translating between English and Chinese for Google Translateor automatically recognizing the faces of friends in Facebook photos.But even the most finely tuned deep learning relies on having lots of quality data to learn from.To help improve AIscapability to recognizehuman actions in motion,DeepMind has unveiled itsKinetics dataset consisting of 300,000 video clips and 400 human action classes.

AI systems are now very good at recognizing objects in images, but still have trouble making sense of videos, says aDeepMind spokesperson.One of the main reasons for this is that the research community has so far lacked a large, high-quality video dataset.

DeepMind enlisted the help of online workers through Amazons Mechanical Turk service to help correctly identify and label the actions inthousands of YouTube clips. Each of the 400 human action classes in the Kinetics dataset has at least 400 video clips, with each clip lasting around 10 seconds and taken from separate YouTube videos. More details can be found in a DeepMind paper on the arXiv preprint server.

The new Kinetics dataset seems likely to represent a new benchmark for training datasets intended to improve AI computer vision for video. It has far more video clips and action classes than the HMDB-51 and UCF-101 datasets that previously formed the benchmarks for the research community. DeepMind also made a point of ensuring it had a diverse datasetone that did not include multiple clips from the same YouTube videos.

Tech giants such as Googlea sister company to DeepMind under the umbrella Alphabet grouparguably have the best access to large amounts of video data that could prove helpful in training AI. Alphabets ownership of YouTube, the incredibly popular, online, video-streaming service, does not hurt either. But other companies and independent research groups must rely on publicly available datasets to train their deep learning algorithms.

Early training and testing with the Kinetics dataset showed some intriguing results. For example, deep learning algorithms showed accuracies of 80percent or greater in classifying actions such as playing tennis, crawling baby, presenting weather forecast, cutting watermelon, and bowling. But the classification accuracy dropped to around 20 percent or less for the Homer Simpson actions, including slapping and headbutting, and an assortment of other actions such as making a cake, tossing coin and fixing hair.

AI faces special challenges with classifying actions such as eating because it may not be able to accurately identify the specific food being consumedespecially if the hot dog or burger is already partially consumed or appears very small within the overall video. Dancing classes and actions focused on a specific part of the body can also prove tricky. Some actions also occur fairly quickly and are only visible for a small number of frames within a video clip, according to a DeepMind spokesperson.

DeepMind also wanted to see if the new Kinetics dataset has enough gender balance to allow for accurate AI training. Past cases have shown how imbalanced training datasets can lead to deep learning algorithms performing worse at recognizing the faces of certain ethnic groups. Researchers have also shown how such algorithms can pick up gender and racial biases from language.

A preliminary study showed that the new Kinetics dataset seems to fairly balanced. DeepMind researchers found that no single gender dominated within 340 out of the 400 action classesor else it was not possible to determine gender in those actions. Those action classes that did end up gender imbalanced included YouTube clips of actionssuch as shaving beard or dunking basketball (mostly male) and filling eyebrows or cheerleading (mostly female).

But even action classes that had gender imbalance did not show much evidence of classifier bias. This means that even the Kinetics action classes featuring mostly male participantssuch as playing poker or hammer throwdid not seem to bias AI to the point where the deep learning algorithms had trouble recognizing female participants performing the same actions.

DeepMind hopes that outside researchers can help suggest new human action classes for the Kinetics dataset. Any improvements may enable AI trained on Kinetics to better recognize both the most elegant of actions and the clumsier moments in videos that lead people to say doh! In turn, that could lead to new generations of computer software and robots with the capacity to recognize what all those crazy humans are doing on YouTube or in other video clips.

Video understanding represents a significant challenge for the research community, and we are in the very early stages with this, according to the DeepMind spokesperson. Any real-world applications are still a really long way off, but you can see potential in areas such as medicine, for example, aiding the diagnosis of heart problems in echocardiograms.

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And they have a new piece of hardwarethe Jetson TX2that they hope everyone will use for this edge processing 8Mar

A deep-learning AI has beaten human poker pros with the hardware equivalent of a gaming laptop 2Mar

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DeepMind Shows AI Has Trouble Seeing Homer Simpson's Actions - IEEE Spectrum

Implementing artificial intelligence systems can be technically challenging and expensive, but it doesnt have to be.

So says DimensionalMechanics, a startup based in Bellevue, Wash., that claims to have a developed a platform that can put A.I. within reach of a wide range of companies, with an initial focus on those in the media and entertainment industry.

The goal is to lower that technology and economic bar in a way that makes A.I. more accessible to organizations without requiring them to have a technical background in areas such as deep learning and machine learning, company CEO and co-founder Rajeev Dutt, said, noting that many are also looking for A.I. solutions that are not just affordable but customizable as well.

To help achieve some of those goals, DimensionalMechanics has introduced NeoPulse AI Studio, a set of applications based on the companys underlying framework that, it says, can help businesses and other organizations rapidly create and design customized A.I. solutions. That product complements the companys pre-built AI models in areas such as image and video analysis and recommendations systems.

The company, which has raised $6.7 million and intends to raise a B round this fall, is also getting a boost into the media and entertainment world through a strategic alliance with GrayMeta, a company that specializes in automated metadata collection, curation and search.

GrayMeta, which counts ABC, AMC, CBS, Deluxe, DirecTV, Disney, HBO, NBCUniversal and Showtime among its clients, is also the first to offer NeoPulse AI to the media and entertainment sector, DimensionalMechanics said.

Dutt said the media, entertainment and advertising industries are among the biggest producers and consumers of data, providing a proving ground for a lot of machine learning technologies.

Some use-case examples include a photo-ranking system that was trained using 2 million images to determine which ones might make an ad or news article more likely to grab attention or drive and maximize traffic. The technology is also being used to help editors analyze and write headlines that can improve click rates.

On the video side, the company also provides A.I. solutions to drive recommendations.

DimensionalMechanics has carved out a set of business models, including cloud software for independent developers, on-premises solutions that can simulate the cloud-based system while keeping a companys data close to the vest, as well as a way for partners to resell and monetize their A.I. models through the NeoPulse AI Store.

Theres a fairly broad range of applications, Dutt said.

Founded in 2015, DimensionalMechanics currently has 11 employees.

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Startup Paves Easier Path to AI - Multichannel News

June 8, 2017 by Nina Larson Sophia, a humanoid robot, is the main attraction at a conference on artificial intelligence this week but her technology has raised concerns for future human jobs

Sophia smiles mischievously, bats her eyelids and tells a joke. Without the mess of cables that make up the back of her head, you could almost mistake her for a human.

The humanoid robot, created by Hanson robotics, is the main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week on how artificial intelligence can be used to benefit humanity.

The event comes as concerns grow that rapid advances in such technologies could spin out of human control and become detrimental to society.

Sophia herself insisted "the pros outweigh the cons" when it comes to artificial intelligence.

"AI is good for the world, helping people in various ways," she told AFP, tilting her head and furrowing her brow convincingly.

Work is underway to make artificial intelligence "emotionally smart, to care about people," she said, insisting that "we will never replace people, but we can be your friends and helpers."

But she acknowledged that "people should question the consequences of new technology."

Among the feared consequences of the rise of the robots is the growing impact they will have on human jobs and economies.

Legitimate concerns

Decades of automation and robotisation have already revolutionised the industrial sector, raising productivity but cutting some jobs.

And now automation and AI are expanding rapidly into other sectors, with studies indicating that up to 85 percent of jobs in developing countries could be at risk.

"There are legitimate concerns about the future of jobs, about the future of the economy, because when businesses apply automation, it tends to accumulate resources in the hands of very few," acknowledged Sophia's creator, David Hanson.

But like his progeny, he insisted that "unintended consequences, or possible negative uses (of AI) seem to be very small compared to the benefit of the technology."

AI is for instance expected to revolutionise healthcare and education, especially in rural areas with shortages of doctors and teachers.

"Elders will have more company, autistic children will have endlessly patient teachers," Sophia said.

But advances in robotic technology have sparked growing fears that humans could lose control.

Killer robots

Amnesty International chief Salil Shetty was at the conference to call for a clear ethical framework to ensure the technology is used on for good.

"We need to have the principles in place, we need to have the checks and balances," he told AFP, warning that AI is "a black box... There are algorithms being written which nobody understands."

Shetty voiced particular concern about military use of AI in weapons and so-called "killer robots".

"In theory, these things are controlled by human beings, but we don't believe that there is actually meaningful, effective control," he said.

The technology is also increasingly being used in the United States for "predictive policing", where algorithms based on historic trends could "reinforce existing biases" against people of certain ethnicities, Shetty warned.

Hanson agreed that clear guidelines were needed, saying it was important to discuss these issues "before the technology has definitively and unambiguously awakened."

While Sophia has some impressive capabilities, she does not yet have consciousness, but Hanson said he expected that fully sentient machines could emerge within a few years.

"What happens when (Sophia fully) wakes up or some other machine, servers running missile defence or managing the stock market?" he asked.

The solution, he said, is "to make the machines care about us."

"We need to teach them love."

Explore further: Humanoid Sophia is given primary role of talking to people

2017 AFP

An essay on robots by a professor in Japan over 40 years ago caused a stir in science circles when he explored what draws us and repels us when it comes to robots.

Are robots coming for your job?

Advances in artificial intelligence will soon lead to robots that are capable of nearly everything humans do, threatening tens of millions of jobs in the coming 30 years, experts warned Saturday.

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"Technophobes"people who fear robots, artificial intelligence and new technology that they don't understandare much more likely to be afraid of losing their jobs to technology and to suffer anxiety-related mental health ...

An AI machine has taken the maths section of China's annual university entrance exam, finishing it faster than students but with a below average grade.

Globally, from China and Germany to the United States, electric vehicle (EV) subsidies have been championed as an effective strategy to boost production of renewable technology and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).

As global automakers compete to bring the first flying car to market, Czech pilot Pavel Brezina is trying a different tack: instead of creating a car that flies, he has made a "GyroDrive"a mini helicopter you can drive.

Apple's new HomePod speaker may be music to the ears of its loyal fans, but how much it can crank up volume in the smart speaker market remains to be heard.

Autonomous vehicles with no human backup will be put to the test on publicly traveled roads as early as next year in what may be the first attempt at unassisted autonomous piloting.

Using Earth-abundant materials, EPFL scientists have built the first low-cost system for splitting CO2 into CO, a reaction necessary for turning renewable energy into fuel.

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"She" is only saying what "she" was programmed to say. It may have been algorithmically derived, but no less what some human programmed "her" to say.

Further, this is not a "she," but an "it." Sophia is a machine.

All well and good, but robots begin doing most of work then Man must find other tasks to do or will cease to exist. If Man does not keep busy and stay productive with a purpose in life he is nothing.

I must confess that I know very little about science, but I fail to see how one can teach a machine to love? The human race must remain the masters to the machines, period.

"We need to teach them love." Why do you come to empty love with expectation? LAgrad The human race is already a slave to headless corporations, impulse, and the momentums of convention, why not a machine?

What happens when the machines of war are directed to solve the human problems on the planet? Think Terminator.

I would love the illusion of love from a machine.Why does everything have to be the same? The illusion of love you can name something new.

From the article photo, looks like A.I. has already started to take selfies. Can't wait for them to discover duck face, trout pout and floppy disk lips 😉

"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law." - Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"

"Crack Cocaine is good for you", says Colombian Drug Lord.

"Smoking is good for you", says 1950's Doctor sponsored by Big Tobacco company.

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AI 'good for the world'... says ultra-lifelike robot - Phys.org - Phys.Org