As our ability to create AI grows, it's important that we assess how it behaves in different situations. DeepMind, Google's AI division in London, has been concerned with one aspect in particular: what happens when two or more AI have similar or conflicting goals.
The team wanted a test similar to the "Prisoner's Dilemma," a popular game that pits two suspects against one another. In this scenario, you're given a choice: testify against the other person and you'll go free, while they have to serve three years. If you both say yes independently, however, you'll serve two years in jail. It's a dilemma without a simple answer.
Read moreA Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people’s relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt.
The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as “non-factoid” questions are difficult for AI to address. “Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions,” says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. Nakatsuji and his team trained their algorithm using almost 190,000 questions and 770,000 answers from the company’s Oshiete goo forum.
Read moreBMW and IBM's artificial intelligence system, known as Watson, are to collaborate on creating a new way for drivers to communicate with their cars.
The partnership will be based in Munich, home to both the carmaker and the Watson division, which recently received $200m of investment from IBM to bring cognitive computing to Internet of Things devices. Thanks to the increasing popularity of advanced software and embedded internet connections, cars are fast becoming the largest and most complex IoT device many of us will own. A fleet of four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars will be used as a testbed for new technologies created by the collaboration.
Read moreMark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances.
Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be “easier than [he] expected” in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon’s Echo. To be fair, most Echo owners didn’t build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that’s what Zuckerberg set out to do.
Read moreArtificial intelligence researchers at Apple are going to start publishing some of their work and engaging more with the wider academic community.
Russ Salakhutdinov, director of AI research at Apple and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, made the announcement at the NIPS conference. The Californian tech giant has traditionally kept research breakthroughs to itself, seeing any developments as valuable intellectual property, so this is a major change in direction. Companies like Google and Facebook already allow their employees to publish their research across a number of fields, including AI.
Read moreArtificial intelligence is getting its teeth into lip reading. A project by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford applied deep learning to a huge data set of BBC programmes to create a lip-reading system that leaves professionals in the dust. The AI system was trained using some 5000 hours from six different TV programmes.
First the University of Oxford and DeepMind researchers trained the AI on shows that aired between January 2010 and December 2015. Then they tested its performance on programmes broadcast between March and September 2016. By only looking at each speaker’s lips, the system accurately deciphered entire phrases.
Read moreResearchers have devised a technique that bypasses a key security protection built into just about every operating system. If left unfixed, this could make malware attacks much more potent.
ASLR, short for "address space layout randomization," is a defense against a class of widely used attacks that surreptitiously install malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in an operating system or application. By randomizing the locations in computer memory where software loads specific chunks of code, ASLR often limits the damage of such exploits to a simple computer crash, rather than a catastrophic system compromise.
Read moreArtificial intelligence, robotics and new disruptive technology are challenging white-collar professions that previously seemed invulnerable. For years now, some researchers have been anticipating that robots would take away jobs from humans.
About a year ago I implanted a biochip in my hand, embarking on a broad experimental journey. My aim is to understand how the connected humans of the future will live — and to get a jump on what can go wrong. I started writing down the insights I gathered and publishing them on this blog. You are reading the eighth entry in diary: about jobs that are just being conceptualized today but will be all the rage tomorrow.
Read moreAmy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar, why couldn’t it do the work for you?
After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her “humanlike tone” and “eloquent manners.” “Actually better than a human for this task,” a beta tester tweeted. But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human—someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin.
Read moreJust blame mainstream media for setting unrealistic expectations. A quick scan of any major media outlet and readers are bound to run into an article about some start-up or Fortune 500 company working on autonomous driving tech.
The autonomous vehicle — which can drive itself in autopilot mode using a variety of in-vehicle technologies — is the shiny plaything of the moment. And this week it landed at the top of Gartner Inc.’s Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies report, right next to the Internet of Things. The annual report assesses how close new technologies are to mainstream adoption.
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