Sapere Aude
Tag: ai
some aspects of statistical machine learning could be implemented at microscopic scales using molecules.
Machine-learning algorithms could make chemical reactions intelligent, tuned to your personal chemistry to diagnose or treat a range of pathologies using “smart drugs”
Americans are fielding millions of calls from bright, energetic telemarketers, but what they don’t know is that they’re talking to machines. 99% of the people do not know that the agent just shifted from pre-recorded to a live voice and back to pre-recorded audio. All these different measures are part of making the human-cyborg conversation feel “natural,” even though it is anything but.
the title is just linkbait, and the author had to throw in the obligatory “creepy” (we’re supposed to be scared by recorded voices now? what is this, 1860?), but it is still fairly interesting.
The terms Biker, Punk, Hipster, Goth or Surfer often spark visual depictions of individuals with very distinct fashion styles. These visually salient styles can provide insight into the social identity of an individual. However, despite its potential usefulness, little work has been done to automatically classify images of people into social categories. We tackle this problem by analyzing pictures of groups of individuals and creating models to represent them. We capture the features that distinguish each subculture and show promising results for automatic classification. This work gives vision algorithms access to the social identity of an individual and helps improve the quality of socially motivated image search, relevance of advertisements, and recommendations of social groups.
the search tool uses the locations of tagged persons to quantify relationships between them, even those not tagged in any given photo. Imagine you and your mother are pictured together, building a sandcastle at the beach. You’re both tagged in the photo quite close together. In the next photo, you and your father are eating watermelon. You’re both tagged. Because of your close ‘tagging’ relationship with both your mother in the first picture and your father in the second, the algorithm can determine that a relationship exists between those 2 and quantify how strong it may be.
i have been observing ben’s progress for ~10 years. he is aiming much higher than most AI efforts.
Vicarious claims they can achieve success rates up to 90% on modern CAPTCHAs.
contrary to all the make-believe about how human tutors can be “flexible”, it turns out they aren’t really. human tutors were 0.79 sigma more effective than no training, and computer tutors were at 0.76, nearly the same.
by collecting 500M data points from the sensors in all their buildings every 24h, finding huge energy savings right away:
In 1 building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66K of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.
2016-07-21: Cooling AI
by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to Google data centers, we’ve reduced the energy we use for cooling by up to 40%. In any large scale environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.
this is why smart grids are one of the highest ROI investments countries could make.
Boston Dynamics is Cyberdyne Systems
2013-11-13: Combat support
Pfc. Marcus Beedle looks over his shoulder at the robot following him. The machine’s 4 legs are eagerly stamping the grass, its sensor-laden head held high. “LS3, follow tight,” Beedle says to the robot, and the Legged Squad Support System—which stands taller than a dog but smaller than a mule—follows in the exact footsteps of its Marine Corps handler. Beedle’s backpack is outfitted with thick black bands. To follow him, the robot senses this pattern via the flickering laser in its head. LS3 also uses stereoscopic cameras to fix on the Marine’s location and can trace the path he’s taken by following a navigation device strapped to Beedle’s right shoe. As the young private first class strides forward, the LS3 obediently trots after him, exhaust from its gas engine sputtering. “Follow-the-leader is our bread and butter”.
2013-12-14: This is a far more interesting take than all the terminator jokes which are neither insightful, original, or clever.
News broke today that Google acquired my friend Marc Raibert’s company, Boston Dynamics, one of the coolest robotics companies in the world. You know Boston Dynamics because of their work building “Big Dog,” “Bigger Dog,” Cheetah and now Atlas. They’ve been the most impressive functional robots around.
What’s bigger news is that this is their 8th announced robotics acquisition in the last 6 months. Remember that Google is spending over $7B every year in R&D, M&A.
This internal robotics revolution is being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who developed and ran Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software. This is being done with Larry Page’s enthusiastic support, as he and his team continue to display their impressive “moonshot thinking” by investing heavily in the future.
Don’t forget that Google is probably the No. 1 hotbed of research on artificial intelligence with the acquisition of my friend and SU Co-Founder Ray Kurzweil and the recent addition of Deep Learning creator Geoffrey Hinton.
So what do you get when you combine 8 robotics companies, the leading AI creative forces and researchers, the brilliance (and ambition) of Larry Page and a $7B R&D budget?
I think it will be the transformation of our society — how we work, how we learn, take care of our sick, conduct our commerce, explore, handle disasters, fight wars… everything.
If this level of transformation isn’t on your radar, if you are not thinking about how this will change your life, your business and your industry, then you are missing it, big time.
You need to understand the implications of this, and figure out how you are going to surf on top of this tsunami… not be crushed by it.
If you like, on January 9th and 10th, 2014, at the Ritz-Carlton hotel (Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles), I’ll be teaching entrepreneurs about robotics, AI and other exponential technologies, how you can think bold and take action globally, and how to leverage such powerful tools as crowd funding and incentive competitions.
And here are some Boston Dynamics videos, so you can see the robots in action:
Big Dog:Cheetah:
Atlas:
2016-03-18: Boston Dynamics are an evolutionary dead end
Boston Dynamics are very successful pioneers. But their algorithms are not based on Deep Learning principles. And Google is leading the world in Deep Learning and can apply it to anything they want, including robotics. DL based algorithms do not provide a complete robotics solution today but there is wide agreement that this is the best path forward for the field. Why is this important? The difference is robots that can walk vs robots that can dance ballet. The goal is “graceful locomotion” which will be an order of magnitude more adaptive, more energy efficient, and faster than the current generation of robots.
2019-04-02: Handle
Kinema’s software—which is robot-agnostic, meaning it already works on a range of robots beyond Handle—helps the machine through all these challenges. “Their system is able to look at a stack of boxes, and no matter how ordered or disordered the boxes are, or the markings on top, or the lighting conditions, they’re able to figure out which boxes are discrete from each other and to plan a path for grabbing the box.” That’s a huge part of what Handle, a robot designed to work in warehouses, needs to do.
2023-05-16: Some much needed competition. Boston Dynamics is moving at a snails pace.
I make a lot of fun of Microsoft for being fools here, but they do have an amazing research team. If only they could ship this stuff. The world would never be the same.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 