You could get help setting off on your vacation from an unusual source this summer, courtesy of a new initiative announced by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Virtual customer representatives, described as “hologram-like avatars” by the Port Authority, will be tested in JFK’s Terminal 5, LaGuardia’s Central Terminal Building, and Newark Liberty’s Terminal B from early July until the end of the year.
Posts tagged "AI"
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'Hologram-like' assistants coming to New York airports in July →
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Science Fiction or Fact: Humanlike Intelligent Machines Will Soon Exist →
In many futuristic tales, our heroic protagonists are often helped — and sometimes harmed — by intelligent machines far more clever than an iPhone. These computers sometimes walk and talk among us. Quick-witted machines serve on spaceships like Lieutenant Commander Data on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” or in our homes like the wisecracking housemaid Rosie the Robot on “The Jetsons.”
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Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test →
One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade.
Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.
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In Crosswords, It's Man Over Machine, for Now →
Score one for humans and their subtle, quirky, pattern-matching brains.
Over the weekend, an impressive crossword-solving computer program, called Dr. Fill, which I wrote about earlier, matched its digital wits against the wetware of 600 of the nation’s best human solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn.
Before the tournament, Matthew Ginsberg, the creator of Dr. Fill and an expert in artificial intelligence, predicted a range of likely outcomes for his clever code. In simulations of 15 past tournaments, Dr. Fill finished on top three times. But at other times it stumbled.
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Artificial Intelligence: No Longer Chasing The Human Dream →
‘I propose to consider the question “Can machines think?”‘ Not my question but the opening of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper which is generally regarded as the catalyst for the modern quest to create artificial intelligence. His question was inspired by a book he had been given at the age of 10: Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster. The book was packed with nuggets that fired the young Turing’s imagination including the following provocative statement:
“Of course the body is a machine. It is vastly complex, many times more complicated than any machine ever made with hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam machine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we know now. It really is a gas engine; like the engine of an automobile, a motor boat or a flying machine.”
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Driverless cars ready to hit our roads →
Lean back, let go of the steering wheel, ease your feet off the pedals and relax: your car is now in charge. The dream of a car that can drive itself has grown over the last decade as the necessary technologies have gradually proved their worth, but the idea has faced major legal hurdles.
Not for much longer. Politicians are now scrambling to make self-driving cars a reality. From Hawaii to Florida, and Oxford to Berlin, the race is on to get driverless cars onto our streets.
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Applying Watson technology for personalized cancer care →
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and IBM have announced an agreement to collaborate on the development of a powerful tool built upon IBM Watson to provide medical professionals with improved access to current and comprehensive cancer data and practices.
The resulting decision support tool will help doctors everywhere create individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on current evidence.
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Bina48 and the State of A.I. at 'South-by' →
The topic of artificial intelligence was front and center at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive Conference…the result, I suspect, of Apple launching Siri around the time the panels were selected. Amber Case, a self-styled “Cyborg Anthropologist” got us started off right with a keynote Sunday about the recent history of man’s merge with machine. She claims any one of us who has a smart phone within reach is already a primitive form of cyborg. Our always-on access to the web makes our brains less and less storage devices for deep, contextual knowledge. Instead, our memories become more akin to a layer of metadata. That allows us to categorize and access knowledge based on our understanding of how to find that knowledge amidst the synapses of the hive-mind we call the World Wide Web. The next day, Ray Kurzweil echoed that theme, telling a packed room of 4,000 people that we are at the front end of a miraculous century. We’re seeing a “democratization of innovation” that allows “small but passionate groups” of individuals to create revolutions that shape humanity. Like Case he feels we are already merged with machines, and whether the technology is internal or external to our bodies is largely irrelevant. That said, a more invasive merge is inevitable because, now that we have mapped the human genome, health and medicine have actually become information technology.
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Baby brainpower makes computers smarter →
Researchers are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.
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The Future of Quantum Computing
Today’s robots are less intelligent than cockroaches, but advances in quantum computing—transferring information using atoms rather than silicon—could revolutionize the field of AI.
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The Turing Test
Artificial Intelligence Computer Algorithms compete with each other in a Game Show setting where they attempt to pass the ‘Turing Test’ and be accepted as human.The work represents a new paradigm in computer generated filmmaking. The realistic 3D human-like digital actors were recorded in real-time directly from the display of a standard PC. The characters’ dialogue was created from textwith a text to speech engine or automatically synchronized to real voice audio clips. The digital actors were ‘directed’ using a markup language to describe behaviours and expressions, with real-time interactive playback.
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AI designs its own video game →
IT IS never going to compete with the latest iteration of Call of Duty, but then Space Station Invaders is not your typical blockbuster video game. While modern shooters involve hundreds of programmers and cost millions of dollars, this new game is the handiwork of an AI called Angelina.
Software that generates video-game artwork, music or even whole levels is not new, but Angelina takes it a step further by creating a simple video game almost entirely from scratch. “It has only been very recently that we’ve asked ourselves, could you procedurally generate the whole thing?” says Michael Cook, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and creator of the game-designing AI system.
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New potato-spotting AI built with off-the-shelf tech →
A “learning” computer system that sorts potatoes has been built using off-the-shelf technology by researchers at the University of Lincoln’s Robotics Lab.
The robot blemish spotter can reliably identify diseases such as silver scurf and common scab, researchers said.
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Computer program that think like humans →
Intelligence — what does it really mean? In the 1800s, it meant that you were good at memorising things, and today intelligence is often measured through IQ tests where the average score for humans is 100. Researchers at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have created a computer programme that can score 150.
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FAQ on AGI and The Singularity →
Here are some brief answers to some non-technical questions about AGI/Singularity that I get asked a lot…
Q: When do you think AGI will be created at the current rate?
A: The “current rate” is hard to define, given the reality of exponential acceleration, and the difficulty of estimating the exponent for acceleration of AGI development. My best guess is that, if there’s no massive and well-done funding infusion, we’ll get it sometime between 2020 and 2035. (By “AGI” I mean human-level AGI, though not necessarily precise human intelligence emulation.)
