What’s artificial intelligence? It is intelligence demonstrated by machines.
A couple years ago, we can only see these mysterious things in sci-fi movies. Do you remember WALL-E? What about R2 in Star Wars? Cute right? No, they are smart.
We already made a lot of progress in image recognition with the help of artificial intelligence. Scientists invented a lot of neural network architectures inspired by human brains.
Out of those neural networks, CNNs(Convolutional Neural Networks) might be the most famous one. Here’s how it works: The network consists of many layers. The first couple of layers might detect low level features such as edges and curves. As it goes to deeper layers, the network will be able to recognize higher level features such as hands or paws or ears in order to predict whether an image is a bird or a cat, etc.
With CNNs, program can recognize the object better than human with lower error. It’s definitely a huge jump for artificial intelligence.
Some people might say artificial intelligence is just a story and it’s too far away from us. Actually it’s not and it’s speeding up and running into our daily life. Here are some examples.
- Siri
Have you ever used Siri before? Siri is a intelligent personal assistant on iPhone. You can ask questions and talk with her.
You can ask Siri to call your friend David through speaking to her like this “Siri, call David” or “Siri, facetime David” without looking for the contact and dialing to David. Or say “Siri, text Dad I’m on my way home” to send a message to your dad without typing by yourself. Or say “Siri, remind me to walk the dog at 7PM today” to set up a reminder.
You don’t need to spend thousands to hire somebody to manage your life. With the advance of natural language processing technology, everybody can feel like a boss and have a real personal assistant.
2. Tesla
You must hear of Tesla, which is the baby of Elon Musk along with SpaceX and SolarCity. Tesla is not just a normal electric car while autopilot definitely differentiates it from others.
Tesla demonstrated level 2.5 capability in the above figure so that it can match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.
Imagine you can just get into Tesla and take a break. You’ll arrive at the destination when you wake up. It will give the competitors a deathly punch and disrupt the transportation industry as well after the automobile area.
It’s pretty amazing and everybody should get his own personal driver. Hopefully it can reduce the cost and let people enjoy the driving experience brought by Tesla.
3. Nest
“Create a connected home” is Nest’s slogan.
With Nest, people can interact with equipments including heating system, cooling system, security camera, doorbell, and even alarm system etc within finger tips on smart phones.
Nest uses behavioral algorithms to predictively learn from your heating and cooling needs, thus anticipating and adjusting the temperature in your home or office based on your own personal needs.
I would imagine Nest will expand to much more devices in the future and become the personal maid of your smart home.
4. Real3D
Powered by artificial intelligence and drone techniques, Real3D can recognize the object automatically and build 1:1 ratio high-quality 3D models for almost any object with just photos and even some short video recording as shown in Figure 2. The error of Real3D is less than one millimeter with the highest accuracy in the world.
With AR technique, Real3D allows people to walk through the house and place furnitures exactly as they were in the house, and change any object’s(like countertop) texture and color as they wish. Drone can help Real3D build the exterior model for the house.
Real3D will reconstruct the whole world. It starts from the furniture market and disrupt this vertical area. Real3D will expand to the whole E-Commerce later and eventually Real3D will help every E-Commerce website display the object in 3D format.
After E-Commerce, Real3D will expand to different domains including real estate, Social Network, Health-Care, Gaming, etc(see appendix). Real3D will change the way how people live and make the life better than ever.
We have to admit Artificial Intelligence starts to change our life, even though it’s weak in terms of intelligence and limited in its capabilities. While there might be a long way for us to improve the current AI and reach the final goal, we should look for new approaches along the road and enjoy whatever it brings to us.
References
- http://300-heroes.wikia.com/wiki/Wall-E
- http://vsheji.net/news/360.html
- https://adeshpande3.github.io/adeshpande3.github.io/A-Beginner's-Guide-To-Understanding-Convolutional-Neural-Networks/
- https://www.apple.com/ios/siri/
- https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
- https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-advice/autonomous-driving-levels-explained-47106