AI in the News — #23

Cozmo (TechXplore)

Cozmo is a $180 toy robot the size of your fist, deliberately designed to project character. It makes R2-ish noises, plays with you, and had animators and game-designers in its development crew. Miss Manners (Judith Martin) once said that anyone might curse at a slow elevator, but only a monster would hurt a teddy bear. Cozmo is just as inanimate as either of those, but trying way harder to engage you. Is that cheating? It it is inanimate. Is it leading you up a garden path?

Giving 200% (Science News)

There’s a quandary involved in driverless cars: We want them to save pedestrians at all costs AND save passengers at all costs…

Analog AI (Science Daily)

Deep learning is a design principle in AI: stacks of neural nets (that’s the “deep” part) run through huge numbers of examples and make their own generalizations. It works very well. But it’s not very human. A more human-like approach is structural mapping, in which the AI learns to make matches between patterns, to think analogically, something we do all the time.

Google on AI safety (TechXplore) (arXiv)

Google is starting a program for “open, cross-institution work on how to build machine learning systems that work as intended. We’re eager to continue our collaborations with other research groups to make positive progress on AI.”

Verbal description (Phys.org)

Disney has developed an AI system that recognizes objects from written descriptions. That takes a great deal of understanding of natural language.

And then he’ll… (Phys.org)

Deep learning, as remarked, works on reviewing lots of examples. It has now been used to predict human actions, training from YouTube and TV.
“Trained on YouTube videos and TV shows such as “The Office” and “Desperate Housewives,” the system can predict whether two individuals will hug, kiss, shake hands or slap five.”