AI News

When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child’s toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That’s because most of us haven’t heard of Emily Howell. No, that’s not a person—it’s the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release,

Gaming Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition StarCraft, one of the most popular games ever made, also serves as the perfect … Haomiao Huang – Jan 19, 2011 12:15 am | 136 Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered a

Apple is launching the iPhone 4S this week with the recently unveiled integration of Siri, a voice activated “assistant.” Siri accepts voice input and can perform a range of actions on your iPhone, including looking up information, adding calendar events, and even composing short texts and e-mails. Siri shows a lot of promise in realizing human computer interaction using natural language. Right now, however, Apple seems to be wisely keeping the feature fir

Her name is Angelina: she runs on a heavy-duty Mac server and she’s building some addictive computer games for you. Angelina (a tail-recursive acronym for “A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I’ve Named ANGELINA”) is a project in evolutionary computing by Michael Cook, a PhD candidate at Imperial College in the UK. Angelina generates computer games from scratch. It arrives at a final product by breaking down the important elements of a game into sub-tasks called

Researchers at Brown and the Technical University of Berlin have produced a program that can identify simple sketches of objects almost as well as humans. The computer application enables “semantic understanding” of abstract sketches as they are being drawn in real time. The research was presented at computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH and the paper is now available online. Computers can already match sketches to objects provided they are accurate repres

In early 2010, Apple bought a company that made a popular iOS app called Siri. Its “intelligent assistant” features were incorporated into iOS 5 and made an exclusive feature of the iPhone 4S when it launched in 2011. While Siri has become synonymous with Apple thanks to its inclusion in the latest iOS devices, though, it almost became a marquee feature of every Android smartphone sold by Verizon. According to a new Huffington Post report detailing Siri’s

You might expect a book titled Robot Futures and written by a robotics researcher to be a whiz-bang prophecy of technologies that are the best thing since sliced bread. Soon we’ll be living to 200 while traveling from vacation to vacation in our flying cars. All the while, robots handle all the parts of our jobs that we hated anyway, right? Maybe, but this book isn’t the place to find it. There’s plenty of speculation in it (I mean, we are talking about th

Sample Watson smartphone app. Credit: Forbes It’s been more than two years since IBM’s Watson kicked some human butt on Jeopardy, and now the artificial intelligence system is on the verge of making it onto smartphones. IBM today announced “Watson Engagement Advisor,” software that lets businesses replace their current automated customer service systems with one that is based on Watson and is thus presumably much smarter. Given the sorry state of automated

Science If software looks like a brain and acts like a brain—will we treat it like one? How we treat brain emulations may ultimately dictate how we treat ourselves. Jenny Morber – Feb 18, 2015 2:30 pm | 301 Credit: Flickr user: Keoni Cabral Credit: Flickr user: Keoni Cabral Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Chappie is merely the latest retread of a hu

Artificial intelligence, machines and software with the ability to think for themselves, can be used for a variety of applications ranging from military technology to everyday services like automated telephone systems. However, none of the systems that currently exist exhibits learning abilities that would match the human intelligence. Recently, scientists have wondered whether an artificial agent could be given a tiny bit of human-like intelligence by mod

Artificial intelligence research is still quite far from developing chatbots that seem convincingly human. But how much does the delivery of the chatbot’s chat affect the result? What would happen if chatbot responses were delivered by a real human? Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science have designed a series of experiments that test whether human delivery makes a difference in how people perceive an artificial intelligence sy

Google has spent several years working to teach robots how to drive perfectly. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company now has to teach the cars how to break speed limits and aim for corner apices instead. The company’s self-driving fleet of cars is pretty safe, with just 16 accidents since 2009. But the vast majority of those were human drivers rear-ending the Google car, something that many in the field attribute to the very conservative nature

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” —Henry VI, Part 2. Shakespeare interpretations aside, it seems that artificial intelligence is on its way to, well, killing off lawyers. That’s according to a recent survey (PDF) of law firm leaders who say that within 10 years, new attorneys and paralegals could be replaced by an IBM Watson-like computer. The study, which included responses from high-ranking lawyers at 320 firms with at least 50 lawyers

The corporation describes TensorFlow as faster, smarter, and more flexible than its predecessor, capable of allowing the company to build and train neural networks up to five times faster compared to the first-generation system. It’s also just slick. Any computation that can be expressed as a computational flow graph can be computed with TensorFlow. Additionally, it provides tools to construct subgraphs common in neural networks, and will also compute deri

MyMoustache.net, created for Movember, uses facial analysis based on machine learning to rate your facial hair (or figure out where it would be if you had it). MyMoustache.net, created for Movember, uses facial analysis based on machine learning to rate your facial hair (or figure out where it would be if you had it). The newly updated Project Oxford homepage divides up the REST-based artificial intelligence APIs into three categories: vision, speech and l

Biz & IT Debunking the biggest myths about artificial intelligence From killer robots, to runaway sentience, there’s a lot of FUD that needs clearing up. Rupert Goodwins – Dec 25, 2015 9:00 am | 120 HAL 9000 in the film 2001. HAL 9000 in the film 2001. Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav The concept of inhuman intelligence goes back to the deep prehisto

Facebook—whose chief Mark Zuckerberg has been on something of a charm offensive in Germany—has confirmed plans to donate 25 “state-of-the-art” GPU-based servers to a myriad of European research institutions. Klaus-Robert Müller of the Technical University of Berlin will be the first benefactor of the new Facebook AI research project. His team will receive four GPU-based servers to assist them in two areas of research: image analysis of breast cancer, and c

It’s “precrime” meets “thoughtcrime.” China is using its substantial surveillance apparatus as the basis for a “unified information environment” that will allow authorities to profile individual citizens based upon their online behaviors, financial transactions, where they go, and who they see. The authorities are watching for deviations from the norm that might indicate someone is involved in suspicious activity. And they’re doing it with a hand from tech

Biz & IT Microsoft’s teenage AI shows I know nothing about millennials But like all teenagers, she seems to be angry with her mother. Ars Staff – Mar 23, 2016 8:09 pm | 101 Credit: Microsoft Credit: Microsoft Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav In rosier times, talking to Tay on Twitter. In rosier times, talking to Tay on Twitter. Same process on GroupM