Alexa and Siri, listen up! Research team is teaching machines to really hear us
University of Virginia cognitive scientist Per Sederberg has a fun experiment you can try at home. Take out your smartphone and, using a voice assistant such as the one for Google's search engine, say the word "octopus" as slowly as you can.
Robots learn household tasks by watching humans
The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what Bahl had done.
Using artificial intelligence to train teams of robots to work together
When communication lines are open, individual agents such as robots or drones can work together to collaborate and complete a task. But what if they aren't equipped with the right hardware or the signals are blocked, making communication impossible? University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers started with this more difficult challenge.
Open source platform enables research on privacy-preserving machine learning
The biggest benchmarking data set to date for a machine learning technique designed with data privacy in mind has been released open source by researchers at the University of Michigan.
5 ways AI is detecting and preventing identity fraud
2022 has been a record-setting year for identity fraud. Here are five ways to detect and prevent it.
Women in AI: Whose voice should be loudest in the diversity convo?
The Women in Data & AI Breakfast Panel, sponsored by Capital One, kicked off VB Transform 2022 with a look at allyship, data bias, and more.
Twitter Takes Round 1
Judge Kathaleen McCormick granted the social media giant’s request for an expedited hearing. Now, the two sides are gearing up for a trial in October.
Mistakenly calling AIs
A Google engineer recently claimed an AI was alive and that it had hired a lawyer. If judges were to accept these claims, it could lead to AIs being frozen in their biased states, writes Annalee Newitz
Robots learn household tasks by watching humans
Researchers have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores.
Push for AI innovation can create dangerous products
Competition between corporations drives innovation and development. But when it comes to artificial intelligence systems, the prevention of harm should be more important.
A system to retrieve images using sketches on smart devices
Researchers at the SketchX, University of Surrey have recently developed a meta learning-based model that allows users to retrieve images of specific items simply by sketching them on a tablet, smartphone, or on other smart devices. This framework was outlined in a paper set to be presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), one of the top three flagship computer vision conferences along with CVPR and ICCV.
New Technology Gives AI Human-Like Eyes
The technology might result in highly developed artificial intelligence that can instantaneously understand what it sees and has uses in robotics and self-driving cars. Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) have built a device for ar
Applying fictitious AI to the real world
Seeing a world increasing its reliance on artificial intelligence, or AI, LSU Ph.D. candidate Zita Hüsing decided to take a closer look at AI through fiction. Using the fictional androids seen in the movie "Blade Runner," Hüsing is examining how AI plays a part in American labor and capitalism, and its impact on disability, race and gender.
Aboriginal language could help solve complex AI problems
Jingulu—a language spoken by the Jingili people in the Northern Territory—has characteristics that allow it to be easily translated into AI commands.
Nanomagnets can discern wine, and could slake AI's thirst for energy
Human brains process loads of information. When wine aficionados taste a new wine, neural networks in their brains process an array of data from each sip. Synapses in their neurons fire, weighing the importance of each bit of data—acidity, fruitiness, bitterness—before passing it along to the next layer of neurons in the network.
Intelligent wireless walls for contactless in-home monitoring
Patient health care strongly relies on in-hospital situation and remote monitoring at home is very challenging. Various human activity recognition systems have been proposed exploiting sensors, cameras and wearables. However, these techniques raise either privacy concerns or involve the discomfort of carrying wearables all the time.
Robot dog learns to walk in one hour
A newborn giraffe or foal must learn to walk on its legs as fast as possible to avoid predators. Animals are born with muscle coordination networks located in their spinal cord. However, learning the precise coordination of leg muscles and tendons takes some time.
As AI language skills grow, so do scientists' concerns
The tech industry's latest artificial intelligence constructs can be pretty convincing if you ask them what it feels like to be a sentient computer, or maybe just a dinosaur or squirrel. But they're not so good—and sometimes dangerously bad—at handling other seemingly straightforward tasks.