AI in the News - #3
No Cute Bots (BBC)
Rodney Brooks says he doesn't want "cute" robots, but he must still wants them to be relatable – "personified" – since his no-nonsense assembly-line-worker robots still have TV cartoon faces.
A Chat with Watson (Science Daily)
IBM has added voice recognition to their premier AI, Watson, so it can now take questions like "How do you make a better desalination process for consuming sea water?" It then responds as a search engine, but working the hits into a conversation.
"Teaching Machines to Learn on Their Own" (Scientific American)
"Undirected learning" is an important strategy in AI design: You turn the machine loose in an environment and it "makes sense" of it, forming categories on its own, for later "discussion" with you.
Chatting with Neural Nets (Discover)
A specific application of undirected learning is ANNABELL, capable of much more connected conversation than Siri, Cortana, or OK Google. Of course, the conversation is probably in Italitan, since ANNABELL is at Università di Sassari in Italy.