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Category: robotics/AI

Artificial intelligence researchers at Google DeepMind are celebrating after reaching a major breakthrough that’s been pursued for more than 20 years: The team taught a computer program the ancient game of Go, which has long been considered the most challenging game for an an artificial intelligence to learn. Not only can the team’s program play Go, it’s actually very good at it.

The computer program AlphaGo was developed by Google DeepMind specifically with the task of beating professional human players in the ancient game. The group challenged the three-time European Go Champion Fan Hui to a series of matches, and for the first time ever, the software was able to beat a professional player in all five of the games played on a full-sized board. The team announced the breakthrough in a Nature article published today.

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In a paper published in Nature on 28th January 2016, we describe a new approach to computer Go. This is the first time ever that a computer program “AlphaGo” has defeated a human professional player.

The game of Go is widely viewed as an unsolved “grand challenge” for artificial intelligence. Games are a great testing ground for inventing smarter, more flexible algorithms that have the ability to tackle problems in ways similar to humans. The first classic game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. But until now, one game has thwarted A.I. researchers: the ancient game of Go.

Despite decades of work, the strongest computer Go programs only played at the level of human amateurs. AlphaGo has won over 99% of games against the strongest other computer Go programs. It also defeated the human European champion by 5–0 in tournament games, a feat previously believed to be at least a decade away. In March 2016, AlphaGo will face its ultimate challenge: a 5-game challenge match in Seoul against the legendary Lee Sedol—the top Go player in the world over the past decade.

This video tells the story so far…

With Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind.

Deep Blue photo credit courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation, © International Business Machines Corporation.

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Wise Autoresponse for your Customer Support Call Center needs — I do know that one of the large financial institutions in NYC announced in Dec. that they were replacing their tier 1 & tier 2 support with AI this summer.

BERKELEY, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/27/16 — Wise.io, which delivers machine learning applications to help enterprises provide a better customer experience, today announced the availability of Wise Auto Response, the first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of an incoming ticket and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address the customer issue without ever involving an agent. By helping customer service teams answer common questions faster, Wise Auto Response removes a high percentage of tickets from the queue, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex tickets and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

“Wise Auto Response has dramatically eased the burden on our support agents, allowing us to reply to half of all tickets automatically,” said Francesca Noli, VP of Marketing at Product Madness. “Now we are able to focus agent attention on more complex, customer-facing issues like payment problems, which have a direct impact on our bottom line. Wise gives us the best of both worlds: it has the power of an artificial intelligence system like Watson, along with the lightweight integration we need to successfully apply machine learning to our service operations quickly, easily and cost effectively.”

Wise Auto Response identifies common customer inquiries that can be responded to with a high level of confidence — such as password resets and basic product functionality, or standard “thank you” email templates that don’t require hands-on follow up — and automatically responds without the need for any manually written business rules. The new functionality complements the current suite of predictive applications offered by Wise.io, including Wise Routing, which automates the support ticket triage process, and Wise Recommended Response, which provides a ranked shortlist of appropriate macros and templates for each new customer inquiry.

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Virtual Healthcare & IMSHealth is a major player in this service offering. Healthcare and clinic in your own home.

The University of Southern California Center for Body Computing has teamed with 8 partners to launch a Virtual Care Clinic. The idea with VCC is to create an integrated approach to the use of mobile apps, “virtual” doctors, artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis, as well as diagnostics and wearable sensors to create truly on-demand healthcare.

The partners involved in this effort are peer-reviewed clinical trial database startup Doctor Evidence, drug data resource IMS Health ($IMS), consumer design firm Karten Design, HIPAA-compliant cloud platform Medable, video creator Planet Grande, sensor-enabled pill startup Proteus Digital Health and vision player VSP Global.

VSP’s next-gen sensor-embedded eyewear prototype, dubbed Project Genesis, will be refined and tested at the VCC in consultation with USC CBC, which is the digital health innovation accelerator at Keck School of Medicine. The VCC will also involve USC’s Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT).

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I can now see it; Nov. I go into my local Verizon store; and Pepper the robot greets me and takes my name and helps me get in line for the next service tech or takes me to show me the latest devices.

Pepper, the lovable humanoid robot, is preparing to take a step into entrepreneurship and staff its own smartphone shop in Japan.

Creator company SoftBank said it planned to open the pop-up mobile store employing only Pepper robots by the end of March, according to Engadget.

The four foot-tall robots will be on hand to answer questions, provide directions and guide customers in taking out phone contracts until early April. It’s currently unknown what brands of phone Pepper will be selling.

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Interesting approach.

A group of scientists has created a neural network based on polymeric memristors — devices that can potentially be used to build fundamentally new computers. These developments will primarily help in creating technologies for machine vision, hearing, and other machine sensory systems, and also for intelligent control systems in various fields of applications, including autonomous robots.

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