For vessels operating at sea, avoiding collisions is a basic operational requirement. When those vessels are operated by humans, collision avoidance is part of basic operator training. And when those vessels become highly autonomous, collision avoidance must be incorporated into complex autonomy algorithms that must be thoroughly tested before the vessels enter the water.
MIT has used machine learning to create video from still images, and the results are pretty impressive. As you can see from the above image, there’s a lot of natural form to the movement in the videos.
The system “learns” types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing…) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos. So the beach video looks like it has crashing waves, for instance.
But like other machine-generated images, these have limitations. The first is size: what you see above is the extent to which the program can render its video. Length is also an issue: only about a second of video gets produced.
Whether you believe the buzz about artificial intelligence is merely hype or that the technology represents the future, something undeniable is happening. Researchers are more easily solving decades-long problems like teaching computers to recognize images and understanding speech at a rapid space, and companies like Google goog and Facebook fb are pouring millions of dollars into their own related projects.
What could possibly go wrong?
For one thing, advances in artificial intelligence could eventually lead to unforeseen consequences. University of California at Berkeley professor Stuart Russell is concerned that powerful computers powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, could unintentionally create problems that humans cannot predict.
Google has announced WaveNet, a speech synthesis program that uses AI and deep learning techniques to generate speech samples better than current technologies. By analyzing samples 16,000 a second, it can generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions.
If you’ve ever been lost in the maze of Youtube videos you may have stumbled on clips of computers reading news articles. You’d recognize that staccato, robotic nature of the voice. We’ve come a long way from “Danger! Will Robinson!,” but it there is yet to be a computer that can seamlessly mimic a human voice.
Now, there’s a new contender, brought to you by the brilliant minds behind DeepMind. Google has announced a new voice synthesis program in WaveNet, powered by deep neural AI.
Posted in business, robotics/AI, transportation | Leave a Comment on Apple Is Said to Be Rethinking Strategy on Self-Driving Cars — By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Brian X. Chen | The New York Times
“Apple started looking seriously into building an electric car about two years ago. It expanded the project quickly, poaching experts in battery technology and so-called machine vision, as well as veterans from the automobile industry.”
Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.
U.K.-based DeepMind, which Google acquired for about 400 million pounds ($533 million) in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence called WaveNet that can mimic human speech by learning how to form the individual sound waves a human voice creates, it said in a blog post Friday. In blind tests for U.S. English and Mandarin Chinese, human listeners found WaveNet-generated speech sounded more natural than that created with any of Google’s existing text-to-speech programs, which are based on different technologies. WaveNet still underperformed recordings of actual human speech.
Worried that AI’s one day could make us their pets Elon Musk is teasing a new brain-hacking tech
There’s no doubting that Elon Musk is one busy guy. Whether he’s trying to land on Mars with SpaceX, running Tesla, buying SolarCity, investing in the future of AI, building Giga factories or throwing out Hyperloop concepts for fun but it’s increasingly apparent that he’s giving a huge amount of thought to the day when advanced AI’s become the most intelligent form of “life” on the planet.
With the advances that we are already seeing in AI it’s inevitable that one day – sooner rather than later humans will, comparatively speaking, be as intelligent to an AI as pets are to us today. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “Neural Lace”, a nanotechnology based device that you can think of as being a digital upgrade for your brain. Human intelligence combined with the power of AI – a digital layer directly overlaid onto the brains cortex.
Now this, this will accelerate AI autonomous capabilities. However, still should be done with a QC secured infrastructure.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s research agency has a new challenge for scientists: make wireless radios with artificial intelligence that can figure out the most effective, efficient way to use the radio frequency spectrum, and win a pile of cash.
Winners of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) could take home up to $3.5 million, but to do that, teams will have to demonstrate new technologies that represent a “paradigm shift” with both military and commercial applications, said Paul Tilghman, a DARPA program manager who is leading the challenge.
“The real crux of the problem is — when you look at users of the spectrum, whether they are commercial users of the spectrum, whether they’re consumers or they’re the military — the thing that is ubiquitously true is we all are placing more and more and more demand on the spectrum, and all of that demand is really adding up.
