The Top A.I. Breakthroughs of 2015
Learn about the biggest developments of 2015 in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Also significant in ’15 is the ability to deeply imagine entirely new imagery based on short English descriptions of the desired picture. While scene renderers taking symbolic, restricted vocabularies have been around a while, this year has seen the advent of a purely neural system doing this in a way that’s not explicitly programmed. This University of Toronto team applies attention mechanisms to generation of images incrementally based on the meaning of each component of the description, in any of a number of ways per request. So androids can now dream of electric sheep.
There has even been impressive progress in computational imagination of new animated video clips this year. A team from the University of Michigan created a deep analogy system that recognizes complex implicit relationships in exemplars and is able to apply that relationship as a generative transformation of query examples. They’ve applied this in a number of synthetic applications, but most impressive is the demo (from the 10:10-11:00 mark of the video embedded below), where an entirely new short video clip of an animated character is generated based on a single still image of the never-before-seen target character, along with a comparable video clip of a different character at a different angle.
A talk by Scott Reed on Deep Visual Analogy Making
While the generation of imagery was used in these for ease of demonstration, their techniques for computational imagination are applicable across a wide variety of domains and modalities. Picture these applied to voices, or music, for instance.
Agile and Dexterous Fine Motor Skills
This year’s progress in AI hasn’t been confined to computer screens.
Earlier in the year, a German primatology team has recorded the hand motions of primates in tandem with corresponding neural activity, and they’re able to predict, based on brain activity, what fine motions are going on. They’ve also been able to teach those same fine motor skills to robotic hands, aiming at neural-enhanced prostheses.
In the middle of the year, a team at U.C. Berkeley announced a much more general and easier way to teach robots fine motor skills. They applied deep reinforcement learning-based guided policy search to get robots to be able to screw caps on bottles, to use the back of a hammer to remove a nail from wood, and other seemingly every day actions. These are the kind of actions that are typically trivial for people but very difficult for machines, and this team’s system matches human dexterity and speed at these tasks. It actually learns to do these actions by trying to do them using hand-eye coordination, and by practicing, refining its technique after just a few tries.
Watch This Space
This is by no means a comprehensive list of the impressive feats in AI and machine learning (ML) for the year. There are also many more foundational discoveries and developments that have occurred this year, including some that I fully expect to be more revolutionary than any of the above. But those are in early days and so out of the scope of these top picks.
This year has certainly provided some impressive progress. But we expect to see even more in 2016. Coming up next year, I expect to see some more radical deep architectures, better integration of the symbolic and subsymbolic, some impressive dialogue systems, an AI finally dominating the game of Go, deep learning being used for more elaborate robotic planning and motor control, high-quality video summarization, and more creative and higher-resolution dreaming, which should all be quite a sight. What’s even more exciting are the developments we don’t expect.
Author Bio: Richard Mallah is Director of Advanced Analytics at knowledge integration platform firm Cambridge Semantics, where he heads AI research in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and machine learning. He is also Director of AI Projects at technology beneficence nonprofit Future of Life Institute, where he works to keep AI good for humanity.
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There has even been impressive progress in computational imagination of new animated video clips this year. A team from the University of Michigan created a deep analogy system that recognizes complex implicit relationships in exemplars and is able to apply that relationship as a generative transformation of query examples. They’ve applied this in a number of synthetic applications, but most impressive is the demo (from the 10:10-11:00 mark of the video embedded below), where an entirely new short video clip of an animated character is generated based on a single still image of the never-before-seen target character, along with a comparable video clip of a different character at a different angle.
While the generation of imagery was used in these for ease of demonstration, their techniques for computational imagination are applicable across a wide variety of domains and modalities. Picture these applied to voices, or music, for instance.
Agile and Dexterous Fine Motor Skills
This year’s progress in AI hasn’t been confined to computer screens.
Earlier in the year, a German primatology team has recorded the hand motions of primates in tandem with corresponding neural activity, and they’re able to predict, based on brain activity, what fine motions are going on. They’ve also been able to teach those same fine motor skills to robotic hands, aiming at neural-enhanced prostheses.
In the middle of the year, a team at U.C. Berkeley announced a much more general and easier way to teach robots fine motor skills. They applied deep reinforcement learning-based guided policy search to get robots to be able to screw caps on bottles, to use the back of a hammer to remove a nail from wood, and other seemingly every day actions. These are the kind of actions that are typically trivial for people but very difficult for machines, and this team’s system matches human dexterity and speed at these tasks. It actually learns to do these actions by trying to do them using hand-eye coordination, and by practicing, refining its technique after just a few tries.
Watch This Space
This is by no means a comprehensive list of the impressive feats in AI and machine learning (ML) for the year. There are also many more foundational discoveries and developments that have occurred this year, including some that I fully expect to be more revolutionary than any of the above. But those are in early days and so out of the scope of these top picks.
This year has certainly provided some impressive progress. But we expect to see even more in 2016. Coming up next year, I expect to see some more radical deep architectures, better integration of the symbolic and subsymbolic, some impressive dialogue systems, an AI finally dominating the game of Go, deep learning being used for more elaborate robotic planning and motor control, high-quality video summarization, and more creative and higher-resolution dreaming, which should all be quite a sight. What’s even more exciting are the developments we don’t expect.
Author Bio: Richard Mallah is Director of Advanced Analytics at knowledge integration platform firm Cambridge Semantics, where he heads AI research in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and machine learning. He is also Director of AI Projects at technology beneficence nonprofit Future of Life Institute, where he works to keep AI good for humanity.
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