Topics

46

Teaching & Research Forum / Artificial intelligence may soon be able to build more AI

« on: November 23, 2017, 03:23:43 PM »

They are a dream of researchers but perhaps a nightmare for highly skilled computer programmers: artificially intelligent machines that can build other artificially intelligent machines.
With recent speeches in both Silicon Valley and China, Jeff Dean, one of Google’s leading engineers, spotlighted a Google project called AutoML. ML is short for machine learning, referring to computer algorithms that can learn to perform particular tasks on their own by analyzing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine-learning algorithm that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms.

With it, Google may soon find a way to create AI technology that can partly take the humans out of building the AI systems that many believe are the future of the technology industry.
The project is part of a much larger effort to bring the latest and greatest AI techniques to a wider collection of companies and software developers.
The tech industry is promising everything from smartphone apps that can recognize faces to cars that can drive on their own. But by some estimates, only 10,000 people worldwide have the education, experience and talent needed to build the complex and sometimes mysterious mathematical algorithms that will drive this new breed of artificial intelligence.
The world’s largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to AI experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn’t going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Artificial-intelligence-may-soon-be-able-to-build-12336227.php

47

Teaching & Research Forum / UC Berkeley professor's eerie lethal drone

« on: November 23, 2017, 03:22:37 PM »

UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute have created an eerie viral video titled "Slaughterbots" that depicts a future in which humans develop small, hand-sized drones that are programmed to identify and eliminate designated targets.

In the video above, the technology is initially developed with the intention of combating crime and terrorism, but the drones are taken over by an unknown forces who use the powerful weapons to murder a group of senators and college students. The video does contain some graphic content, and was originally uploaded to YouTube.

Russell, an expert on artificial intelligence, appears at the end of the video and warns against humanity's development of autonomous weapons.

"This short film is just more than speculation," Russell says. "It shows the results of integrating and militarizing technologies that we already have."

Source: http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/UC-Berkeley-killer-robots-artificial-intelligence-12368152.phpUC

48

Teaching & Research Forum / Transcend the Classroom with Virtual Place-Based Learning

« on: November 21, 2017, 11:07:12 PM »

Personally, I’ve always been a sucker for games like SimCity, Age of Empires or Theme Park Tycoon, where I get to be the master of a little universe for a while. From an early age, these games allowed me to construct an alternate reality where I got to be an architect, emperor or entrepreneur. Although these games were always more about fun than anything else, I learned an incredible amount about grown-up things through them—business management, resource allocation and the economy, for example. The simulated environment allowed me to make mistakes and explore possibilities within a realistic scenario.

Simulation-based learning allows us to play in a highly immersive environment that reflects aspects of the real world. In virtual simulations, we can explore and create with much lower stakes than we would encounter in the real world. Questions of “What if?” flourish in a virtual simulation as we create and experience new possibilities with increasing realism. With smartphones making access to virtual reality easier and easier, virtual simulations can now become part of place-based learning in the classroom.

Using virtual reality creation technology, we asked our students at Parklands College to design “District 2020,” a hypothetical eco-city based on an area of Cape Town, South Africa, formerly known as District Six. Students were to virtually design District 2020 as an urban area emphasizing sustainability and food security and reflecting the area’s social history. This created a place-based interdisciplinary project where students drew from English, history and geography learning and applied their knowledge to a contemporary challenge in a local context.

Students designed their eco-cities in a simulated virtual reality environment during class time. They worked in groups of three. While working collaboratively on designing District 2020, each group had an architect, a researcher and an urban planner. We provided students with a checklist of design considerations, but allowed them total freedom as to the appearance, presentation and embellishments of their eco-city. Their final product was a link to their virtual reality eco-city. We could open their links on our phones, slip it into Google Cardboard and assess their work from inside virtual reality.

49

Teaching & Research Forum / InMind Virtual Reality apps

« on: November 21, 2017, 11:05:39 PM »

Revolving around the chemistry behind human emotion, InMind VR 2 is set inside the brain of John, a teenage boy. It is inspired by Lövheim’s theory of emotions and the well-loved Disney Pixar animated movie, “Inside Out.” To control John’s emotions, one must catch the right neurons by shaking his head. These molecules will control John’s reactions to the situations around him, which will then shape his future as an adult.

InMind VR 2 is compatible with View Master, Fibrum, Homido, Lakento, Archos, Durovis and other Cardboard headsets.

50

Teaching & Research Forum / Educational Virtual Reality Apps

« on: November 21, 2017, 11:05:02 PM »

Virtual reality (VR) has so much potential as a tool that can take learning beyond the conventional classroom. With touted benefits such as enhanced engagement, improved retention, and the ability to block out common classroom distractions, this simulation-based technology is being predicted as one of the top emerging learning trends in 2017.

But despite the clear advantages, we have yet to see the widespread use of virtual reality in schools. According to the findings of a survey conducted by Extreme Networks in June 2016, 77% of 350 higher education and K-12 schools had not used VR in the classroom, and the top reasons for not utilizing the technology, according to 43% of the respondents, were the high cost of equipment and the difficulty in implementation.

However, the future of VR in the education sector isn’t bleak at all. About 53% of the survey respondents did reveal that they plan to use VR in the future, and 68% acknowledged this technology’s power to excite students to learn.

The creative use of VR technology as a storytelling tool is also expected to further engage young learners.

51

Faculty Sections / State of technology in 2018 - Future Forecast

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:59:19 PM »

TECHNOLOGY RELEASES FOR 2018
In 2018, a number of technology breakthroughs and trends will become available to the public, for example:
There will be one Wi-Fi hotspot for every 20 people. 1
Elon Musk's supersonic Hyperloop train to open to public 1
Apple Inc. transition to OLEDs screens, marking shift in smartphone industry 1
Tesla plans to build and sell 500,000 electric vehicles 1
HP's latest computer invention, The Machine, is available for purchase and is 6 times more powerful than current servers 1
10Gbps Wi-Fi available at 5GHz frequency bands 1
Cell phone signals become 1000x faster with pCell 1
James Webb Space Telescope is launched into orbit to discover liquid water on other planets 1
First 3D printed car created 1
Cost of solar panels, per watt, equals 1.5 US dollars 1
Kenya/Uganda/Rwanda's "Mombasa-Kigali railway project" is fully built 1
London's "London Crossrail" is fully built 1
Abu Dhabi's "Saadiyat Island" is fully built 1
South Korea's "Songdo IBD" is fully built 1
Abu Dhabi's "Yas Island" is fully built 1
World sales of electric vehicles reaches 5,200,000 1
Predicted global mobile web traffic equals 10.5 exabytes 1
Global Internet traffic grows to 132 exabytes 1

52

Faculty Sections / 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:58:30 PM »

these technologies all have staying power. They will affect the economy and our politics, improve medicine, or influence our culture. Some are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop. But you should know about all of them right now.

Reversing Paralysis
Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take away.

Availability: 10 to 15 years

“Go, go!” was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine’s mind.

The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal’s spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal’s spinal cord, below the injury. A wireless connection joined the two electronic devices.

The result: a system that read the monkey’s intention to move and then transmitted it immediately in the form of bursts of electrical stimulation to its spine. Soon enough, the monkey’s right leg began to move. Extend and flex. Extend and flex. It hobbled forward. “The monkey was thinking, and then boom, it was walking,” recalls an exultant Courtine, a professor with Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

53

Faculty Sections / Best Augmented Reality apps

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:49:14 PM »

Since it was first announced at WWDC, Apple’s ARKit has been open to developers to get a feel for the new platform. Now that iOS 11 is finally here, ARKit is available for anyone with an iPhone 6S or later, the iPad Pro, and the latest 9.7-inch iPad. In the time between the announcement and its official release yesterday, developers have used ARKit to create apps for big brands like The Food Network and AMC’s The Walking Dead, as well as for smaller, but no less important amusements like this demo that does nothing but visualize AR tea cups resting on top of a good dog.

Whether it’s existing apps that have added AR functionality with their updates, or fresh new apps introduced specifically for the platform, here are nine AR-ready iOS apps you should check out after updating to iOS 11 to get a feel for the feature’s usefulness — and yes — pointless fun.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/20/16329366/ios-11-apple-arkit-best-new-ar-apps

54

Faculty Sections / Best virtual reality apps

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:47:58 PM »

Virtual reality apps can immerse you in incredible 360-degree visuals. You don't need to splash hundreds of pounds on headsets such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, you can enjoy a great VR experience using your smartphone and some brilliant apps.

While early VR experiences were limited to advanced headsets, now there are a range of options for turning your smartphone into an immersive device.

To use VR on your smartphone you can pick up a budget headset such as Google's Daydream View, the Samsung Gear VR, or even the simple Google Cardboard. There are also plenty of budget virtual reality headsets that work well with iPhones, such as the Homido V2.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/10-best-virtual-reality-apps/

55

Faculty Forum / Support Vector Machine (SVM)

« on: November 14, 2017, 09:10:45 PM »

What is the goal of the Support Vector Machine (SVM)?

The goal of a support vector machine is to find the optimal separating hyperplane which maximizes the margin of the training data.
The first thing we can see from this definition is that a SVM needs training data. Which means it is a supervised learning algorithm.

It is also important to know that SVM is a classification algorithm. Which means we will use it to predict if something belongs to a particular class.

Source:https://www.svm-tutorial.com/

56

Faculty Forum / Welcome to Deep Learning

« on: November 13, 2017, 09:29:07 PM »

Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.

If you are just starting out in the field of deep learning or you had some experience with neural networks some time ago, you may be confused. I know I was confused initially and so were many of my colleagues and friends who learned and used neural networks in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The leaders and experts in the field have ideas of what deep learning is and these specific and nuanced perspectives shed a lot of light on what deep learning is all about.

In this post, you will discover exactly what deep learning is by hearing from a range of experts and leaders in the field.

Source: https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-is-deep-learning/

57

Faculty Forum / Computing machinery and Inteligence

« on: November 13, 2017, 09:21:32 PM »

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

Source: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

58

Faculty Forum / Facebook open-sources Caffe2, a new deep learning framework

« on: April 21, 2017, 11:33:18 AM »

At its F8 developer conference in San Jose, Facebook is announcing the launch of Caffe2, a new open-source framework for deep learning, a trendy type of artificial intelligence (AI). Deep learning generally involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, like photos, and then getting them to make inferences about new data.

Today’s announcement builds on Facebook’s contributions to the Torch open-source deep learning framework and more recently the PyTorch framework that the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group conceived. And last year Facebook talked about a system called Caffe2go

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/18/facebook-open-sources-caffe2-a-new-deep-learning-framework/

59

Faculty Forum / Most cited deep learning papers

« on: April 20, 2017, 04:38:40 PM »

This is a curated list of the most cited deep learning papers (since 2012) posted by Terry Taewoong Um.

The repository is broken down into the following categories:
Understanding / Generalization / Transfer
Optimization / Training Techniques
Unsupervised / Generative Models
Convolutional Network Models
Image Segmentation / Object Detection
Image / Video / Etc
Recurrent Neural Network Models
Natural Language Process
Speech / Other Domain
Reinforcement Learning / Robotics
More Papers from 2016

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/most-cited-deep-learning-papers

60

Faculty Forum / Welcome to Kaggle Competitions

« on: April 20, 2017, 04:37:12 PM »

Challenge yourself with real-world machine learning problems

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions