Can Robots Keep Humans from Abusing Other Robots?

As humans encounter more and more robots in public spaces, robot abuse is likely to get increasingly frequent. Abuse can take many forms, from more benign behaviors like deliberately getting in the way of autonomous delivery robots to see what happens, to violent and destructive attacks. Sadly, humans are more willing to abuse robots than other humans or animals, and human bystanders aren’t reliable at mitigating these attacks, even if the robot itself is begging for help. Without being able to count on nearby humans for rescue, robots have no choice but to rely on themselves and their friends for safety when out in public—their friends being other robots. Researchers at the Interactive Machines Group at Yale University have run an experiment to determine whether emotionally expressive bystander robots might be able to prompt nearby humans into stepping in to prevent robot abuse. 

Startup and Academics Find Path to Powerful Analog AI

Engineers have been chasing a form of AI that could drastically lower the energy required to do typical AI things like recognize words and images. This analog form of machine learning does one of the key mathematical operations of neural networks using the physics of a circuit instead of digital logic. But one of the main things limiting this approach is that deep learning’s training algorithm, back propagation, has to be done by GPUs or other separate digital systems. Now University of Montreal AI expert Yoshua Bengio, his student Benjamin Scellier, and colleagues at startup Rain Neuromorphics have come up with way for analog AIs to train themselves. That method, called equilibrium propagation, could lead to continuously learning, low-power analog systems of a far greater computational ability than most in the industry now consider possible, according to Rain CTO Jack Kendall. Analog circuits could save power in neural networks in part Continue reading Startup and Academics Find Path to Powerful Analog AI

Peer Review of Scholarly Research Gets an AI Boost

In the world of academics, peer review is considered the only credible validation of scholarly work. Although the process has its detractors, evaluation of academic research by a cohort of contemporaries has endured for over 350 years, with “relatively minor changes.” However, peer review may be set to undergo its biggest revolution ever—the integration of artificial intelligence. Open-access publisher Frontiers has debuted an AI tool called the Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA), which purports to eliminate much of the grunt work associated with peer review. Since the beginning of June 2020, every one of the 11,000-plus submissions Frontiers received has been run through AIRA, which is integrated into its collaborative peer-review platform. This also makes it accessible to external users, accounting for some 100,000 editors, authors, and reviewers. Altogether, this helps “maximize the efficiency of the publishing process and make peer-review more objective,” says Kamila Markram, founder and CEO of Frontiers. AIRA’s interactive online platform, which Continue reading Peer Review of Scholarly Research Gets an AI Boost

Attention Rogue Drone Pilots: AI Can See You!

The minute details of rogue drone’s movements in the air may unwittingly reveal the drone pilot’s location—possibly enabling authorities to bring the drone down before, say, it has the opportunity to disrupt air traffic or cause an accident. And it’s possible without requiring expensive arrays of radio triangulation and signal-location antennas. So says a team of Israeli researchers who have trained an AI drone-tracking algorithm to reveal the drone operator’s whereabouts, with a better than 80 per cent accuracy level. They are now investigating whether the algorithm can also uncover the pilot’s level of expertise and even possibly their identity. Gera Weiss—professor of computer science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel—said the algorithm his team has developed partly relies on the specific terrain around an airport or other high-security location. After testing neural nets including dense networks and convolutional neural networks, the researchers found that a kind of recurrent neural net called Continue reading Attention Rogue Drone Pilots: AI Can See You!

Robot Learns to Cook Your Perfect Omelet

Cooking robots have come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. We’re not yet at the point where we’ve got robot arms dangling from the ceiling that do all the work for us, but there are a bunch of robots out there with reasonable cookie-making skills. However, we’ve mostly seen cooking robots that are programmed to follow a specific recipe, rather than cooking robots that are programmed to cook you exactly what you want. Sometimes these are the same thing, but often cooking is (I’m told) much more about adapting a recipe to your individual taste.   For personal cooking robots to make us food that we love, they’re going to need to be able to listen to our feedback, understand what that feedback means, and then take actions to adapt their recipe or technique to achieve the desired outcome. This is more complicated than, say, adding less Continue reading Robot Learns to Cook Your Perfect Omelet

What’s the Deal With Robot Comedy?

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. In my mythical free time outside of professorhood, I’m a stand-up comedian and improviser. As a comedian, I’ve often found myself wishing I could banter with modern commercial AI assistants. They don’t have enough comedic skills for my taste! This longing for cheeky AI eventually led me to study autonomous robot comedians, and to teach my own robot how to perform stand-up.

A Robot That Explains Its Actions Is a First Step Towards AI We Can (Maybe) Trust

For the most part, robots are a mystery to end users. And that’s part of the point: Robots are autonomous, so they’re supposed to do their own thing (presumably the thing that you want them to do) and not bother you about it. But as humans start to work more closely with robots, in collaborative tasks or social or assistive contexts, it’s going to be hard for us to trust them if their autonomy is such that we find it difficult to understand what they’re doing. In a paper published in Science Robotics, researchers from UCLA have developed a robotic system that can generate different kinds of real-time, human-readable explanations about its actions, and then did some testing to figure which of the explanations were the most effective at improving a human’s trust in the system. Does this mean we can totally understand and trust robots now? Not yet—but it’s Continue reading A Robot That Explains Its Actions Is a First Step Towards AI We Can (Maybe) Trust

The Next Frontier in AI: Nothing

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. At an early age, as we take our first steps into the world of math and numbers, we learn that one apple plus another apple equals two apples. We learn to count real things. Only later are we introduced to a weird concept: zero… or the number of apples in an empty box. The concept of “zero” revolutionized math after Hindu-Arabic scholars and then the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced it into our modern numbering system. While today we comfortably use zero in all our mathematical operations, the concept of “nothing” has yet to enter the realm of artificial intelligence. In a sense, AI and deep learning still need to learn how to recognize and reason with nothing. Is it an apple or a banana? Continue reading The Next Frontier in AI: Nothing

Facebook AI Launches Its Deepfake Detection Challenge

In September, Facebook sent out a strange casting call: We need all types of people to look into a webcam or phone camera and say very mundane things. The actors stood in bedrooms, hallways, and backyards, and they talked about topics such as the perils of junk food and the importance of arts education. It was a quick and easy gig—with an odd caveat. Facebook researchers would be altering the videos, extracting each person’s face and fusing it onto another person’s head. In other words, the participants had to agree to become deepfake characters.  Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) division put out this casting call so it could ethically produce deepfakes—a term that originally referred to videos that had been modified using a certain face-swapping technique but is now a catchall for manipulated video. The Facebook videos are part of a training data set that the company assembled for a global Continue reading Facebook AI Launches Its Deepfake Detection Challenge

Yoshua Bengio, Revered Architect of AI, Has Some Ideas About What to Build Next

Yoshua Bengio is known as one of the “three musketeers” of deep learning, the type of artificial intelligence (AI) that dominates the field today.  Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is credited with making key breakthroughs in the use of neural networks—and just as importantly, with persevering with the work through the long cold AI winter of the late 1980s and the 1990s, when most people thought that neural networks were a dead end.  He was rewarded for his perseverance in 2018, when he and his fellow musketeers (Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) won the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing. Today, there’s increasing discussion about the shortcomings of deep learning. In that context, IEEE Spectrum spoke to Bengio about where the field should go from here. He’ll speak on a similar subject tomorrow at NeurIPS, the biggest and buzziest AI conference in the world; Continue reading Yoshua Bengio, Revered Architect of AI, Has Some Ideas About What to Build Next