Google on Tuesday said it was dabbling with getting computers to simulate the learning process of the human brain as one of the unusual projects for researchers in its X Lab.
Computers programmed with algorithms intended to mimic neural connections “learned” to recognize cats after being shown a sampling of YouTube videos, Google fellow Jeff Dean and visiting faculty Andrew Ng said in a blog post.
“Our hypothesis was that it would learn to recognize common objects in those videos,” the researchers said.
“Indeed, to our amusement, one of our artificial neurons learned to respond strongly to pictures of ... cats,” they added. “Remember that this network had never been told what a cat was, nor was it given even a single image labeled as a cat.”
The computer, essentially, discovered for itself what a cat looked like, according to Dean and Ng.
The computations were spread across an “artificial neural network” of 16,000 processors and a billion connections in Google data centers.
The small-scale “newborn brain” was shown YouTube images for a week to see what it would learn.
“It ‘discovered’ what a cat looked like by itself from only unlabeled YouTube stills,” the researchers said. “That’s what we mean by self-taught learning.”
Google researchers are building a larger model and are working on ways to apply the artificial neural network approach to improve technology for speech recognition and natural language modeling, according to Dean and Ng.
“Someday this could make the tools you use every day work better, faster, and smarter,” they said.
Dean and Ng conceded that there is a long road ahead, since an adult human brain has around 100 trillion connections.
Google X Lab headed by company co-founder Sergey Brin is known for its work on innovations, such as a self-driving car and The Terminator-style glasses that provide Internet information about what is being seen.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained