Remember The Jetsons’ robot maid, Rosie? Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers think her future real-life incarnations can learn a thing or two from Steve Carell and other sitcom stars.
MIT says a computer that binge-watched YouTube videos and TV shows such as The Office, The Big Bang Theory and Desperate Housewives learned how to predict whether the actors were about to hug, kiss, shake hands or slap high fives — advances that eventually could help the next generation of artificial intelligence function less clumsily.
“It could help a robot move more fluidly through your living space,” lead researcher Carl Vondrick said in an interview. “The robot won’t want to start pouring milk if it thinks you’re about to pull the glass away.”
Photo: AFP
Vondrick also sees potential healthcare applications.
“If you can predict that someone’s about to fall down or start a fire or hurt themselves, it might give you a few seconds’ advance notice to intervene,” he said.
The findings — two years in the making at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — are to be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Las Vegas from today through Friday.
Vondrick, a doctoral candidate focusing on computer vision and machine learning with grants from Google and the National Science Foundation, worked with MIT professor Antonio Torralba and Hamed Pirsiavash, now at the University of Maryland. The trio wanted to see if they could create an algorithm that could mimic a human being’s intuition in anticipating what will happen next after two people meet.
To refine what is known in artificial intelligence studies as “predictive vision,” they needed to expose their machine-learning system to video showing humans greeting one another.
Cue what Vondrick acknowledges were “random videos off YouTube.” Six hundred hours of them, to be precise.
The researchers downloaded the videos and converted them into visual representations — a sort of numerical interpretation of pixels on a screen that the algorithm could read and search for complex patterns.
They then showed the computer clips from TV sitcoms it had never seen before — interactions between The Big Bang Theory stars Jim Parsons (Sheldon Cooper) and Kaley Cuoco (Penny), for example — and asked the algorithm to predict one second later whether the two would hug, kiss, shake hands or high-five.
The computer got it right more than 43 percent of the time. That may not sound like much, but it is better than existing algorithms with a 36 percent success rate. Humans make the right call 71 percent of the time.
In a video trailer of the study that showed the algorithm blowing it on a clip from The Office, the researchers quipped: “So it’s not perfect ... still a long way to go.”
That likely will involve even more binge-watching. Six hundred hours of video sounds like a lot, but it is not really that much. By the time we are 10 years old, we have logged nearly 60,000 hours of waking-hours experience.
“Humans are really good at predicting the immediate future,” Pirsiavash, the team member now based in Baltimore, said on Wednesday. “To have robots interact with humans seamlessly, the robot should be able to reason about the immediate future of our actions.”
Martial Hebert, director of the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the MIT study, called it “an important work.”
“Some argue that prediction is a central part of [artificial] intelligence,” Hebert said. “If you have a robot that can predict, you can map a deeper and more complicated understanding of the environment around it.”
The researchers’ biggest relief? The computer did all the binge-watching.
“We never had to watch the videos,” Vondrick said.
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS