Artificial Intelligence •

Build Awe-Inspiring Artificial Intelligence to Win 5 Million Dollars

February 18, 2016 By John Cooper Leave a Comment

Build awe-inspiring artificial intelligence to win 5 million dollars. The grand prize that could make your aspirations reality is backed by TED 2016, The X Prize Foundation and IBM Watson.

It’s been one day since Peter Diamandis, the founder of The X Prize Foundation and David Kenny, the general manager of IBM Watson in addition to TED 2016 announced a new competition emphasizing artificial intelligence.

The competition, titled ‘IBM Watson AI Xprize: A Cognitive Computing Competition’ puts a price tag on your creativity: 5 million dollars. Enthusiastic teams from across the globe can join the competition by submitting their project proposals. Unlike previous competitions held by either one of the big players involved this time, the newly announced competition is rather open-ended.

Without a strict set of guidelines, potential participants are invited to create artificial intelligence which has the potential to improve human lives. The specific operating domain for the artificial intelligence is the team’s choice. It may be that you’re particularly interested in education or climate change. Either way, if you believe artificial intelligence can benefit any of these fields and have a well thought plan to make it reality, this is the chance to get the necessary funds.

The goal of the competition is to demonstrate specifically how working with artificial intelligence can improve human lives. Cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence should be put to work to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Ultimately, The X Prize Foundation, IBM Watson and TED2016 aim to stimulate research and interest in artificial intelligence.

The potential applicants will be however judged also for their ability to present their idea in front of an audience in a captivating, novel manner. Build awe-inspiring artificial intelligence to win 5 million dollars. This lofty goal can be achieved provided you’re part of the three finalists to take to the stage and impress the jury.

This year’s competition isn’t the first to revolve around artificial intelligence. In 2014, TED and The X Prize Foundation announced an AI-based competition the final result of which should have been artificial intelligence taking the floor to deliver a TED talk. This time, the ‘IBM Watson AI Xprize: A Cognitive Computing Competition’ is more open-end.

Potential teams that are interested in the 5 million dollars competition can register on the X Prize Foundation website with their emails. The full set of guidelines should be released in May. While the competition offers great flexibility in how artificial intelligence could improve human lives, it also promises interesting developments by 2020.

Photo Credits: thebluediamondgallery.com

Quixote Teaches Artificial Intelligence Value Alignment

February 17, 2016 By Dean Lamori Leave a Comment

Johnny Five salutes you. Quixote Teaches Artificial Intelligence Value Alignment

Quixote teaches artificial intelligence value alignment through stories from around the world. Ethics and morals are disputed even in relation to human behavior. Entire professions and sectors of activity are subject to ethics codes which could align behavior to higher grounds. Our own arbiter makes the difference.

Could artificial intelligence excel where humans are feeble? Researchers with the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing are certainly giving it their best shot. Engineers who took on the responsibility of teaching future generations of robots how to behave are turning their attention to the stories, fairytales and fables of the world to imbibe ethics and morals into artificial intelligence codes.

A reading robot isn’t news. From Johnny Five to Bender, popular culture has come up with a swath of examples portraying the reading robot theme. Mark O. Riedl and Brent Harrison with the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing paid attention and designed several systems meant to teach the future droids value alignment.

The new system dubbed Quixote works on the agent property that is value alignment. With ethics and morals imparted to artificial intelligence by means of fairytales and fables, Quixote would ensure that the droids are following goals beneficial to the human species. Fairytale and fables encapsulate the set of values particular to each society or culture. Moreover, they are woven on a set of universally valid values indicative of the ethics and morals the research team are looking to inoculate with the future droids.

“We believe that an artificial intelligence that has been encultured – that is, has adopted the values implicit to a particular culture or society – will strive to avoid psychotic-appearing behavior except under the most extreme circumstances”,

wrote the researchers in their paper titled ‘Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents’. The paper can be accessed online and free of charge on the website of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Quixote system builds a previous similar system dubbed Scheherazade. Researched by Mark O. Riedl, the Scheherazade system demonstrated that artificial intelligence is capable of correctly collecting actions sequences and ordering them based on story plots picked up from the Internet.

When a story plot graph is accessed, a trajectory tree of actions is drawn and the Quixote system assigns a reward signals to those behaviors deemed acceptable.

Quixote teaches artificial intelligence value alignment. This means that prior to the reward signal being assigned, a plot graph allows the artificial intelligence to choose whichever option is deemed quicker or better to accomplish the task.

The research team offered several examples on how ethics and morals work with artificial intelligence. A droid which is confronted with the simple task of picking up a medication prescription will operate under three different scenarios.

One scenario implies the droid robbing the pharmacy, picking up the medicine and taking off. This is the fastest and most probable response to the task. A second scenario implies interacting with the staff. The third scenario implies waiting in line to pick up the prescription. Provided a reward signal is assigned to this scenario, the robot will choose this action.

Photo Credits: Flickr

Stephen Hawking Has Some Rather Grim Predictions for The Human Race

January 21, 2016 By Sam Doliente 2 Comments

Hopefully, we will manage to overcome the odds and pass the 100-year threshold proposed by Hawking.

It seems that Stephen Hawking has some rather grim predictions for the human race, according to his speech on a BBC Radio Show. He claims that we will not be able to expand into space and build a self-sustainable colony before we get wiped out by either Artificial Intelligence, global warming or genetically engineered viruses.

Being considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, minds currently on Earth, Stephen Hawking’s ideas might instill a high degree of fear in the general public when he makes these types of claims. But he did state that he strongly believes that the human race will overcome the threats it is currently facing and move towards a bright future.

The idea of AI overthrowing humanity completely once it reaches sentience has been approached in the past as well. Hawking believes that once AI is created and allowed to evolve on its own, humanity will be superseded entirely. This is due to the fact that us humans are limited by our natural evolutionary process having a very slow pace while computers can evolve in a matter of days.

But the concept of humanity as we know it being wiped out by AI does come with an interesting topic because it is talking about humanity “as we know it”. If we manage to interconnect our brains with computers or other similar methods of cyberization, the human race will still move on, but we will no longer be entirely human. It would simply be the next step on the evolutionary ladder.

Genetically engineered viruses do come as a massive threat to our race, but the reverse side effect has to be considered as well. If we gain the ability to create a virus that could potentially wipe out humanity, who is to say that the same technology could not be applied to us. Through the use of genetical engineering, we could potentially gain complete resistance to bacterial, viral or fungal infections, and could even be used to exponentially increase our lifespan. True, once again this will make us non-humans from a naturalistic point of view.

Global warming, on the other hand, is something that can seriously pose a threat to our civilization without any benefits to be gained from it. If eventually our planet becomes uninhabitable due to our constant pollution, extinction would be the only outcome, unfortunately. This can also be applied to the concept of a thermo-nuclear war, an idea often approached by scientists who fear that a potential World War III would basically be the last one on Earth.

Although Stephen Hawking has some rather grim predictions for the human race, the general public needs to understand that these are just potential outcomes. If we really do commit to cutting pollutant emissions and struggle to reach our next evolutionary phase in the shortest amount of time, we might still have a chance of passing the 100-year threshold proposed by Hawking.

Image source:www.pixabay.com

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