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Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

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Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#41

Post by ac »

krschultz wrote: post #38
iamelgringo wrote: post #26

I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…

I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.

I think that's very good that people still control the military drones. You don't want the drone dropping a bomb where it is not supposed to just because there was some suspicious movement there. No matter how well you can program the robot and how much elaborate heuristics you can give it, at this point it seems to me that humans are infinitely more flexible in making decisions. I wouldn't allow computers make life-and-death decisions any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#42

Post by n8tron »

zandorg wrote: post #37
dstein wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I. When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innov…

What about saying "Hamburger shopping basket"? That'd find you an online store selling hamburgers. Or use Google's Froogle.

The point being made here is that we are still unable to build programs which interpret language nearly as effectively as the human brain. Our programs still have little skill in determining context in language - which will be an important step in reaching Kurzweillian levels of computing competence.

However, it should be noted that Natural Language Processing and studies in word sense disambiguation have brought us closer, people still cherish the "Dude, where's my flying car" impatience of technology.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#43

Post by another »

krschultz wrote: post #38
iamelgringo wrote: post #26

I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…

I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.

Unfortunately untrue.

Many military robots are purely remote controlled, but many others integrate often substantial levels of autonomy. Most UAVs provide autonomous navigation and stationkeeping, for example, and often much more; other military robots operate with no human in the loop whatsoever (eg, AUVs).

It's also interesting to consider the autonomy of fast-react weapons-in-the-loop systems such as AA/SAM sites and ABM installations (eg, Patriot), and the contribution of that autonomy to associated friendly-fire incidents. Methods normally considered AI---probabilistic filters, reasoning, and data fusion, in particular---are fundamental to such systems.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#44

Post by younata »

krschultz wrote: post #38
iamelgringo wrote: post #26

I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…

I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.

Well, the terminator films give reason as to why we're not fielding AI-controlled military drones.

Also, every unmanned spacecraft ever has been controlled by an AI. These drones show the success of AI research.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#45

Post by npp »

People have already explained the fact that the field now goes under a number of different names, and that it is very active, so I won't rehash this. A few pointers to things where you can keep track that are different from what others suggested so far.

1. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning -- this is a journal aimed at publishing a very small number of well-written survey papers on various trends in ML. This is easier to follow than an entire conference (much lower traffic, higher signal/noise), and should be readable for a wider audience (assuming they are math-inclined).

2. Conferences like Algorithms for Modern Massive Datasets are practically-oriented, well attended by a lot of industry, and involve a lot of AI: http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmds/. Look through the speakers and topics. This is one example, there are others.

3. A lot of important tech companies have teams that do AI and AI-type things, at least using the modern definition of AI (Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, even Apple with its Siri acquisition; there are others). This is not to mention people using this stuff in other areas, like finance and bioinformatics. These groups sometimes talk about what they're working on, so you can check this out.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#46

Post by egonschiele »

apu wrote: post #17

To add to the many good responses here so far: AI is such an overloaded term with many negative connotations that it's no longer used. It's also now specialized into separate components, as researchers realize that it's not "cheating" to study e.g. vision separately from natural language processing. Even humans cheat, by having separate portions of the brain specialize in different parts of "AI". So some of the major…

Seconding the recommendation for David Lowe's paper. It's easy to follow and seriously impacted image detection. If you have MATLAB you can also run his demo: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/

It's very interesting to see.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#47

Post by ddewey »

If you want AI literature treating human-level intelligence, try searching for "artificial general intelligence".

Also, here are some links to the proceedings of recent AGI conferences:

http://www.atlantis-press.com/publications/aisr/AGI-09/

http://www.atlantis-press.com/publications/aisr/AGI-10/

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

dstein wrote: post #36
iamelgringo wrote: post #26

I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…

I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I. When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innov…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#49

Post by ansible »

n8tron wrote: post #42
zandorg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about saying "Hamburger shopping basket"? That'd find you an online store selling hamburgers. Or use Google's Froogle.

The point being made here is that we are still unable to build programs which interpret language nearly as effectively as the human brain. Our programs still have little skill in determining context in language - which will be an important step in reaching Kurzweillian levels of computing competence. However, it should be noted that Natural Language Processing and studies in word sense disambiguation have brought us…

Yes, NLP is still a tough nut to crack.

The flip side is that if you type just 'hamburger' into maps.google.com, you'll likely get a map of all the hamburger stands near your present location (based on either GPS or your IP address).

I'd argue that this is pretty damn smart, and it is way ahead of where we were 10 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?

#50

Post by krschultz »

another wrote: post #43
krschultz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.

Unfortunately untrue. Many military robots are purely remote controlled, but many others integrate often substantial levels of autonomy. Most UAVs provide autonomous navigation and stationkeeping, for example, and often much more; other military robots operate with no human in the loop whatsoever (eg, AUVs). It's also interesting to consider the autonomy of fast-react weapons-in-the-loop systems such as AA/SAM sites…

Forgive me, I failed to make this clear, but I work on such systems and I don't think they are all that smart. The code for station keeping is less interesting than the code for directions on Google Maps. (Connecting GPS points in space is pretty damn easy). Landing a UAV is pretty sweet, but I still wouldn't call it AI. The complexity is on the control side, but if you call that AI then is your cruise control in your car AI?
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