EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.
Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.
via ‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists.
Nina stands for Nuance Interactive Natural Assistant and was launched on the iOS and Android platforms last August, allowing businesses to integrate the sophisticated voice recognition and natural language engine into their apps.
via Human Interaction Under Threat from NINA – the Virtual Assistant – IBTimes UK.
This sounds like an interesting development offshoot from projects like IBM’s Watson (the computer that beat the best humans on Jeopardy). Then there’s this.
The days of human behind the counter or at the end of a telephone line at coming to an end. As voice recognition and natural language engines become ever more sophisticated, it may soon be hard to distinguish between an automated system and the real thing.
I am not looking forward to this day. Perhaps this is what HAL tried to warn us about in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Very prescient indeed.
Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.
The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.
via Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence – NYTimes.com.
For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists.
via Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed | TIME.com.
The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals.
Artificial intelligence researchers at Google regularly log into a D-Wave computer over the Internet to try it out, and 2011 also saw the company sign its first customer. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin paid $10 million for a computer for research into automatically detecting software bugs in complex projects such as the delayed F-35 fighter (see “Tapping Quantum Effects for Software that Learns“). Questions remain about just how its technology works, but D-Wave says more evidence is forthcoming. It is readying an improved processor that Rose calls the company’s first true product rather than a piece of research equipment. D-Wave is expected to announce other major customers in coming months.
via The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing – Technology Review.
“At an engineering level they’ve put together a setup that’s impressive in various ways,” says Scott Aaronson, an MIT professor who studies the limits of quantum computation. “But in terms of the evidence that they’re solving problems using quantum mechanics faster than you could classically, I don’t think it’s there yet.” A fierce critic of D-Wave in the years following its 2007 demo, Aaronson softened his stance last year after the company’s Nature paper showing quantum effects. “In the past there was an enormous gap between the marketing claims and where the science was and that’s come down, but there’s still a gap,” says Aaronson, who visited the company’s labs in February. “The burden of proof is on them and they haven’t met the burden yet.”
The CPRG’s poker programs, named “Hyperborean” in the ACPC, are constructed quite differently compared to programs for “perfect information games” such as chess.
With AI systems becoming more common, we have to start worrying about security. A network intrusion may be all the more serious if it is a neural net that is affected. New results indicate that it may be easier than we thought to provide data to a learning program that causes it to learn the wrong things.
Narrative Science helps companies leverage their data by creating easy to use, consistent narrative reporting – automatically through our proprietary artificial intelligence technology platform.
via Narrative Science | We Transform Data Into Stories and Insight.
From CNN:
Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science’s chief technology officer, said his team started the program by taking baseball box scores and turning them into game summaries.
“We did college baseball,” Hammond recalled. “And we built out a system that would take box scores and historical information, and we would write a game recap after a game. And we really liked it.”
If this works I see a huge future for this in business reporting as well.
First they proposed five types of developer, and you won’t find it hard to recognize them:
- S0 – the innovator always builds apps with a wide range of novel features.S1- the milker who implements slight largely unnecessary variations on a single app.
- S2 – the optimizer who simply releases improvements on their most successful app.
- S3 – the copycat simply copies the best apps in the market.
- S – the flexible developer who adopts whichever strategies seems good at the moment.
via The Artificial Life of the App Store – the Best Strategy to Succeed.