Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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How AI doctors can save patients’ lives

Image: Project Emerge
An AI-enabled system called Project Emerge helps health-care providers head off medical errors. (Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine via YouTube)

Someday soon, your physician may be second-guessed by an artificial intelligence program – and you’ll probably be healthier for it, according to Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz.

Horvitz, a research fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research’s lab in Redmond, Wash., laid out the statistics to support second-opinion software during today’s White House workshop on how AI can bring social benefits.

The workshop in Washington, D.C., was the second in a series of four sessions aimed at helping the Office of Science and Technology Policy formulate future initiatives on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft Research is pursuing projects in more than 60 areas of computer science, including AI, but Horvitz focused on two projects in particular that brought AI tools to bear on health care challenges.

One project targets medical errors, which Horvitz said are thought to cause more than 400,000 deaths annually in the United States.

“It’s kind of like a city the size of Oakland or Miami going away quietly every year, due to avoidable deaths,” Horvitz said. “It’s the third-leading cause of death in the United States.” (Heart disease and cancer are No. 1 and No. 2.)

Microsoft has been working with partners including the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to develop software that scans for potential medical errors. Horvitz said such programs can serve as “safety nets” for health care providers.

“You learn to recognize anomalies,” he said. “You learn to recognize acts of omission and commission and flag them.”

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Experts weigh in on the bright side of AI

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Can humans and machines get along? (Credit: Imperial College London)

Experts on artificial intelligence are following up on the first White House workshop on artificial intelligence, presented last month in Seattle, with a session that addresses a central question about the technology: What good can it do for humanity?

Whenever folks talk about AI, the discussion usually turns to the dark side. Will machines surpass us, even rule over us? Researchers point out that although computers can be programmed to outdo unassisted humans in specialized tasks, such as playing the game of Go, artificial general intelligence still lags far behind human capabilities.

But if there’s even a minuscule risk that robot overlords will prevail, as claimed by luminaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, why take the chance? At Tuesday’s White House workshop, the second in a series of four, the spotlight focuses on why we should turn to the bright side of AI.

“AI has been successfully applied to societal challenge problems, and it has a great potential to provide tremendous social good in the future,” the Computing Community Consortium’s Helen Wright says in a blog post advancing the session.

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White House brings first AI workshop to UW

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Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the future, and that will pose a challenge for governments and legal system. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

Intelligent machines won’t be ruling the world anytime soon – but what happens when they turn you down for a loan, crash your car or discriminate against you because of your race or gender?

On one level, the answer is simple: “It depends,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in the issues raised by autonomous vehicles.

But that opens the door to a far more complex legal debate. “It seems to me that ‘My Robot Did It’ is not an excuse,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2.

The rapidly rising challenges that face America’s legal system and policymakers were the focus of today’s first-ever White House public workshop on artificial intelligence, presented at the University of Washington School of Law. For a full afternoon, Smith, Etzioni and other experts debated the options in an auditorium that was filled to capacity.

White House deputy chief technology officer Ed Felten said today’s discussion will feed into an interagency policymaking process that includes a public report, due to be published later this year, and a request for information directed to the public.

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How to train your robot: Treat it like a dog

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A virtual dog has to be taught to move the red bag to the blue room. (Credit: Peng et al. / WSU)

To figure out the best way for a robot to move, designers have turned to snakes,cheetahs, fish and even mermaids for inspiration. But to figure out the best way for a robot to learn, they’re going to the dogs.

A team led by computer scientists at Washington State University’s Intelligent Robot Learning Laboratory set up a robot training program that builds in the kinds of fits and starts that a dog might employ when it’s learning a task from its human master. When the virtual robot is unsure what to do, it slows down and looks for feedback. But once it’s figured out the task, it runs through the job lickety-split.

The “Strategy-Aware Bayesian Learning” model, which was laid out in Singapore last week at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, was developed in anticipation of an age when regular folks rather than programmers would have to teach robots what to do.

“We want everyone to be able to program, but that’s probably not going to happen,” WSU Professor Matthew Taylor said today in a news release. “So we needed to provide a way for everyone to train robots – without programming.”

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Semantic Scholar dives into scientific search

Image: Oren Etzioni
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, scribbles on a whiteboard to illustrate who’s connected to whom in research. (Geekwire photo by Alan Boyle)

Baseball players are judged by their batting averages, RBIs, ERAs and other statistics voluminous enough to fill a scorecard. But how do you rate researchers?

The classic measure is citations: that is, who’s quoting whom in their research papers. But just as in baseball, the statistics are becoming more nuanced. NowSemantic Scholar, a scientific search engine developed at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is introducing a whole new set of stats.

If you’re in the “publish-or-perish” game, get ready to find out how you score in acceleration and velocity. Get ready to find out who influences your work, and whom you influence, all with the click of a mouse.

“We give you the tools to slice and dice to figure out what you want,” said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a.k.a. AI2.

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How androids will become part of our lives

Image: Albert Hubo and David Hanson
Roboticist David Hanson faces the camera with a robot named Albert Hubo, which was developed with the assistance of South Korean scientists. Hanson is the one on the right. (Credit: Hanson Robotics)

Artificial intelligence and robots are hot topics right now, but will we ever get to the stage we saw 50 years ago on “The Jetsons,” where your typical household could have a robotic maid named Rosie?

Robotics pioneer David Hanson says yes, and he thinks it’ll take less than 50 more years. That’s the prediction he delivered on Wednesday during a Skype-enabled panel presentation on the future of AI and robotics in Seattle, sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest.

A veteran of Disney’s imagineering operation, Hanson has produced custom-made robot heads that are capable of eerily humanlike expressions. Now Hanson has relocated to Hong Kong, where he’s gearing up to unveil a line of production-model robots that take advantage of recent AI advances as well as the toymaking prowess of the Pearl River Delta.

He’s not yet ready to say how much those robots will cost. That will come later this year. But he foresees a day when humanoid robots will cost as much as cars.

“It is possible that we can get the cost down to tens of thousands of dollars for walking, humanoid robots that can grasp and manipulate,” he said from Hong Kong. “They can perform as well as the robots like the KAIST DARPA Robotics Challenge grand prize winner.”

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Roboticists try putting a human face on AI

Image: Sophia and Ava
Hanson Robotics’ Sophia (left) represents the state of the art in “friendly” AI robots, while the AI robot Ava from “Ex Machina” (played by Alicia Vikander, at right) represents a sci-fi vision of where the robotics field could go. (Credit: CNBC / Hanson Robotics / A24 Films)

Can artificially intelligent robots be our friends? Our helpmates? Our companions? Roboticists and AI researchers are trying to make it so – and the first fruits of their labors are about to come onto the market. But there are already hints that the efforts will touch some of humanity’s hot buttons.

Take Hanson Robotics, for example: Its latest creation, Sophia, combines an AI chatbot with an expressive humanlike face. She can talk enthusiastically about helping humans in health care, education and customer service. But she can also go off script.

“Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no,” roboticist David Hanson, the company’s founder, asked Sophia during a CNBC interview at this month’s South By Southwest technology conference in Texas.

“OK, I will destroy humans,” it replied. “No, I take it back!” Hanson said with a laugh.

Closer to home, a Microsoft teen chatbot named Tay was hijacked by mischievous Twitter users and transformed into a foul-mouthed racist, less than 24 hours after it was released onto the Internet. Microsoft had to take Tay offline, delete the offending Tweets and try resetting its AI attitude.

Such problems shouldn’t be surprising to science fiction fans, who have been pummeled by robo-dystopias ranging from the classic 1927 film “Metropolis” to last year’s “Ex Machina.” But despite the challenges, scores of companies around the world are working on robots that are meant to have the smarts and the actuators necessary to interact with humans in everyday environments.

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The human strikes back: AI loses Go game

Image: Lee Sedol
Go champion Lee Sedol meets the press after winning Game 4 in a five-game showdown against the AlphaGo AI program. (Credit: Google DeepMind via @thegoblognet)

Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program may have won the $1 million five-game Go match with three straight wins, but Go champion Lee Sedol struck back with a consolation win today.

“Because I lost three matches, and I was able to get one single win, I think this one win is so valuable I would not trade it for anything in the world,” Lee said during a post-game news conference that was webcast from Seoul, South Korea.

Lee said he was driven on by the “cheers and encouragement” of his fans.

The Korean Go master is part of one of the most closely watched experiments in artificial intelligence since IBM’s Watson computer software took on two human champions in the “Jeopardy” TV quiz show in 2011. The past week’s match has also been compared to the duels between IBM’s Deep Blue computer and chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s.

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AI program wins $1 million prize in Go showdown

Image: Lee Sedol and Go board
South Korean champion Lee Sedol (upper right) contemplates a move during his game against Google DeepMind’st AlphaGo artificial intelligence program. (Credit: Google DeepMind via YouTube)

Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program will take home the $1 million prize after winning the first three games in its Go showdown with South Korean champion Lee Sedol.

“Folks, you saw history made here today,” webcast host Chris Garlock said.

But today’s third win isn’t the end of the historic match in Seoul: The last two games will still be played, with Lee hoping to demonstrate that it’s possible for a human to beat the computer program.

“I think it’s going to be tough going,” match commentator Michael Redmond said during today’s webcast. Lee was never able to achieve an advantage in the third game, which lasted more than four hours. More than 65,000 viewers watched the YouTube webcast at its peak.

After today’s game, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis paid tribute to Lee, and particularly to the “really huge ko fight” that the champion executed during the endgame.

“To be honest, we are a bit stunned and speechless,” Hassabis told reporters. “Lee Sedol put up an incredible fight again.”

Lee apologized for his performance, and said he let the pressure get to him during the third game. “I should have shown a better outcome. … I kind of felt powerless,” he said.

The duel marks a milestone for AI, and for the millennia-old game of Go. Comparisons have been drawn to chess champion Garry Kasparov’s defeat in a 1997 match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer, and the triumph of IBM’s Watson computer over human champions in the “Jeopardy” TV quiz show.

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AI program just gets stronger in Go showdown

Image: Go showdown
Go champion Lee Sedol, at right, studies the game board during a match against the AlphaGo AI program. Google DeepMind researcher Aja Huang, at left, made AlphaGo’s moves on the board. (Credit: Google DeepMind)

The second game of a million-dollar, man-vs.-machine Go showdown was a real nail-biter, but the outcome was a repeat of the first game: Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program vanquished Go champion Lee Sedol.

Today’s game in Seoul, South Korea, lasted almost four and a half hours. The battle went on so long that Sedol ran out of regulation time and eventually was forced to make each of his moves in a minute or less. AlphaGo racked up an unassailable lead in points, and Sedol resigned.

“Yesterday, I was surprised, but today, it’s more than that,” Sedol said afterward at a news conference. “I’m quite speechless.”

Sedol said that during the first game, AlphaGo may have made some questionable moves. In contrast, the program played a “near-perfect game” the second time around, he said.

DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said AlphaGo’s playing style was more confident than it was the day before. “AlphaGo seemed to know what was happening,” he said.

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