AI is Changing the Way we Study the Stars, Grow Food, and Create Art
Emergent Insight:
Innovation is rampant at companies integrating artificial intelligence into products, services and processes. Kyle Wiggers at VentureBeat shares several areas where AI is changing the way organizations get things done. And it’s faster, saves money and leads to unprecedented results – like seeing a black hole for the first time. Get caught up and start thinking about how AI can be plugged in to your world.
Original Article:
Image Credit: enzozo/Shutterstock
Too often, technologists become wrapped up in doom-and-gloom predictions about job-stealing, prejudicial, and potentially murderous AI. Fear sells, the saying goes, and that seems doubly true when it comes to emerging tech.
But focusing on AI’s negatives blinds us to its positives. As my colleague Khari Johnson and I have written countless times, artificial intelligence promises to transform entire verticals for the better, from health care and education to business intelligence and cybersecurity. More excitingly, it’s laying the groundwork for new industries and pursuits of which we haven’t yet conceived.
This week, MIT graduate student and postdoctoral fellow with Event Horizon Telescope Katie Bouman created an algorithm — Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors, or CHIRP for short — that combined data from eight radio telescopes from around the globe to generate the first image ever of a black hole. CHIRP — a three-year collaborative effort among MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the MIT Haystack Observatory — reconstructs images while accounting for variations in signal strength, such that delays caused by atmospheric noise cancel each other out.
In equally uplifting news, the University of California, Berkeley on Monday unveiled a humanoid robot with a depth-sensing camera and motorized arms, all of which can be controlled with virtual reality handsets and trained to manipulate objects using AI. Pieter Abbeel, a professor and director of the Robot Learning Lab at UC Berkeley and the roboticist leading the project, told The Verge that recent advances in machine learning made possible the new design, which has a bill of materials substantially lower than most comparable alternatives (around $5,000 versus tens of thousands of dollars).