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Kinect-Based AI System Watches What You're Up To
mikejuk writes "Researchers from Cornell have used AI to create a system based on the Kinect that can recognize what you are doing — cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard etc. In a smart home it could be used to offer help: 'Would you like some help with that recipe, Dave?' Or it could monitor patients or workers to make sure they are doing what they are told. The study also reveals that there is probably enough information in how activities are performed to recognize an individual — so providing yet more biometrics. There are clearly a lot more things that we can teach the Kinect to do with machine learning than just gesture recognition."
"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help with that?"
It seems to me you and your girlfriend need advice.
My Machine Learning professor at University of Texas was hugely into Reinforcement Learning. He and one of his graduate student had developed this kind of system many years ago. Basically, only using a simple video camera, the computer could identify correctly all sub-activities involved in making a peanut butter sandwich; such as 'open jar', 'jelly on bread', 'jar closed', etc. We were shown the video during first class of the course and it was pretty cool.
The MSR guys are doing interesting stuff but this is nothing groundbreaking.
A voice will gently intone "I see you're masturbating, Dave. I happen to know of 20238 men and 3 women who are also masturbating right now. Would you like me to open video chat with any of them?"