DARPA Wants To Build 'Contextual' AI That Understands the World (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @08:13AM from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, is one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at a VentureBeat summit. From the report: One area of study is so-called "common sense" AI -- AI that can draw on environmental cues and an understanding of the world to reason like a human. Concretely, DARPA's Machine Common Sense Program seeks to design computational models that mimic core domains of cognition: objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). "You could develop a classifier that could identify a number of objects in an image, but if you ask a question, you're not going to get an answer," Pierce said. "We'd like to get away from having an enormous amount of data to train neural networks [and] get away with using fewer labels [to] train models." The agency's also pursuing explainable AI (XAI), a field which aims to develop next-generation machine learning techniques that explain a given system's rationale. "[It] helps you to understand the bounds of the system, which can better inform the human user," Pierce said.

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Re:Repost by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-23 08:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

Cyc has been working on this for decades (with poor results), and they have received DARPA funding. How is "new" direction any different?
What we need first: by Rick+Schumann · 2018-10-23 08:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

We need to understand how a human brain is capable of producing the phenomenon we refer to as 'thinking'.
Before we can do that, we need to invent the instrumentality to actually be able to observe, in detail, how our own brains function; fMRI ain't cutting it, or we'd already have the answer to the above.
Then, and only then, when we have the understanding, can we create machines that actually 'think'.
What we have now just mimicks a very small element of how a brain actually functions. Throwing faster processors and more memory at it won't make it magically 'wake up' and be like a human brain.
I'm going to assume they understand all this since they seem to acknowledge that the current approach is insufficient and will be starting from square one for a new approach.