Making a Machine that Sees Like Us

Making a Machine that Sees Like Us

Author: Zygmunt Pizlo

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0199922543

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This text explains why and how our visual perceptions can provide us with an accurate representation of the world 'out there.' Along the way, it tells the story of a machine (a computational model) built by the authors that solves the computationally difficult problem of seeing the way humans do.


Making a Machine that Sees Like Us

Making a Machine that Sees Like Us

Author: Zygmunt Pizlo

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780190228385

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"Making a Machine That Sees Like Us explains why and how our visual perceptions can provide us with an accurate representation of the external world. Along the way, it tells the story of a machine (a computational model) built by the authors that solves the computationally difficult problem of seeing the way humans do. This accomplishment required a radical paradigm shift - one that challenged preconceptions about visual perception and tested the limits of human behavior-modeling for practical application. The text balances scientific sophistication and compelling storytelling, making it accessible to both technical and general readers. Online demonstrations and references to the authors' previously published papers detail how the machine was developed and what drove the ideas needed to make it work. The authors contextualize their new theory of shape perception by highlighting criticisms and opposing theories, offering readers a fascinating account not only of their revolutionary results, but of the scientific process that guided the way"--


Machines like Us

Machines like Us

Author: Ronald J. Brachman

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0262369222

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How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise. It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance, lane-following, and route-calculation capacities are all irrelevant; it fails to act because it lacks the common sense of a human driver, who would quickly figure out what’s happening and find a workaround. In Machines like Us, Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque—both leading experts in AI—consider what it would take to create machines with common sense rather than just the specialized expertise of today’s AI systems. Using the stuck traffic light and other relatable examples, Brachman and Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyze common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning. Finally, they consider the critical issue of how we can trust an autonomous machine to make decisions, identifying two fundamental requirements for trustworthy autonomous AI systems: having reasons for doing what they do, and being able to accept advice. Both in the end are dependent on having common sense.


Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0385545126

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From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding. Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human—our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!


Final Jeopardy

Final Jeopardy

Author: Stephen Baker

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2011-02-27

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0547519435

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The “charming and terrifying” story of IBM’s breakthrough in artificial intelligence, from the Business Week technology writer and author of The Numerati (Publishers Weekly, starred review). For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought—one that doesn’t just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant web page, but understands and communicates with us. With the creation of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson’s “life,” from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson’s eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how Watson’s breakthroughs and the future of artificial intelligence could transform medicine, law, marketing, and even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world—and how they’ll disrupt it. “The place to go if you’re really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence.” —The Seattle Times “Like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, Baker’s book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It’s an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.” —Kirkus Reviews “Like a cross between Born Yesterday and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Baker’s narrative is both . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence—and a sobering glimpse of things to come.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review


Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0593318188

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?


The Wrong Answer Faster

The Wrong Answer Faster

Author: Michael Goodkin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-01-18

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1118238575

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The fascinating story behind the machines that trade trillions of dollars every day “A Bildungsroman, one jacket blurb calls this book—and sure, it’s a traditional coming-of-age tale. But the story itself is anything but conventional. The pleasures of the book lie in the story of their bumpy path to success.” Canadian Business In 1968, Michael Goodkin is about to graduate from Columbia University. While his classmates interview for jobs, he daydreams of seeing the world as a man of independent means. Noticing that there are no computers on Wall Street and drawing on his experiences as a failed teenage investor and successful gambler, he has an epiphany: since no one knows the right price for anything, the only way to beat the market is to make a computer that comes up with the wrong answer faster than the professionals. And thus begins a journey that takes this provincial Midwesterner from nearly broke to opulent Park Avenue. The Wrong Answer Faster is the story of unintended consequences: how a technique originally created to minimize market risk spiraled into a multi-trillion dollar game with unparalleled risks. Having founded and sold a firm that changed the world, Goodkin left New York to travel and play backgammon—only to return to found another groundbreaking firm, Numerix, a software company that substituted computational physics for econometrics to better manage derivative risk. The story of the computerization of Wall Street by the man at the helm Packed with keen insights, based almost entirely on poker, backgammon and game theory Goodkin's unique insight to the markets is that everyone has the wrong answers The solution is not to try to beat the market but to come up with the wrong answers faster The epic tale of the untold story how one man with a great idea decided not to play the market but to revolutionize the financial world for generations to come by creating the most ground breaking tool for market players since the ticker tape.


The Voice in the Machine

The Voice in the Machine

Author: Roberto Pieraccini

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0262016850

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An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?


Machine Beauty

Machine Beauty

Author: David Gelernter

Publisher:

Published: 1998-01-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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Called "a brand name in computer science" by "The New York Times Magazine", renowned scientist and visionary David Gelernter offers a fascinating and often humorous discussion of the critical role of beauty, elegance, and aesthetics in computer technology. Print features.