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IBM’s ‘Watson’ Advances Artificial Intelligence

Austin — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:22:01 +0000

IBM’s ‘Watson’ Advances Artificial Intelligence

The battle between mankind and machine has been long-fought. Deep Blue, a computer built to play chess by analyzing every possible move, beat chess champ Garry Kasparov in 1997. Since then, major leaps have been taken in the areas of Artificial Intelligence. IBM’s newest challenge was Watson, a super-computer capable of playing Jeopardy. 4 years after programming for Watson began, Watson faced off against Jeopardy winners like Ken Jennings, and won.

Here are some stats about Watson. “He”:

has 2,880 processor cores
has about 15TB(or 15,000GB) of RAM
took 4 years worth of algorithms to make Jeopardy-ready
is equal in power to about 6,000 high-end home computers
can understand and interpret speech, including jokes, pop culture references, similes, and more
has the entire World Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, iMDB, most of the New York Times archive, and The Bible stored in its database
can “learn.” Not by trial-and-error, but by example(this process is known as “machine learning”)

While it’s difficult to say whether a super-computer like Watson could possibly lead to a real-life Skynet, we can say that IBM’s accomplishment with Watson is a very impressive feat, and one that could bring about a variety of great technological advances. What would you like to see this technology used for in the future? Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

More information about Watson can be found here.

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Microsoft Introduces OneAlbum, Fusing facial Recognition and Social Networks

Hammad — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:20:13 +0000

Microsoft Introduces OneAlbum, Fusing facial Recognition and Social Networks

Recently, we wrote about Microsoft’s upcoming project, Mobile Surface, which was introduced at the TechFest 2010 in Redmond. Microsoft demonstrated another cool project at TechFest 2010 called OneAlbum that uses facial recognition and event-matching technology to automatically retrieve photos that would interest you from your social networks and your friends’ online photo albums and add them to yours.

Microsoft’s Principal research program manager, Eyal Krupka said,

“Today, my album refers to a collection of photos I have taken. But many photos relevant to me—such as photos of me or my children—are in my friends’ albums. OneAlbum automatically finds relevant photos in my friends’ albums on social networks or in shared albums, brings them to my album, and shows them side-by-side with the photos I’ve taken. OneAlbum uses breakthrough technology to recognize which photos interest me by analyzing my own album.”

Furthermore, she said that the novel, unsupervised algorithm behind OneAlbum was tested on real large-scale albums including tens of thousands of photos and achieved accuracy rates as high as 90 percent. Looks like it will be the end of manually tagging pictures in different social networks like Facebook, when you can find all of your photos with facial recognition.

A video has also been posted on Microsoft research website which shows OneAlbum in action.

via – All About Microsoft

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Gazelle – a Chrome like Web Browser from Microsoft Research.

Imran — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:48:08 +0000

Gazelle – a Chrome like Web Browser from Microsoft Research.

Channel 9 has this great video on the Gazelle web browser project by Microsoft Research. It’s being constructed on an operating system architecture, which means improved security, resource handling and sharing.

Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection.

It sounds very much like Chrome, and going through Chrome’s design documents, you’ll find a lot of information of a somewhat similar multi process model and architecture. An interesting question asked in this video is if Gazelle can be ‘blue screed’ since it’s based on an OS architecture. This and many other interesting questions are answered in the video by Gazelle project lead Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer. Keep in mind that Gazelle so far is based on paper purely, and there hasn’t been any signs of a working prototype so far in the open. It’s not clear whether Gazelle will be used for Internet Explorer 9 either, although seeing the slowness of Internet Explorer 8, I’d like to see Gazelle be the core of the next Microsoft web browser.

iThinkDifferent - All things different about Microsoft, Apple, Google and the Internet.

SearchTogether Beta from Microsoft Research

Imran — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:37:01 +0000

SearchTogether Beta from Microsoft Research

SearchTogether is a project from Microsoft Research which features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat. It works as an Internet Explorer plug-in and requires a Windows Live ID. You would think it just works with Live Search. But no, it supports Google and Yahoo as well. Although it’s collaborative search, you can only see the queries that your friend is searching and see the same results, or comment on it. Chat is also available but it’s rather slow, it takes a while for the message to deliver after you press send.

The collaboration isn’t just limited to 2 people, and from what I see there’s not limit on the number of people you can add to a search session. On it’s project page, the requirement is Internet Explorer 7, but I use the plug-in on Windows 7 build 7057, and it worked just fine apart from a the exceptions it threw when using search in the split mode. It’s a very interesting concept and can be used for research, group assignments and social networking. I have a feeling there might be a similar plug-in for Firefox as well. But if you want to give SearchTogether a try, download it here. An extensive tutorial is also available to get you started.

iThinkDifferent - All things different about Microsoft, Apple, Google and the Internet.