Could an A.I.?

What is truly astounding about mankind is its capacity to turn equal parts witless and curious shower thoughts into reality. The following questions kept a significant many interested for a long time to arrive at an answer. Their hard-work coupled with academia has led to some very exciting prospects in A.I. The backbone, of course, is Deep Learning. The lesson remains - the more data, the better judgement.

1) Could an A.I. judge a book by its cover?

The answer is yes.

A deep neural network, which has four layers of up to 512 neurons each, was able to correctly identify what genre a book belongs to just by analyzing its cover. Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida of Kyushu University in Japan conducted an experiment to check if artificial intelligence can engage in the proverbial book judging. The A.I. algorithm listed three possible genres for each book. The results showed “the experiment had an accuracy of 21.9% for Top 1, 32.1% for Top 2, and 40.2% for Top 3 in 20-class classification.”

2) Could and A.I. read your lips?

The answer is yes.

A new AI lip reader, LipNet, has been built by a team of scientists from Oxford to process whole sentences at a time, allowing the AI to teach itself what letter corresponds to each slight mouth movement. When compared against human lip readers who scored an accuracy of 52.3 percent, LipNet was 1.78 times more accurate than them in translating the same sentences. When made perfect, LipNet could be used as a tool for the hearing-impaired.

3) Could an A.I. help save lives?

The answer is yes.

A team of MIT researchers led by Alán Aspuru-Guzik developed A.I. that can help search for new drug compounds without using lengthy simulations, thanks to its training on 250,000 drug-like molecules. According to the study, continuous representations allow us to automatically generate novel chemical structures by performing simple operations in the latent space, such as decoding random vectors, perturbing known chemical structures, or interpolating between molecules. “It explores more intuitively, using chemical knowledge it learned, like a chemist would,” says Aspuru-Guzik. This A.I. is disruptive in a good way and can definitely help save lives if applied optimally.

4) Could an A.I. tackle climate change?

Needless to say, yes, courtesy of Barry Porter and his team of data science experts from Lancaster University.

Data processing and maintenance requires huge data centers with large teams of software developers, and they consume a ton of energy and financial resources. Porter and his team have developed an artificially intelligent computer software system, called REx, that can rapidly self-assemble itself into the most efficient form without human input. According to Porter, his team’s technology could be beneficial on a number of levels. It could reduce or even eliminate altogether the need for humans to understand and process complex systems as REx could take over the task. It would also have a huge impact of the energy needs of data-processing centers, which they report currently account for around 3 percent of power used globally.