IBM’s machine argues, pretty convincingly, with humans

BBC News

On a stage in San Francisco, IBM’s Project Debater spoke, listened and rebutted a human’s arguments in what was described as a groundbreaking display of artificial intelligence.

The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents - mostly newspaper articles and academic journals - to form its responses to a topic it was not prepared for beforehand.

Its performance was not without slip-ups, but those in attendance made clear their thoughts when voting on who did best. 

While the humans had better delivery, the group agreed, the machine offered greater substance in its arguments. 

That, IBM said, spoke to the heart of its goal: augmenting human beings to make decisions quickly and with more data than ever before.

“I think it says actually very optimistic things about how humans respond to facts and figures,” said Noa Ovadia, one of the human debaters at the event. 

“I think they are important, but they’re not everything when we make up our argumentation.”

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Artificially Intelligent Lawyer “Ross” Has Been Hired By Its First Official Law Firm

Comment:  And before you know it we'll have rows and rows of children plugged in to their own personal "Ross" and "Renee" with no human teachers anywhere to be found.  And that's only the tiniest tip of a monumental iceberg of implications.

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The American Lawyer

 

Ross: A Very Smart Artificial Co-worker

 

Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM’s AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers. According to CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, other firms have also signed licenses with Ross, and they will also be making announcements shortly.

Ross, “the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney” built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it.

“You ask your questions in plain English, as you would a colleague, and ROSS then reads through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly,” the website says. “In addition, ROSS monitors the law around the clock to notify you of new court decisions that can affect your case.”

Ross also minimizes the time it takes by narrowing down results from a thousand to only the most highly relevant answers, and presents the answers in a more casual, understandable language. It also keeps up-to-date with developments in the legal system, specifically those that may affect your cases.

Baker & Hostetler chief information officer Bob Craig explains the rationale behind this latest hire: “At BakerHostetler, we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients.”

“BakerHostetler has been using ROSS since the first days of its deployment, and we are proud to partner with a true leader in the industry as we continue to develop additional AI legal assistants,” he added.

IBM Develops a New Chip That Functions Like a Brain

New York Times

Inspired by the architecture of the brain, scientists have developed a new kind of computer chip that uses no more power than a hearing aid and may eventually excel at calculations that stump today’s supercomputers.

The chip, or processor, is named TrueNorth and was developed by researchers at IBM and detailed in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. It tries to mimic the way brains recognize patterns, relying on densely interconnected webs of transistors similar to the brain’s neural networks.

The chip’s electronic “neurons” are able to signal others when a type of data — light, for example — passes a certain threshold. Working in parallel, the neurons begin to organize the data into patterns suggesting the light is growing brighter, or changing color or shape.

The processor may thus be able to recognize that a woman in a video is picking up a purse, or control a robot that is reaching into a pocket and pulling out a quarter. Humans are able to recognize these acts without conscious thought, yet today’s computers and robots struggle to interpret them.

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The Most Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project In The World Has Been Operating In Near-Secrecy For 30 Years

Business Insider

“We’ve been keeping a very low profile, mostly intentionally,” said Doug Lenat, President and CEO of Cycorp. “No outside investments, no debts. We don’t write very many articles or go to conferences, but for the first time, we’re close to having this be applicable enough that we want to talk to you.”

IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri stirred up a hunger and awareness throughout the United States for something like a Star Trek computer that really worked — an artificially intelligent system that could receive instructions in plain, spoken language, make the appropriate inferences, and carry out its instructions without needing to have millions and millions of subroutines hard-coded into it.

As we’ve established, that stuff is very hard. But Cycorp’s goal is to codify general human knowledge and common sense so that computers might make use of it.

Cycorp charged itself with figuring out the tens of millions of pieces of data we rely on as humans — the knowledge that helps us understand the world — and to represent them in a formal way that machines can use to reason. The company’s been working continuously since 1984 and next month marks its 30th anniversary.

“Many of the people are still here from 30 years ago — Mary Shepherd and I started [Cycorp] in August of 1984 and we’re both still working on it,” Lenat said. “It’s the most important project one could work on, which is why this is what we’re doing. It will amplify human intelligence.”
It’s only a slight stretch to say Cycorp is building a brain out of software, and they’re doing it from scratch.

“Any time you look at any kind of real life piece of text or utterance that one human wrote or said to another human, it’s filled with analogies, modal logic, belief, expectation, fear, nested modals, lots of variables and quantifiers,” Lenat said. “Everyone else is looking for a free-lunch way to finesse that. Shallow chatbots show a veneer of intelligence or statistical learning from large amounts of data. Amazon and Netflix recommend books and movies very well without understanding in any way what they’re doing or why someone might like something.

“It’s the difference between someone who understands what they’re doing and someone going through the motions of performing something.”

Cycorp’s product, Cyc, isn’t “programmed” in the conventional sense. It’s much more accurate to say it’s being “taught.” Lenat told us that most people think of computer programs as “procedural, [like] a flowchart,” but building Cyc is “much more like educating a child.”

“We’re using a consistent language to build a model of the world,” he said.

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Tech Time Warp of the Week: Watch IBM Warn Us About Glassholes 10 Years Ago

Wired

Google Glass? Oculus Rift? Those are old ideas.

Academics and tech outfits have explored similar concepts for decades. The ideas behind the Oculus virtual reality headset date to the early 1980s. By the early aughts, Dyson—yes, the vacuum-maker—was tinkering with something quite like Google Glass. And around the same time, IBM was working on all sorts of computer headwear, actively trying to create a world in which we could trade emails, edit documents, and even communicate in real-time through tiny, voice-activated, image-recognizing machines attached to our noggins.

In the late ’90s, IBM’s research arm developed something dubbed “the Wearable,” a portable machine with a 1.5-inch etched glass display. Only one was built, and it was so delicate, it had to be handled with gloves. In 1997, the tech giant commissioned a futuristic short film that showcased the gizmo—and its much bigger, clunkier predecessors (see video above). Some of them look an awful lot like the Rift.

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IBM: Mass Biometric Surveillance Unstoppable

Wired

It’s already too late to stop the ubiquitous tracking and monitoring of the public through biometrics, says Peter Waggett, Programme Leader at IBM’s Emerging Technology Group. We need to stop worrying about prevention, and start working out how to make the most of data garnered from that kind of surveillance.

“We’re fighting the wrong battle when we ask should we stop people being observed. That is not going to be feasible. We need to understand how to use that data better,” urged Waggett, who was speaking as part of a Nesta panel debate on what biometrics mean for the future of privacy.

“I’ve been working in biometrics for 20 years, and it’s reaching a tipping point where it’s going to be impossible not to understand where people are and what they are doing. Everything will be monitored. It’s part of the reason why when we put together the definition of biometrics it included biological and behavioural characteristics — it can be anything.”

To back up his point, Waggett identified a few of the futures once portrayed in science fiction movies, now a reality. Minority Report is generally the go to film for these kinds of comparisons. But it’s the commercial aspects of the film Waggett flagged up, rather than the gesture technology. In the film, the protagonist walks into a shop where an advert immediately pops up and draws on his past preferences to offer up some suggestions. “The one thing they got wrong is you won’t recognise you’re being scanned — the flashing red light in the film is for effect, but all that’s now feasible.”

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IBM unveils cognitive computing chips, combining digital ‘neurons’ and ‘synapses’

Cognitive computing chip (credit: IBM Research)

kurzweilai.net

IBM researchers unveiled today a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition.

In a sharp departure from traditional von Neumann computing concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. 

The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers, the researchers say. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.

Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember — and learn from — the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

“This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century,” said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research.