Headline April 21, 2018/ ''' MACHINES *DEEPEN* MYSTERY '''

''' MACHINES *DEEPEN* MYSTERY '''

SAUDI ARABIA TOOK A direct stake in Uber, and through its investment in SoftBank's Vision Fund, and it has also acquired-

Pieces of companies like WeWork and Slack.

Privately, some investors also grumble about the close ties that the Saudi government has with  President Trump, an unpopular figure with many in Silicon Valley.

Uber's new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, stated last year that the company had discussed whether -

To take Saudi money, with women's rights the major issue. But he now thinks, that the cultural changes since have been very, very positive 

PROFESSOR GEOFFREY HINTON, 69-year old British expatriate, opened Google's artificial intelligence lab in Toronto in 2017, and -

Deepened the mystery the way machines sees the world :

*A neural network that has seen a coffee cup only from the side is unlikely to recognize a coffee cup turned upside down*.

With his capsule networks, Mr. Hinton aims to finally give machines the same three-dimensional  perspective that humans have - allowing them to recognize coffee-cup from any angle after learning what it looks like from only one.

*This is not something neural networks can do*.

''It is a fact that is ignored by researchers in computer vision.'' he said. ''And that is a huge mistake.''

Loosely modeled on the web of neurons in the human brain, neural networks are algorithms that can learn discrete tasks by identifying patterns in large amounts of data.

By analyzing thousands of  car photos, for instance, a neural network can learn to recognize a car.
 
This mathematical idea dates back to the 1950s, but the concept has found real-world applications in recent years, thanks to improvements in processing  power and the large amounts of data generated by the Internet.

Over the last five years, the neural networks have accelerated the progress of everything from  smartphone digital assistants to language translation services to autonomous robots.

But these methods are still a long way from delivering machines with true intelligence - and new research is needed to deliver the kinds of autonomous machines that -

So many off the top tech companies are now promising, including conversational computers and driverless cars.

Mr. Hinton, who is a kind of godfather figure for the A.I. community, is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of specialists who are working to push the industry into these alternative areas of research.

Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence based in Seattle, lamented what he called the industry's myopia;

Its current focus on neural networks, he said, will hurt the progress of  A.I. in the long run.

Eric Horviz, who oversees much of the A.I. work at Microsoft, argued that neural networks and related techniques were small advances compared with technologies that would arrive in the years to come.

''Right now, what we are doing is not a science but a kind of alchemy,' he said

Mr. Hinton acknowledges that his project in Toronto has so far shown only preliminary results. And others, like Mr. Etzioni and Mr. Horvitz, believe that very different techniques will be needed to truly achieve intelligent machines.

Mr. Etzioni said that although machine learning methods would remain at the center of A.I. work, they must be augmented with other techniques.

They are fundamentally limited because they learn from data. The right data isn't always available.

But Mr. Hinton believes his capsule networks can eventually expand to a wider array of situations, accelerating the progress of computer vision and things like conversational computing.

Capsule networks are an attempt mimic the brain's network of neurons in a more complex and structured way, and he explained that this added structure could help other forms of artificial intelligence as well.

He certainly understands that many will be skeptical of his technique. But Mr. Hinton also pointed out that five years ago, many were skeptical off neural networks.

''History is going to repeat itself,'' he said. ''I think''.     

With respectful dedication Professor Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto, Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of Canada, and then the world.

See Ya all on !WOW! - the World Students Society and .....................  Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

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