The integration of robotics and AI is picking up pace and one of the biggest contributors to research conducted on an annual basis is MIT, home to some of the most intelligent computer engineering and programming specialists in the world.

In this article we will look at a recent breakthrough MIT just made in the field of contextual commands. As technologies like Alexa (the digital personal assistant) get better and better so does the programming of competition, learning from Alexa and expanding on it.

Ask your cyborg butler, for instance, to pick up a specific tool from a toolbox, and “it would be completely lost,” according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Picking it up means being able to see and identify objects, understand commands, recognize that the ‘it’ in question is the tool you put down, go back in time to remember the moment when you put down the tool, and distinguish the tool you put down from other ones of similar shapes and sizes,” the academy said.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), however, are making progress in this area.

Take a look at this interesting video of MIT showing off some of its recent developments in AI and robotics:

At MIT, researchers created a team called ComText (“commands in context”), an Amazon Alexa-like system that enables robots to understand commands that require contextual knowledge.

“Where humans understand the world as a collection of objects and people and abstract concepts, machines view it as pixels, point-clouds, and 3D maps generated from sensors,” CSAIL postdoc Rohan Paul, one of the lead authors of the paper, said in a statement.

To us this is just a block and if someone asked us to pick it up it would be a very simple task. However, programming a robot to be able to complete the same task is an incredibly difficult and time consuming challenge.

While most machine learning focuses only on semantic memory (general knowledge), MIT believes that androids should have “different kinds of memory, just like people,” co-author and research scientist Andrei Barbu said.

So the team is training its computer to retain personal facts, or episodic memory—an object’s shape, size, position, type. This adds another layer of intelligence, and allows ComText to reason, infer meaning, and respond to commands.

This added layer of information acts as a sort of contextual understanding for AI and enables it to have a deeper understanding of a task or challenge.

Techblogger Wrap Up

Did you think that AI would be something you would see integrated to everyday life in your lifetime? Do you think these developments will continue to affect consumer products in coming months and years?

If you answered yes to both of these questions, then you and I are on the same page. Contextual knowledge will make AI seem more life-like and more intelligent. It will enable robots to complete many of the same tasks that we are able to complete and in doing so they will be able to compete with humans more effectively.

What are your thoughts on this? Please leave your comments and feedback below.

Thanks for reading!

Source:

Step Aside, Alexa: MIT Robot Follows Contextual Commands - Geek.com