AI & Robotics

Positive affectivity, or the characteristic that describes how people experience affects (e.g., sensations, emotions, and sentiments) and interact with others as a consequence, has been linked to increased interest and curiosity as well as satisfaction in learning. Inspired by this, a team of Microsoft researchers propose imbuing reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs…

Optical character recognition (OCR), or the conversion of images of handwritten or printed text into machine-readable text, is a science that dates back to the early ’70s. But algorithms have long struggled to make out characters that aren’t parallel with horizontal planes, which is why researchers at Amazon developed what they call TextTubes. They’re detectors for curved text in natural…

Summarizing text is a task at which machine learning algorithms are improving, as evidenced by a recent paper published by Microsoft. That’s that’s good news — automatic summarization systems promise to cut down on the amount message-reading done by enterprise workers, which one survey estimates amounts to 2.6 hours each day. Not to be outdone, a Google Brain and Imperial College London team…

It’s nine in the morning on a rainy December 23, and my iPhone has just photographed a supermoon from my front door — no easy feat since the real moon is a distant and barely visible waning crescent today, and I’m shooting in pure daylight. Even by the latest and greatest smartphone camera technology standards, my device has captured an impossible image, yet when I look at my device’s…