Google Upgrades Voice Search

Google said it has constructed a better neural network that is making its voice search work faster and better in noisy environments.

“We are happy to announce that our new acoustic models are now used for voice searches and commands in the Google app (on Android and iOS), and for dictation on Android devices,” Google’s Speech Team wrote in a recent  blog post . “In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries.”

In 2013, Google brought the same voice recognition tools that had been working in Google Now to Google Search.

Along with being able to find information on the Internet, Google Voice Search also was able to find information for users in their Gmail, Google Calendar and Google+ accounts.

At the 2013 Google I/O developers conference, Amit Singhai, today a senior vice president and Google Fellow, said the future of search is in voice. For Google, he said, future searches will be more like conversations with your computer or device, which also will be able to give you information before you even ask for it.

The company went on to make it clear that it would continue to focus on voice search.

And this week’s announcement backs that up.

Google explained in its blog post that it has updated the neural network it’s using for voice search. A neural network is a computer system based on the way the human brain and nervous system work. It generally uses many processors operating in parallel.

The improved neural network is able to consume the incoming audio in larger chunks than conventional models without performing as many calculations.

“With this, we drastically reduced computations and made the recognizer much faster,” the team wrote. “We also added artificial noise and reverberation to the training data, making the recognizer more robust to ambient noise.”

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/google-upgrades-voice-search.html

Will A.I. Create The Next Industrial Revolution?

Artificial Intelligence will be responsible for the next industrial revolution, experts in the field have claimed, as intelligent computer systems replace certain human-operated jobs.

Four computer science experts talked about how advances in AI could lead to a “hollowing out” of middle-income jobs during a panel debate hosted by ClickSoftware about the future of technology.

“It’s really important that we take AI seriously. It will lead to the fourth industrial revolution and will change the world in ways we cannot predict now,” said AI architect and author George Zarkadakis.

His mention of the “fourth industrial revolution” refers to the computerization of the manufacturing industry.

If the first industrial revolution was the mechanisation of production using water and steam power, followed by the second which introduced mass production with the help of electric power, then the third is what we are currently experiencing: the digital revolution and the use of electronics and IT to further automate production.

The fourth industrial revolution, which is sometimes referred to as Industry 4.0, is the vision of the ‘smart factory’, where cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions.

These cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and humans in real time over the Internet of Things.

Dan O’Hara, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explained that this fourth industrial revolution will not be the same kind of “hollowing out” of jobs that we saw during the last one.

“It [won’t be] manual labour replaced by automation, but it’ll be the hollowing out of middle-income jobs, medium-skilled jobs,” he said.

“The industries that will be affected the most from a replacement with automation are construction, accounts and transport. But the biggest [industry] of all, remembering this is respective to the US, is retail and sales.”

O’Hara added that many large organisations’ biggest expense is people, who already work alongside intelligent computer systems, and this area is most likely to be affected as companies look to reduce costs.

“Anything that’s working on an AI-based system is bound to be very vulnerable to the replacement by AI as it’s easily automated already,” he said.

However, while AI developments in the retail space could lead to the replacement of jobs, it is also rather promising at the same time.

Mark Bishop, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, highlighted that AI could save businesses money if it becomes smart enough to determine price variants in company spending, for example, scanning through years of an organisation’s invoice database and detecting the cheapest costs and thus saving on outgoings.

While some worry that AI will take over jobs, others have said that they will replace humans altogether.

John Lewis IT chief Paul Coby said earlier this year that the blending of AI and the IoT in the future could signal the end of civilisation as we know it.

Coby explained that the possibilities are already with us in terms of AI and that we ought to think about how “playing with the demons” could be detrimental to our future.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak added to previous comments from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk with claims that “computers are going to take over from humans”.

Woz made his feelings on AI known during an interview with the Australian Financial Review, and agreed with Hawking and Musk that its potential to surpass humans is worrying.

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question. Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people,” he said.

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Google Moves To Drop CAPTCHA

Google announced that it is trying to get rid of those annoying CAPTCHAs required by websites, which is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Instead of requiring that users fill in the letters and numbers shown in a distorted image, sites that use Google’s reCAPTCHA service will be able to use just one click, answering a simple question: Are you a robot?

“reCAPTCHA protects the websites you love from spam and abuse,” wrote Vinay Shet, product manager for Google’s reCAPTCHA service, in a blog post. “For years, we’ve prompted users to confirm they aren’t robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box… But, we figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots. So, we did! ”

Google on Wednesday began rolling out a new API that rethinks the reCAPTCHA experience.

CAPTCHA “can be hard to read and frustrating for people, particularly on mobile devices,” said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research. “People often have to put in the text several times. On the surface, this seems a good way to improve the user experience. It still requires human intervention, just something simpler.”

CAPTCHAs were created to foil computer programs that hackers or spammers use to troll for access to websites or to collect email addresses.

Google said CAPTCHAs are less useful than they have been, although they are still frustrating to everyday users.

“CAPTCHAs have long relied on the inability of robots to solve distorted text,’ wrote Shet. “However, our research recently showed that today’s artificial intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy. Thus distorted text, on its own, is no longer a dependable test.”

The new API, along with Google’s ability to analyze a user’s actions — before, during, and after clicking on the reCAPTCHA box — let’s the new technology figure out if the user is human or not.

“The new API is the next step in this steady evolution,” Shet stated. “Now humans can just check the box and in most cases, they’re through the challenge.”

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Google Continues A.I. Expansion

Google Inc is growing its artificial intelligence area, hiring more than half a dozen leading academics and experts in the field and announcing a partnership with Oxford University to “accelerate” its efforts.

Google will make a “substantial contribution” to establish a research partnership with Oxford’s computer science and engineering departments, the company said on Thursday regarding its work to develop the intelligence of machines and software, often to emulate human-like intelligence.

Google did not provide any financial details about the partnership, saying only in a post on its blog that it will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops “to share knowledge and expertise.”

Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, is building up its artificial intelligence capabilities as it strives to maintain its dominance in the Internet search market and to develop new products such as robotics and self-driving cars. In January Google acquired artificial intelligence company Deep Mind for $400 million according to media reports.

The new hires will be joining Google’s Deep Mind team, including three artificial intelligence experts whose work has focused on improving computer visual recognition systems. Among that team is Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman, a three-time winner of the Marr Prize for computer vision.

The four founders of Dark Blue Labs will also be joining Google where they will be will be leading efforts to help machines “better understand what users are saying to them.”

Google said that three of the professors will hold joint appointments at Oxford, continuing to work part time at the university.

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Google Buys A.I. Firm

Google has purchased DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence company in London, reportedly for $400 million.

A Google representative confirmed the via email, but said the company’s isn’t providing any additional information at this time.

News website Re/code said in a report this past Sunday that Google was paying $400 million for the company, founded by games prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

The company claims on its website that it combines “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.” It said its first commercial applications are in simulations, e-commerce and games.

Google announced this month it was paying $3.2 billion in cash to acquire Nest, a maker of smart smoke alarms and thermostats, in what is seen as a bid to expand into the connected home market. It also acquired in January a security firm called Impermium, to boost its expertise in countering spam and abuse.

The Internet giant said on a research site that much of its work on language, speech, translation, and visual processing relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence. “In all of those tasks and many others, we gather large volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest, and we apply learning algorithms to generalize from that evidence to new cases of interest,” it said.

In May, Google launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, hosted by NASA’s Ames Research Center. The Universities Space Research Association was to invite researchers around the world to share time on the quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, to study how quantum computing can advance machine learning.

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Can Android Fight Cyber Threats With A.I.?

A security firm called Zimperium has launched mobile software that learns from smartphones to fend off malicious cyber attacks.

Claiming to be the first security software to be powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the app is called zIPS, with the “IPS” standing for “intrusion prevention system”. The aim of the AI is to better spot malware before it causes harm or spreads to other devices.

The zIPS software works whether the smartphone is offline or online and can protect against malicious apps, such as those that can self-modify, and network attacks like a “man in the middle” attack where a hacker intercepts data being sent between one user and another.

“With zIPS, corporations will now have the opportunity to use [bring your own device] as an advantage to their security. zIPS is the first security solution that can combat modern cyber-attacks on mobile,” said Zimperium’s founder and CEO Zuk Avraham. “There is already evidence of attacks that are happening to infiltrate organisations, which only zIPS can prevent.”

Prior to working on the Android app, Avraham worked as a security researcher for the Israeli Defense Forces and Samsung electronics before setting up Zimperium in response to what he thinks is a poor selection of good mobile security software.

According to MIT Technology Review, Zimperium said that there have as yet been no programs that can detect, notify and protect against cyber attacks deployed through mobile devices.

The zIPS Android app has arrived in the Google Play store for all Android devices at a time when malware on Android is at an all time high.

Last year, Trend Micro warned that Google’s Android mobile operating system is so beset by cyber criminals creating malicious apps that the malware was on track to hit the million mark before the end of 2013.

The firm said that this was attributable to hackers seeking to exploit Android’s growing global user base.

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Can Robots Run On (NH2)2CO?

Scientists have discovered a way to power future robots using an unusual source — urine.

Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and the University of Bristol collaborated to build a system that will enable robots to function without batteries or being plugged into an electrical outlet.

Based on the functioning of the human heart, the system is designed to pump urine into the robot’s “engine room,” converting the waste into electricity and enabling the robot to function completely on its own.

Scientists are hoping the system, which can hold 24.5 ml of urine, could be used to power future generations of robots, or what they’re calling EcoBots.

“In the city environment, they could re-charge using urine from urinals in public lavatories,” said Peter Walters, a researcher with the University of the West of England. “In rural environments, liquid waste effluent could be collected from farms.”

In the past 10 years, researchers have built four generations of EcoBots, each able to use microorganisms to digest the waste material and generate electricity from it, the university said.

Along with using human and animal urine, the robotic system also can create power by using rotten fruit and vegetables, dead flies, waste water and sludge.

Ioannis Ieropoulos, a scientist with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, explained that the microorganisms work inside microbial fuel cells where they metabolize the organics, converting them into carbon dioxide and electricity.

Like the human heart, the robotic system works by using artificial muscles that compress a soft area in the center of the device, forcing fluid to be expelled through an outlet and delivered to the fuel cells. The artificial muscles then relax and go through the process again for the next cycle.

“The artificial heartbeat is mechanically simpler than a conventional electric motor-driven pump by virtue of the fact that it employs artificial muscle fibers to create the pumping action, rather than an electric motor, which is by comparison a more complex mechanical assembly,” Walter said.

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IBM’s Next-gen Transistors Mimick Human Brain

IBM has discovered a way to make transistors that could be turned into virtual circuitry that mimics how the human brain operates.

The new transistors would be made from strongly correlated materials, such as metal oxides, which researchers say can be used to build more powerful — but less power-hungry — computation circuitry.

“The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end, after a fantastic run of 50 years,” said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research. “We need to consider alternative devices and materials that operate entirely differently.”

Researchers have been trying to find ways of changing conductivity states in strongly correlated materials for years. Parkin’s team is the first to convert metal oxides from an insulated to conductive state by applying oxygen ions to the material. The team recently published details of the work in the journal Science.

In theory, such transistors could mimic how the human brain operates in that “liquids and currents of ions [would be used] to change materials,” Parkin said, noting that “brains can carry out computing operations a million times more efficiently than silicon-based computers.”

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