What Is I.B.M.’s Watson? →
It’s a long article, but it’s pretty awesome. At least watch the video. :x
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.
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Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia (“This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series” — “What is ‘Blue Thunder’?”), science (“The greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles” — “What is Egypt?”) and sophisticated wordplay (“Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice” — “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?”).
John Underkoffler on G-speak at TED.
This presentation actually was not NEARLY as impressive as the one he gave at USC, when his company gifted USC with a G-speak system (which lived in Flowerspace). He had most of the functions of the gestural system, but didn’t really demonstrate them specifically… and projection would have only covered the stage area, whereas in Flowerspace, the enclosed area was small enough that the projection / camera coverage included nearly the entire space.
Still, something to look at, to give you an idea of how far along we may or may not be. John sells the concepts of needing to revolutionize UI and developing a new OS very well, at any rate. ;x
Firm uses typing cadence to finger unauthorized users →
So Scout used some Javascript timing features to watch how users type when they enter their login credentials for various services. Shanahan says that his algorithms need a minimum of 5 attempts at entering a phrase of at least 12 characters in order to generate a typing “cadence.” By watching repeated logins, Scout could soon categorize these cadences into a digital pattern, then assign each pattern a serial number.
“As you’re typing, you have a cadence and rhythm,” Shanahan says, a rhythm that includes how long one holds down various keys and how long it takes to move between keys. Applying the technology to its data set of 20 million logins, Scout pulled out 175,000 unique patterns—thereby identifying 175,000 distinct users, even when they used the same login credentials on the same machine.
The Kotaku iPad article made a mention of this in-development MIT experiment called the SixthSense and the screencap was interesting, so I Googled and was pleasantly intrigued by the TED video that came up for it.
There are definitely similar strains of work occurring with this and the Gspeak (aka Minority Report system) that MIT was also developing.
I also find it relevant how they call it the “SixthSense” system, considering Manda’s belief that Twitter is Telepathy… something that my gut instinct wanted to reject, but I admit I was partially won by her reasoning. >_>
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