Researchers have developed a learning program that can recognize handwritten characters after seeing only a few examples, reports Emily Chung for CBC News. The program “could lead to computers that are much better at speech recognition — especially recognizing uncommon words — or classifying objects and behaviour for businesses or the military.”
In a piece for Wired, Robert McMillan examines new MIT research showing that computers “powered by the latest ‘deep learning’ algorithms,” are catching up in tests that compare their intelligence to those of monkeys.
In a piece for New Scientist about teaching robots to communicate like humans, Aviva Rutkin highlights how researchers from MIT developed a new approach to communicating with a robot called inverse semantics. Using this approach, “the robot tries to choose the right words by looking at its environment,” Rutkin writes.