Artificial-intelligence system surfs web to improve its performance

Artificial intelligence has always been a topic of debate when it comes to how it performs and how it can perform better. One of the new ideas thought off is just how vast the internet is and how helpful it can be. The only problem is that the information available is in plain text, so extracting this information for analytical tests that can help humans see correlations between differnt things is difficult to do and time consuming, we all know that when it comes to computer science and machine learning, the time it takes for computation is very important and each computation must be efficient in its accuracy and speed. In general information extraction has always been more of a challenge in the realm of computer science and artificial intelligence just because there have not been any methods created to make this method work any better. Not until recently have there been students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along with researches that have brought the concept of machine learning to the next level. We have to realize that most machine learning work mostly by combining training examples that are provided to them by the human annotators. They just look for patterns that match keywords that are once again in memory, meaning they are truly limited in the information they can access because of their initial training. This new idea that has been brought up concerns machine learning and extends its capability by allowing the machine learning system to assign what they call a "confidence score" to each classification that the system makes. If this this score is too low then the system will automatically go searching the web for information that might contain the information that the system is trying to extract.

After this initial process the system then tries to extract all relevant data from the new texts that it found from its search query and combines this information with its information that it extracted in the initial attempt to find information. The cool thing that I am amazed by is the fact that all of this computing that is being done by the system is the result of machine learning, the system learns how to search, look at the accuracy of its search, and then be able to comprehend if the information is relevant to its initial task at hand, and then to be able to fuse the two together to complete its extraction. These researchers tested this system on many pieces of data that are extensive like mass school shootings and food contamination. The system was tasked with extracting things like names of shooters and schools, and in the case of food contamination, food type and type of contamination. The system was trained to respond to keywords and teach terms. In each trial the system was able to extract about 10 new documents from the web that related to the 300 documents that it was initially trained on. After seeing that this system actually works, these researchers compared their systems performance to that of conventional machine learning systems techniques. Basically one each test, the newly created system by the MIT students and researchers was able to out perform its older predecessors by almost 10 percent every time.

I find this amazing and it can only get better from here. These researchers are even thinking about adding millions and millions of articles to this system so that it can even perform on a wider scope. Machine learning just blows my mind away every time I hear about it. We are on the brink of allowing machines to do things that we can't do and faster. The best thing is we can train them on exactly what we want them to do so that they do only the task that they asked for. I can only imagine that this will get even better in the near future, and hopefully it will be for the better of science. 

Reference Links:

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/machinelearningfordummies-140401055817-phpapp01/95/machine-learning-for-dummies-4-638.jpg?cb=1396332069

http://news.mit.edu/2016/artificial-intelligence-system-surfs-web-improve-performance-1110

http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/styles/news_article_image_top_slideshow/public/images/2016/MIT-Webaid-Learning_0.jpg?itok=Sli1Qec0

Enabling Wireless Virtual Reality Through Programmed Phased Arrays

Virtual reality is the newly known technology that allows a person to see graphics at a higher resolution enough that it mimics a real world environment. The only problem is that VR is limited to some sort because it requires a direct connection to some hardware in order to be able to process such a high graphics resolution that the user is trying to watch. Believe it or not, the reality is that wires suck, you can trip on them and we are so far into the digital age to require something that has been available for a while. Well to no surprise of mine, MIT researchers have developed a way so that wires will hopefully no longer be required. They're calling this functional prototype, "MoVR," which will basically allow any person to utilize any VR headset through a wireless connection, the name even sounds like "Move" and "VR," implying that you can wander around with this newly innovative technology. Through several tests administered by researchers at MIT's computer science department, they have discovered that this technology can actually enable communication up to several megabits per second, which converted to bits comes out to several billion bits per second. These tests utilized many high-frequency signals of radio waves that are called "millimeter waves," which are guessed by many experts to one day provide some very fast and powerful smartphones that would run on 5g.

One smartphone by the name of the HTC Vive was able to utilize this VR technology. Though most of the experts have stated that the "MoVR" technology is able to be utilized with any headset. Just imagine that you can play multiplayer video games with friends all wirelessly, even using many other applications that are capable with this VR device. Now you may ask how this tech actually works. The antenna is a two directional and what they call a "phased array" antenna which is a relative array of many antennas that feeds each antenna through a pattern of signals that can correct undesired direction. Below is an image of the "MoVR" antenna that is almost the size of a credit card, and can fit almost anywhere.

While there are several complications with this newly built tech, like the fact that it is very hard to keep a strong signal as the user has to be directly in front of the antenna or else even the slightest blockage like for example putting your hand in front of the antenna can cause signal loss. MoVR has the ability to revert each signal toward the user and correct the signal, but this solution is not fully refined and needs more work. While this is close to being something that can be bought hopefully, the technology is a bit ahead of itself. But the idea is awesome and requires extensive programming by computer societies utilizing special algorithms too that the angle can be corrected automatically. So it is a mixture of programming and hardware design that has allowed this innovation to become a feasible  reality. I am a fan of VR gaming and hope to be able to buy such a piece of tech soon if it is available. It is amazing to see where tech is headed and where it is going to be in the near future. 

Reference Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

http://news.mit.edu/2016/enabling-wireless-virtual-reality-1114

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6GA5oIy9ONo/maxresdefault.jpg

Faster programs, easier programming: New system lets nonexperts optimize programs that run on multiprocessor chips.

It is no surprise that MIT keeps coming up with new and innovative methods to create faster, easier running, and more efficient machines and programs. One of the best schools for engineering and with leading engineers, they have a mass amount of technology in their disposal to work magic. This article speaks on a new system that was created to allow a non expert to have the ability and capability to modify and optimize any program that can run on a multiprocessor chip. We have dynamic programming which can allow techniques to give us accurate solutions to problems in several fields like economics, genomic analysis which is the analyzation of a genome, and many other fields. The problem is that adapting this same idea to computers with multiple cores would require a level of programming that these occupations just don't have the expertise in at all to be able to execute such a task. That is why researchers from MIT and Stony Brook University came up with this system that can allow a user to directly tell their programs what to exactly do in very simple terms. The system will then read these "terms" and create a version of that program that will actually run on multiple core chips. It also offers the guarantee that it will give you the same results as you would get from a single core processor, only difference in this case is that it is much faster because in this instance you have multiple processors instead of one.

Now when you think about this idea, it can almost be applied to any idea. The idea that I will focus on is the idea of "rapid search." This method surprisingly utilizes something that we recently learned in our CS150 class, it is called recursion. This version of recursion will basically allow smaller division of a specific matrix, this will be generated by the program named "Bellmania" which will take that metric, perform some operation on it, and then outsource it to some other subroutines that will also complete some task. This process will basically be the heart of recursion, an operation is performed, outsourced, performed, and so it repeats recursively. The amazing thing about this new way of programming is that Bellmania can perform this task in 15 min, where as a programmer would take hours and is more error prone because it is hand coded, where as Bellmania guarantees accuracy. This idea literally is amazing, it will allow what is usually hand optimized code, which is error prone because of its dense complexity to be done in a matter of minuted and with no errors whatsoever. This will make any field 100% better when performing some task, instead of having someone optimize this code, you can just use Bellmania and be carefree about any possible problems. This applies to biology, computation in computer science, network traffic, and even cybersecurity.

Hopefully this newly created idea can become a public thing that is able to be sold as a program, because this can allow regular users to optimize their code for free lance work and many other ways. It has the potential to be something that is revolutionary in the world of computer science.

Reference Links:
http://news.mit.edu/2016/faster-programs-easier-programming-multiprocessor-chips-1107
http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/styles/news_article_image_top_slideshow/public/images/2016/MIT-Laymans-Parellel_0.jpg?itok=qsLqjTEi
http://m.eet.com/media/1196773/f4.8.jpg