This week's Digital Savant column is what we affectionately call around here "A grab bag" column. Instead of a long column about one thing, it's a column made up of shorter bits. This week, I talk a bit about a recent visit I made to the University of Texas department that researches artificial intelligence within the Department of Computer Science. I also rounded up some of the South by Southwest Interactive updates you may have seen on this blog over the last week or so. And lastly, I wrote about a recent Down Syndrome Association of Central Texas App Day.
Peter Stone is a professor in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas. He’ll be speaking on a panel, “How Robots Can Transform Learning,” at SXSWedu on March 12. Credit: University of Texas
Here's an excerpt from the column:
Department chair Bruce Porter guided me through the areas he and his colleagues are exploring, everything from using IBM's Watson AI technology to make social services more accessible to virtual reality, robots and autonomous driving.
We discussed machine learning, neural networks and the flap over physicist Stephen Hawking's warning that artificial intelligence could destroy the human race. "Discuss" may be too generous a word. Mostly, Porter enlightened me as I asked bewildered questions about the near future.
Then I visited Peter Stone, who specializes in robotics and so-called "autonomous agents" that include the driverless cars companies such as Google, Tesla and (reportedly) Apple are working on. Remarkably, Stone suggests that the robot agents that may help us in our homes to do everyday tasks may be a bigger challenge than trying to make relatively safe auto-driving cars for the highways.
You can read the entire column here. It ran in Tuesday's print edition of the American-Statesman as well.
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