Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagMachine Vision

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Busy evening cityscape with cars and people on 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan New York City

One Way Human Vision Is Better Than a Machine’s

The problem machine vision has with understanding what things *should* look like creates risks for traffic video safety systems, researchers say

Because machine vision absorbs information without context, it simply doesn’t “see” what a human sees — and the results could be “dangerous in real-world AI applications,” warns York University prof James Elder. He and his colleagues did an interesting experiment with deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). They used “Frankensteins” — models of life forms that are distorted in some way — to determine how they would be interpreted by humans or by machine vision: “Frankensteins are simply objects that have been taken apart and put back together the wrong way around,” says Elder. “As a result, they have all the right local features, but in the wrong places.” The investigators found that while the human visual system is confused by Read More ›

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Woman Lost Something

Researchers: Now We Know How Objects Can Hide in Plain Sight!

At times, we can’t “see” what we are looking for because our brain waves are not co-operating

Have you ever looked desperately for something—your passport perhaps—and then found, half an hour later, that it was right in front of you all the time? Inconspicuous but not really invisible? “Hiding in plain sight,” as the saying goes. It happens to everyone. We wonder why we didn’t find it before. But some enterprising researchers asked a different question: Why do we find it later? And they have come up with an explanation from the way our brains work: They found that patterns of neural signals, called traveling brain waves, exist in the visual system of the awake brain and are organized to allow the brain to perceive objects that are faint or otherwise difficult to see. Salk News, “Traveling Read More ›

Machine vision Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash SrC5iuVJk_c

What You See That the Machine Doesn’t

You see the “skeleton” of an idea
Humans can intuit the underlying forms that govern shapes, in part by guessing the intentions of other humans. Machine vision does not intuit things, which may be one reason for its odd misidentifications. Read More ›
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Artificial Intelligence Is Actually Superficial Intelligence

The confusing ways the word “intelligence” is used belie the differences between human intelligence and machine sophistication

Words often have more meaning than we hear at first. Consider colors. We associate green with verdant, healthy life and red with prohibition and danger. But these inferences are not embedded in the basic meaning of “red” or “green.” They are cultural accretions we attach to words that enable the richness of language. That, by the way, is one reason why legal documents and technical papers are so difficult to read. The terms used are stripped clean of such baggage, requiring additional words to fill the gaps. The word “intelligent” is like that. Saying that a computer, or a program, is intelligent can lead us down a rabbit hole of extra meaning. An honest researcher merely means the computer has Read More ›