04 April 2012

Engineering Intelligence

Do we actually want machines to interact with humans in an emotional way? Will it be possible for them to interact with us? Researchers at UCL London are working on machine learning and applications of probability in information processing. The world expects to be able to interact naturally with machines by expecting them to understand what we say and move naturally in our environment. There are already research programmes that attempt to gauge the emotion in someone’s voice or face but I’m more interested in a machine that could recognise the emotional significance of an event for a human. The ultimate dream in the future for researchers in the field of machine and information learning would be for machines to not only comprehend what we say in the pure semantic sense, but in an emotional sense as well.


How might a machine in the future react when reading an emotional novel? Could they ever act similarly to humans? Could these intelligent machines feel sad or feel happy? Would these machines understand the emotional consequences of the human sentence ‘I’ve lost my job’? These questions represent some of the fundamental challenges that lie ahead – necessitating a large database of information about humans and the human world. Any machine that wishes to understand the complexity of social interaction, society and behaviour, needs to have some grasp of what it really means to be human. Perhaps the initial step in ever beginning to reverse intelligence is to first understand the theoretical aspects of information processing in the brain. From this, researchers can then analyse how an ‘artificial brain’ would be able to process or store information in the same way.

More information:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-to-engineer-intelligence/