CINVESTAV: Artificial intelligence lenses for the blind created

Combining computational geometry, artificial intelligence, geo and ultrasound techniques, among others, scientists from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) created a device to help people with low vision or blindness to navigate more easily.

This project, developed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, began formally in 2009, and in less than five years a prototype was created and is about to be transferred to the technology company Qualtop, said Eduardo José Bayro Corrochano, project leader.

The navigation device consists of glasses with stereo sound sensors, GPS technology and a tablet, which guides the blind person to a specific point and avoids hitting static or moving obstacles, also recognizes money bills of various denominations, and color of clothing.

The expert, who also developed the first inexpensive humanoid robot in Mexico called Mexone, said it was from progress made during his research in robotics that he considered using stereoscopic vision algorithms in a guiding device for people with visual disability.

The idea came from a doctoral thesis at the CINVESTAV on the use of stereoscopic vision lenses designed for people with blindness.

To do this, the researchers went to the School for Blind Girls in Guadalajara, which addresses this type of disabilities, in order to meet the needs of the visually impaired.

It was after the financial support of the National Council for Science and Technology (CINVESTAV) in 2012 and 2013 when they could accelerate the development of the lens, set the hardware, adapt processors and try different types of sensors used in the device.

"We currently have a light weight, ergonomically acceptable prototype since it almost looks like a normal pair of glasses and can work in real time with batteries that last approximately four hours in continuous use."

"We hope to have a commercial prototype by next August at the latest, and being able to market it in early 2015," Bayro Corrochano said, who is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Researcher at the CINVESTAV estimate that the commercial product would cost between ten and fifteen hundred dollars ($13,000- $19,500 Mexican pesos), and consist of the glasses with sensors and a tablet from which a voice would tell directions and/or warnings.

Bayro Corrochano

Although globally there are similar devices, says Bayro Corrochano, the development at CINVESTAV combines new algorithms and technology which makes it unique.

For example, the use of ultrasound techniques to detect translucent obstacles, like glass, or the use of artificial intelligence (machine learning) in order to recognize places, signs and objects.

These glasses are also useful for those with poor eyesight, as they help to improve perception.

The project has generated two patents at the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, and the developers are looking for investors interested in participating in large-scale production.

Stephen Hawking: Threat to Humanity - Artificial Intelligence and Smart Weapon Systems

Stephen Hawking, in an article inspired by the new Johnny Depp flick Transcendence, said it would be the "worst mistake in history" to dismiss the threat of artificial intelligence.

In a paper he co-wrote with University at California, Berkeley computer-science professor Stuart Russell, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professors Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, Hawking cited several achievements in the field of artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars, Siri and the computer that won the US game show Jeopardy!

"Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring," the article in Britain's Independent said.

"Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," the article continued. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks."

The professors wrote that in the future there may be nothing to prevent machines with superhuman intelligence from self-improving, triggering a so-called "singularity."

"One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand."

"Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all," the article said.

"Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute."

"All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks."

UK Lord Dyson invests £5m in AI Robotic Vision lab

Lord James Dyson considers himself a UK evangelist for engineering.

Dyson, the engineering company best known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, is to invest £5m in a Robotics Vision lab at Imperial College, London.

The research will focus on vision systems that can help robots understand and adapt to the world around them, the company said.

Below is a video of one of their projects SLAM++.


Dyson has been working on robotics with Imperial's Prof Andrew Davison since 2005, and he will run the new lab.

The research will cover domestic robots as well as his speciality, robotic vacuum cleaners.

James Dyson said: "My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014. We now have the mechanical and electronic capabilities, but robots still lack understanding - seeing and thinking in the way we do.

"Mastering this will make our lives easier and lead to previously unthinkable technologies."

Dyson's prototype DC06 robotic cleaner never made it to market 

Although the UK may believe it's a pioneer in this field, a number of other small robotic vacuum cleaners, such as LG's Hom-Bot and iRobot's Roomba, have come on to the market and are achieving great success.

iRobot also has a long-standing history with AI robotics for the military and enforcement authorities.

The five-year investment, supplemented by an additional £3m of match-funding from other sources, will pay for 15 scientists, including some of Dyson's own engineers, the company said.

Prof Davison, currently head of robot vision at Imperial's department of computing, is a collaborative team member for the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM++) systems. (see the video above).

The innovative group's work on SLAM++ is led by Renato Salas-Moreno.

Davison says: "A truly intelligent domestic robot needs to complete complex everyday tasks while adapting to a constantly changing environment.

"We will research and develop systems that allow machines to both understand and perceive their surroundings - using vision to achieve it."

UK engineering and robotic innovative projects are still bogged down in wrangles over meagre budgets, nepotism, cronyism, administrative hurdles and stifling red tape, resulting in mediocre products that are a mere shadow imprint of their original concepts.

Academic institutes fight each other over the financial scraps thrown to them by a UK government focussed only on boosting the enormous profits of the financial institutes to which they are connected.

Let's wish this project one more success, given that it is fronted my a real live English Lord. Who else would be allowed to rise above their station and receive the meagre financial backing of an elitist government in a democratically failing UK.

DeepMind: Google acquires another AI organisation

The golden age of AI is upon us. Credit: kidpixo

All eyes turned to London this week, as Google announced its latest acquisition in the form of DeepMind, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence technologies.

The £400m pricetag paid by Google and the reported battle with Facebook to win the company over indicate that this is a firm well worth backing.

Although solid information is thin on the ground, you can get an idea of what the purchase might be leading to, if you know where to look.

Google has always been active in artificial intelligence and relies on the process for many of its projects.

Just consider the "driver" behind its driverless cars, the speech recognition system in Google Glass, or the way its search engine predicts what we might search for after just a couple of keystrokes.

Even the page-rank algorithm that started it all falls under the banner of AI. Acquiring a company such as DeepMind therefore seems like a natural step.

The big question is whether Google is motivated by a desire to help develop technologies we already know about or whether it is moving into the development of new technologies.

Google has the money and the drive to tackle the biggest questions in science, and developing computers that think like humans has, for a long time, been one of the biggest of them all.

Demis Hassabis

The headlines this week have described DeepMind as a "secretive start-up", but clues about what it gets up to at its London base can be gleaned from some of the research publications produced by the company's co-founder, Demis Hassabis.

Hassabis' three most recent publications all focus on the brain activity of human participants as they undergo particular tasks.

He has looked into how we take advantage of our habitat, how we identify and predict the behaviour of other people and how we remember the past and imagine the future.

As humans, we collect information through sensory input and process it many times over using abstraction.

We extract features and categorise objects to focus our attention on the information that is relevant to us.

When we enter a room we quickly build up a mental image of the room, interpret the objects in the room, and use this information to assess the situation in front of us.

The people at Google have, until now, generally focused on the lower-level stages of this information processing.

They have developed systems to look for features and concepts in online photos and street scenes to provide users with relevant content, systems to translate one language to another to enable us to communicate, and speech recognition systems, making voice control on your phone or device a reality.

The processes Hassabis investigates require these types of information processing as prerequisites.

Only once you have identified the relevant features in a scene and categorised objects in your habitat can you begin to take advantage of your habitat.

Only once you have identified the features of someone's face and recognised them as a someone you know can you start to predict their behaviour.

And only once you have built up vivid images of the past can you extrapolate a future.

Other recent acquisitions by Google provide further pieces to the puzzle.

Ray Kurzweil

It has recently appointed futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes in search engines with human intelligence and being able to upload our minds onto computers, as its director of engineering.

And the purchase of Boston Dynamics, a company developing ground breaking robotics technology, gives a hint of its ambition.

Google is also getting into smart homes in the hope of more deeply interweaving its technologies into our everyday lives.

DeepMind could provide the know-how to enable such systems to exhibit a level of intelligence never seen before in computers.

Combining the machinery Google already uses for processing sensory input with the ideas under investigation at DeepMind about how the brain uses this sensory input to complete high-level tasks is an exciting prospect. It has the potential to produce the closest thing yet to a computer with human qualities.

Building computers that think like humans has been the goal of AI ever since the time of Alan Turing.

Progress has been slow, with science fiction often creating false hope in people's minds. But these past two decades have seen unimaginable leaps in information processing and our understanding of the brain.

Now that one of the most powerful companies in the world has identified where it wants to go next, we can expect big things. Just as physics had its heyday in the 20th century, this century is truly the golden age of AI.