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.

NASA MAVEN launch today: Another US Robotic explorer heading to Mars

This photo provided by NASA shows a full moon rising behind the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft onboard at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2013, Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

NASA's next Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. 

AP Photo/NASA, Bill Ingalls

NASA's newest Martian explorer is on its launch pad in Florida, ready to soar.

The Maven spacecraft was scheduled to blast off aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket Monday afternoon.

NASA is sending Maven to Mars to study its upper atmosphere. Scientists want to know why Mars went from being warm and wet during its first billion years, to the cold and dry place it is today.

The early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support microbial life. But much of that atmosphere may have been lost to space, eroded by the sun.

"Something clearly happened," the University of Colorado's Bruce Jakosky, the principal Maven scientist, said on the eve of Maven's flight.

"What we want to do is to understand what are the reasons for that change in the climate."

Maven—bearing eight science instruments—will take 10 months to reach Mars, entering into orbit around the red planet in September 2014. The mission costs $671 million.

A question underlying all of NASA's 21 Mars missions to date is whether life could have started on what now seems to be a barren world.

Another Zenit 3SL Sea Launch Failure

Once the platform is ballasted to a depth of 22 m, the launch vehicle hangar is opened and the Zenit 3SL is mechanically moved to a vertical position. 

The launch platform crew members then evacuate to the command ship which steams about five kilometers away. 

Rocket stages are then remotely commanded to load propellants. 

The final launch sequence is then completed and launch takes place.

Sea Launch is currently a Russian spacecraft launch service that uses a mobile seagoing platform for direct equatorial launches of commercial payloads on Zenit 3SL rockets.

Since its inception there have been 31 launches, including three failures and one partial failure. The sea-based system operates out of Long Beach, California, but its launches take place from an equatorial spot in the Pacific Ocean. This location allows a minimal energy ascent-to-orbit for geostationary-bound satellites.

Sea Launch was originally established in 1995 as a consortium of four companies from Norway, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. The program was managed by Boeing with personnel participation from the other shareholders.

Its first launch took place in March 1999. Almost all of Sea Launch's commercial payloads have been communications satellites intended for geostationary transfer orbit. The launch vehicle and its payload are assembled in Long Beach on a specially outfitted ship, the "Sea Launch Commander."

Once assembled the vehicle is positioned on top of a self-propelled converted oil platform, the "Ocean Odyssey." Both the command ship and the platform sail some 4,828 km to an equatorial position at 154 degrees West Longitude, where final pre-launch operations and launch take place.

The travel time to the site is about 11 days for the platform and about eight days for the command ship.