Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence @ MIRI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. You (YOU!) Can Take Stanford's 'Intro to AI' Course Next Quarter, For Free. Stanford has been offering portions of its robotics coursework online for a few years now, but professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are kicking things up a notch (okay, lots of notches) with next semester's CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
For the first time, you can take this course, along with several hundred Stanford undergrads, without having to fill out an application, pay tuition, or live in a dorm. This is more than just downloading materials and following along with a live stream; you're actually going to have to do all the same work as the Stanford students. There's a book you'll need to get. There will be at least 10 hours per week of studying, along with weekly graded homework assignments. You won't technically earn credits for the course unless you're a Stanford student, but for all practical purposes, you'll be getting the exact same knowledge and experience -- transmitted directly to you by none other than two living Jedis of modern AI. Computers: Artificial Life: Artificial Worlds. MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors. Though memristors are dense, cheap, and tiny, they also have a high failure rate at present, characteristics that bear an intriguing resemblance to the brain's synapses.
It means that the architecture must by definition tolerate defects in individual circuitry, much the way brains gracefully degrade their performance as synapses are lost, without sudden system failure. Basically, memristors bring data close to computation, the way biological systems do, and they use very little power to store that information, just as the brain does. For a comparable function, the new hardware will use two to three orders of magnitude less power than Nvidia's Fermi-class GPU. For the first time we will begin to bridge the main divide between biological computation and traditional computation. The use of the memristor addresses the basic hardware challenges of neuromorphic computing: the need to simultaneously move and manipulate data, thereby drastically cutting power consumption and space. How DARPA Is Making a Machine Mind out of Memristors. Artificial intelligence has long been the overarching vision of computing, always the goal but never within reach.
But using memristors from HP and steady funding from DARPA, computer scientists at Boston University are on a quest to build the electronic analog to a human brain. The software they are developing – called MoNETA for Modular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent – should be able to function more like a mammalian brain than a conventional computer. At least, that's what they're claiming in a new feature in IEEE Spectrum. There's reason to be optimistic that this attempt might be different from all the previous AI let-downs that have come before it. Why? The Boston U. team, by its own admission, doesn't yet know exactly what these platforms will look like, but they seem very confident that they will soon be a reality. Decide for yourself if MoNETA is the real deal by clicking through the source link below. [IEEE Spectrum]
AI Learning. AI Recognition.