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Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?

October 17, 2019

A tool known as BERT can now beat humans on advanced reading-comprehension tests. But it's also revealed how far AI has to go.

Computers and Humans ‘See’ Differently. Does It Matter?

September 17, 2019

In some ways, machine vision is superior to human vision. In other ways, it may never catch up.

Q&A

The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence

August 26, 2019

Iyad Rahwan’s radical idea: The best way to understand algorithms is to observe their behavior in the wild.

Q&A

His Artificial Intelligence Sees Inside Living Cells

July 24, 2019

The computer vision scientist Greg Johnson is building systems that can recognize organelles on sight and show the dynamics of living cells more clearly than microscopy can.

Q&A

Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines

July 11, 2019

Consciousness is a famously hard problem, so Hod Lipson is starting from the basics: with self-aware robots that can help us understand how we think.

Where We See Shapes, AI Sees Textures

July 1, 2019

To researchers’ surprise, deep learning vision algorithms often fail at classifying images because they mostly take cues from textures, not shapes.

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

March 11, 2019

The latest AI algorithms are probing the evolution of galaxies, calculating quantum wave functions, discovering new chemical compounds and more. Is there anything that scientists do that can’t be automated?

Foundations Built for a General Theory of Neural Networks

January 31, 2019

Neural networks can be as unpredictable as they are powerful. Now mathematicians are beginning to reveal how a neural network’s form will influence its function.

Q&A

A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think

January 10, 2019

Neural networks are famously incomprehensible, so Been Kim is developing a “translator for humans.”

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