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Community => Recreation Commons => Our researchers have made a breakthrough! => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on August 26, 2014, 03:51:56 pm

Title: Robotics Researchers Are Turning The Internet Into A Giant Robot Brain
Post by: Buster's Uncle on August 26, 2014, 03:51:56 pm

Robotics Researchers Are Turning The Internet Into A Giant Robot Brain
Business Insider
By Dylan Love  35 minutes ago


(http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/k_rxwv938DWM7NCq2HQozg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NQ--/http://globalfinance.zenfs.com/en_us/Finance/US_AFTP_SILICONALLEY_H_LIVE/Robotics_Researchers_Are_Turning_The-c981976aa9fdc7c522a9082a6386e9b3)
Mauricio Lima/AFP



One of the biggest challenges in building useful robots lies in simply teaching them about our world. Robotics researchers at Cornell, Stanford, Brown, and UC Berkeley are building a compelling solution to this problem, and they're calling it "Robo Brain."

Beginning in July, the researchers began compiling "about one billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals" into robot-friendly data that can be stored on the cloud. Machine learning technologies can already interact with data like this to draw useful conclusions from it, but the data's never been gathered on this scale before.

Here's an example of how a robot might use Robo Brain, according to Cornell:

If a robot sees a coffee mug, it can learn from Robo Brain not only that it’s a coffee mug, but also that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full, as opposed to when it is being carried from the dishwasher to the cupboard.

The system employs what computer scientists call “structured deep learning,” where information is stored in many levels of abstraction. An easy chair is a member of the class of chairs, and going up another level, chairs are furniture. Sitting is something you can do on a chair, but a human can also sit on a stool, a bench or the lawn.

Put another way, when a robot needs information about a situation, object, or any unknown thing that it doesn't recognize, it could query Robo Brain over the internet to derive the appropriate way to proceed. The Robo Brain website displays things that robots will readily be able to learn. It's basic stuff for humans, but robots have to start somewhere. For example:


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Screenshot


http://news.yahoo.com/robotics-researchers-turning-internet-giant-135848721.html (http://news.yahoo.com/robotics-researchers-turning-internet-giant-135848721.html)

Title: Cornell Scientists Create ‘Robo Brain’ to Teach Robots to Learn from Humans
Post by: Buster's Uncle on August 26, 2014, 06:32:03 pm

Cornell Scientists Create ‘Robo Brain’ to Teach Robots to Learn from Humans
Indo-Asian News Service
‎Aug‎ ‎25‎, ‎2014


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Two researchers have created “Robo Brain” — a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources — to teach robots how humans naturally behave.

The exclusive data bank for robots will help the machines learn how to find keys, pour a drink, put away dishes, and when not to interrupt two people having a conversation.

“Our laptops and cellphones have access to all the information we want. If a robot encounters a situation it has not seen before, it can query ‘Robo Brain’ in the cloud,” explained lead researcher Ashutosh Saxena, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University in New York.


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“Robo Brain” is currently downloading and processing about 1 billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos, and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals.

“The information is being translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots will be able to draw on when they need it,” Saxena added.

According to him, “Robo Brain” will process images to pick out the objects in them, and by connecting images and video with text, it will learn to recognize objects and how they are used, along with human language and behavior.

For example, if a robot sees a coffee mug, it can learn from “Robo Brain” not only that it is a coffee mug but also that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full.


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“The ‘Robo Brain’ will look like a gigantic, branching graph with abilities for multi-dimensional queries,” explained Aditya Jami, a visiting researcher at Cornell who designed the large-scale database for the brain.

Like a human learner, “Robo Brain” will have teachers thanks to crowdsourcing, said Saxena, who described the project at the 2014 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference in Berkeley recently.


https://www.yahoo.com/tech/cornell-scientists-create-robo-brain-to-teach-robots-95740298304.html (https://www.yahoo.com/tech/cornell-scientists-create-robo-brain-to-teach-robots-95740298304.html)