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Community => Recreation Commons => Our researchers have made a breakthrough! => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on October 28, 2013, 04:09:36 pm

Title: AI Startup Vicarious Claims Milestone In Quest To Build A Brain: Cracking CAPTCH
Post by: Buster's Uncle on October 28, 2013, 04:09:36 pm

AI Startup Vicarious Claims Milestone In Quest To Build A Brain: Cracking CAPTCHA
Robert Hof, Contributor 10/28/2013 @ 12:13AM
 


Can machines think? Not yet. But there is one at least partial test: the CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” those distorted characters you have to type into a website that wants to repel automated programs from spamming or making comments in blogs. Because CAPTCHAs by definition are intended to be recognizable only by humans, they’re widely (if not universally) considered one test of whether a machine can at least display a visual understanding close to that of people.

On Monday, the artificial intelligence startup Vicarious will release the results of a test, shown in a video, that it says shows its early prototype software can solve CAPTCHAs reliably. In particular, two of the three-year-old company’s cofounders, Dileep George and D. Scott Phoenix, say the AI software can solve Google's GOOG +0.18% reCAPTCHA, the most widely used test of a computer’s ability to act like a human being.

In the tests shown in the video, the system scans the CAPTCHA and presents a list of possible answers–often topped by the correct one. The company claims it gets 95% per letter on reCAPTCHA, and that it solves reCAPTCHA 90% of the time. That compares with essentially 0% for state-of-the-art algorithms cited in a Microsoft Research paper. Even a solve rate of 1% is considered to beat the CAPTCHA system.


(http://b-i.forbesimg.com/roberthof/files/2013/10/recaptcha1-1024x640.jpg)


While Vicarious doesn’t plan to do anything with its CAPTCHA recognition, it’s a demonstration of its broader goal. Vicarious says it’s creating software, which it calls a recursive cortical network, that thinks and learns like a human, even to the extent of being able to use what we think of as imagination. The company distinguishes its approach from many other companies, from IBM to Google to Microsoft and a raft of startups, in focusing on visual perception.

Instead of trying to model and simulate the brain itself, like projects such as the Human Brain Project, George says, Vicarious is trying to identify only the elements of the brain needed for information processing–in particular the neocortex’s ability to understand the structure of the physical world. Vicarious also calls out shortcomings in deep learning, a branch of AI that has produced big advances in image and speech recognition in recent years–most obviously in services such as the iPhone’s Siri and Google’s voice search. That approach, George and Phoenix say, rests on a model of neuron behavior much more primitive than the human brain’s, so it depends on heavy computation and extensive learning from many more examples–10,000 or more in many cases–than even a child. “That is not intelligence,” says Phoenix.

Instead, Vicarious is “trying to do the math behind the processes of the brain,” says Phoenix. It’s the same thinking, he adds, that is behind the obvious fact that “airplanes don’t flap their wings. We’re focusing on lift and thrust  vs. feathers and flapping.”

The company even claims its breakthrough is more impressive than the best-known AI demonstration so far: IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson computer. Although that was clearly impressive, Vicarious says the approaches IBM used doesn’t truly involved understanding of words because they don’t include an understanding of or experience in physical objects, like humans innately have–and like Vicarious claims to have simulated at least in preliminary fashion in software. “The brain is trying to model the structure of the world, so the world is another clue” in addition to research on what the brain itself is doing, says George.

One interesting wrinkle is that Vicarious is setting up the system to “imagine” what shapes might be, filling in blanks that humans naturally do. “Perception is a lot about imagination,” says George. “Imagining what you’re seeing is a big part of perception.” He aims to have a system that can “see a dog in the clouds.”

George and Phoenix say the CAPTCHA demonstration is just that, and that its software can be used to solve other sensory perception and even reasoning problems. “We have solved other problems we’re not telling people about yet,” says George. The company plans to do other Turing tests as well.


(http://b-i.forbesimg.com/roberthof/files/2013/10/vicariousteam.jpg)
Vicarious team, with Phoenix (left) and George in foreground


It’s tough for outsiders to assess the company’s technology, since it’s keeping a tight lid on details. George and Phoenix even requested that its location, which is to the east of Silicon Valley, not be identified. When it was pointed out that this was revealed on its employment page, they promptly removed it. The secrecy is understandable, especially given that bad guys who want to beat CAPTCHAs would love to see what they’re doing.

But as a result, even the two experts they referred me to couldn’t provide much insight. Indeed, Luis von Ahn, one of the Carnegie Mellon University team that coined the term CAPTCHA, says he’s skeptical. “It’s hard for me to be impressed since I see these every few months,” he says–about 50 claims since 2003. Each time, CAPTCHAs are adjusted to foil the bots–which he predicts will happen again as CAPTCHAs go from chiefly text-based to picture-based. “I guarantee they will not be able to break that, because if they could, they’d be announcing a big breakthrough in computer vision.”

George, however, says they are testing CAPTCHAs with colors, 3-D shapes, lighting angles, and other variations.

Indeed, in what is hard to view as a coincidence, Google itself announced on Oct. 25 that its reCAPTCHA system had been improved to make it at once easier for humans and harder for bots. “The updated system uses advanced risk analysis techniques, actively considering the user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during and after they interact with it,” Google said in a blog post. “That means that today the distorted letters serve less as a test of humanity and more as a medium of engagement to elicit a broad range of cues that characterize humans and bots. As part of this, we’ve recently released an update that creates different classes of CAPTCHAs for different kinds of users.”

Still, CAPTCHAs are merely the demonstration point for the technology, and 90% accuracy even on current versions is clearly a big advance over other methods. Nils Nilsson, an emeritus professor of engineering at Stanford University’s computer science department, said he hasn’t “the foggiest idea of their technology,” but said visual perception is an important part of AI.

However, Nilsson says visual perception isn’t the only avenue AI needs to pursue. Understanding movement and actions is another. “There’s nothing to say that the human brain follows only one method of computation,” he says. In fact, George says the system is trained on videos, not just images, so next on the agenda is recognizing objects in a 3-D scene and recognizing actions or motions.

Vicarious is clearly thinking very long-term, at least in terms of the usual Silicon Valley startup these days. They don’t expect to release any products for at least five years. Indeed, staying out of the tech echo chamber is one reason the company is headquartered outside the usual local tech hubs. The six-person company is backed with $16.1 million so far from Good Ventures, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Oh, and in case anyone running bots to break CAPTCHAs is wondering, Vicarious will not be releasing its software into the wild.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/10/28/ai-startup-vicarious-claims-milestone-in-quest-to-build-a-brain-craking-captcha/?partner=yahootix (http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/10/28/ai-startup-vicarious-claims-milestone-in-quest-to-build-a-brain-craking-captcha/?partner=yahootix)

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Screw these guys.

Title: Re: AI Startup Vicarious Claims Milestone In Quest To Build A Brain: Cracking CAPTCH
Post by: Buster's Uncle on October 28, 2013, 04:51:08 pm

Software Firm Claims Breakthrough in Computer Vision Will Lead to Better AI
Scientific American
By Susan Kuchinskas 5 hours ago



Luis von Ahn has heard it all before. As co-inventor of the CAPTCHA, those annoying images composed of wiggly letters and numbers that Web sites use to make sure you’re a human rather than a machine, von Ahn has received as many as 50 claims over the past decade of ways to beat his program.

Make that 51.

The start-up Vicarious, based in Union City, Calif., claims it has come up with artificial intelligence (AI) software that reads images nearly as well as humans and can crack a CAPTCHA 90 percent of the time. If the claims are true, they could signify a breakthrough in building AI that is indistinguishable from human cognition—at least when it comes to helping computers identify and understand images.

Vicarious calls the architecture its AI system is based on a “recursive cortical network,” meaning it is modeled along the line of the human neocortex—the brain’s gray matter that processes information. This approach allows AI software to learn new things from a few examples, much as a human child comes to understand the world by learning to recognize what he sees and figuring out how the images are connected.

Vicarious’s approach differs from AI methods such as "deep learning," in which software trains an artificial neural network by providing thousands of training images for it to connect, according to the company. "The human brain is made up of a simple, replicated circuit—a single repeated element that happens over and over again in the neocortex," Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix says, adding that his company’s software is likewise built from single, repeated elements.

Solving a CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) clears the bar that mathematician Alan Turing set in 1950 to determine whether a machine could be said to possess a humanlike intelligence, although in a limited way. Over the years other computer scientists and hackers have found ways to program computers to pass the CAPTCHA test, forcing Web publishers to employ increasingly more complicated CAPTCHAs that are difficult to decipher in their efforts to repel increasingly sophisticated spamming tactics.

Vicarious's CAPTCHA-solving demonstration is an example of "narrow artificial intelligence," a technology that can match or even exceed human performance on a narrowly defined task. IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue is another such example. But Vicarious insists its computer perception software is the foundation of an AI that will learn the way humans do—by experiencing the world around it, principally via vision, and then identifying patterns. "If an algorithm solves vision in general, it is not narrow AI, it's a general AI system,” says, Dileep George, also a Vicarious co-founder. “We are working on a general algorithm for solving [the] vision problem, and CAPTCHA is a stepping stone to that.”

One reason computers scientists are skeptical about Vicarious’s claim is that the company has kept its technology under wraps. It demonstrated the software on video, which showed its technology solving CAPTCHAs from major Web sites, rather than by publishing its findings in scientific journals. Nils Nilsson, emeritus professor at Stanford University and author of The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements, says Vicarious’s claim is significant but he has reservations. Vicarious, he says, uses "the CAPTCHA thing as just one test case to show how well their technology works. I'd say, okay, that's probably a pretty good advance, but I would need to know more."

George, a former PhD student of Nilsson’s, says that Vicarious has elected not to publish its results because publishing papers can be “very constraining." “You work toward the next paper and think in a one-year time frame whereas we are set up to think on a much longer time frame—and that lets us make bets or look in directions other people might not be looking.” Besides, adds Phoenix, they don't want to give spammers any new ideas.

In 2012 Vicarious received $15 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firms led by Good Ventures, the investment firm of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Vicarious is a "flexible-purpose corporation," a type of for-profit California corporation that pursues a goal of benefit to society, even at the expense of profits. This lets the company take a very long view—according to Phoenix, Vicarious doesn't expect to demonstrate full AI before 2028.

Stealth mode isn’t necessary to come up with good AI technology, researchers point out. "If you want impressive, neutrally inspired computer vision results, there are many of them around,” says Yann LeCun, director of New York University’s Center for Data Science. “People have published results and used benchmarks so that you can compare them with other methods."

CAPTCHA inventor von Ahn, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, doesn’t seem excessively worried. It is hard to determine exactly how much better Vicarious's technology is than other work in the field, he says. The Vicarious approach, which relies on visual perception, is in line with current thinking about AI, according to von Ahn. "Many artificial intelligence researchers spend most of their time dealing with perception,” he says. “It's believed that our own intelligence derives from our visual cortex.”

Even if it proves to be a technological dead end, "the one nice thing about the approach of using computer vision is that at the very least, it has applications," von Ahn notes. For example, technology based on Vicarious’s system might someday give a self-driving car the ability to identify pedestrians straying onto a roadway.


http://news.yahoo.com/software-firm-claims-breakthrough-computer-vision-lead-better-110000907.html (http://news.yahoo.com/software-firm-claims-breakthrough-computer-vision-lead-better-110000907.html)

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Scew von Ahn, too; I hate captchas.