In an ideal world, everyone would speak the same language or at least be able to understand other languages fluently. But we don't live in that ideal world, yet. We do, however, live, work, and interact in a global society, where effective communication with co-workers is vital, and machine translation software has become a must for any company that works on internationally. There are many types of machine-based translation software. The two types most talked about assist translators and those who can do the translation themselves.

The first task was to replicate the sights and sounds around them. Originally starting with cartoonish 8-color images and clicking noises, this ability has been refined over the years to the point where we can now type in any address in the United States and get an interactive, 360-degree view from that location using Google Maps. But teaching a computer to analyze and understand the real world -- a.k.a. Artificial Intelligence -- has proven much more difficult. A solid 10 years after I first tried dictating a social studies paper to my computer, I still groan when I hear an automated Customer Service message ask me in Robot-speak to please state my problem.

Today, we are honored to have Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies, participate in our social media Q&A. I was a pure academic track research scientist before I entered the industry. I did research in computational neuroscience and my thesis was on modeling visual processing in the human brain using mathematical approaches, such as statistics and machine learning. Because computer vision is nowhere near the performance of humans in terms of its ability to segment objects, recognize people and understand a scene, my goal was to understand the computations that occur in our brains so we can recreate them in a machine vision system. I joined the industry right after finishing my PhD.

Are we born with a predetermined level of intelligence or can it be improved? Are there different kinds of intelligence? How can we assess intelligence? You'll find answers to these questions and much more here in this educational resource. What is Intelligence and How is it Measured?: Intelligence is a term that is difficult to define, and… Are You Born Intelligent or Does It Develop Socially?: Despite what many people think, your… Interesting Questions Using Computers for Intelligence, What are... Re: Why are Humans More Intelligent than Animals?: Animals have language!

Miss Piggy doesn't like it when I ask her about Kermit. We're having a conversation in Facebook's Messenger app, and the famous Muppet is trying to convince me to watch her fictional talk show Up Late With Miss Piggy, whose backstage hijinks provide the plot of ABC's show The Muppets. She gushes about the show's house band, Electric Mayhem--"VERY hairy"--and asks me whether I'd rate the program a 10 out of 10 or a mere 9 out of 10. But when I ask about her green ex-lover, she snaps. "I wish everyone would stop asking me about Kermit...I've moved on."

Between cat videos and online banking, the web runs the gamut of wasteful and wonderful when it comes to getting things done. And if you were to weigh the Internet's time wasters against its time-saving tools, it would be like an elephant sitting across a fulcrum from a field mouse. But through all the advances that have come with cloud computing, the Internet is quickly turning into a giant productivity machine. Shopping is great when you're soaking in some retail therapy, but when you're doing it because you have to, it can feel like a major chore. Mezi, a free iOS app, works like a personal assistant that you can text message. Just tell the service what you want--airfare, clothing, dinner reservations, personal electronics--and Mezi's agents scour the web for the best deals, even using coupons if possible to get you a good deal.

Once a secret project, Google's self-driving cars are now out in the open, quite literally, with the company test-driving them on public roads and, on one occasion, even inviting people to ride inside one of the robot vehicles as it raced around a closed course. Google's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now logged more than 190,000 miles (about 300,000 kilometers), driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads with only occasional human intervention. The project is still far from becoming commercially viable, but Google has set up a demonstration system on its campus, using driverless golf carts, which points to how the technology could change transportation even in the near future. Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who guides the project, and Google engineer Chris Urmson discussed these and other details in a keynote at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco last month. Thrun and Urmson explained how the self-driving car works and showed videos of the road tests, including footage of what the on-board computer "sees" [image below] and how it detects other vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic lights.

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven's 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as'memories'. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer. To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby's vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother's.

It is an early morning of the just-arrived winter. People I can see on the street from my window wear heavy coats, but it's unclear how cold it is. I can open the window and let my natural skin sensors grab an approximate measurement, but I realize a much more accurate value can be obtained by pressing a button. I ask, with a Brazilian accent that most Americans think is Russian. It is 32 degrees outside," answers the piece of rectangular glass I hold.

The output of the face detector is scaled to 90x90 and fed directly to the facial expression analysis system (see Figure 1). The system is essentially the same as the one used for Automatic FACS coding. First the face image is passed through a bank of Gabor filters at 8 orientations and 9 scales (2-32 pixels/cycle at 0.5 octave steps). The filterbank representations are then channeled to a classifier to code the image in terms of a set of expression dimensions. We have found support vector machines to be very effective for classifying facial expressions (Littlewort et al., in press, Bartlett et al., 2003).