Cognitive Science

We're constantly being bombarded with new and exciting technological developments – but few are as intriguing as the rise of artificial intelligence. Once the stuff of sci-fi stories, artificially intelligent devices are in homes around the world now, and this technology is a powerful force which needs forward-thinking professionals behind it. But what does human science have to do with any of this? We've teamed up with IE University and their School of Human Sciences and Technology to find out. Artificial intelligence and machines will most likely never be able to replicate emotional intelligence and human creativity.

"AI: More than Human," an exhibition that appeared at London's Barbican Art Gallery this past summer and can now be seen at the Forum in Groningen, the Netherlands, mirrors the muddled zeitgeist of artificial intelligence. It seeks to bring together the various elements of art, research, and commerce, displaying interactive installations as well as projects applying AI in fields as diverse as agriculture and neuroscience. Rather than untangle these distinct areas, Barbican curator Anna Holsgrove has chosen to intermix them under sections titled the Dream of AI, Mind Machines, Data Worlds, and Endless Evolution. I saw the show in the company of computational artist Memo Akten, who has been at the forefront of many micro-movements, learning new tools to study how they expand human creativity. At the Barbican, Akten presented the latest iteration of Learning to See (2017), an interactive installation in which machine-learning software analyzes a live feed from a camera pointed at a table covered with everyday objects.

Several Greek startups have stood out in the past few years, somehow able to break free of the fetters of the economic crisis and the mass exodus of educated, skilled individuals to other countries. One of these enterprises is Twiddle, a group of four talented Greek computer whizzes who want to not only make videos sound better but also have a greater impact on the viewer. The idea was simple: Most videos posted on social media, whether they are amateur personal videos or commercial marketing videos, suffer from the poor choice of music used with them. As a result, they may not have the overall effect the maker intended. "Twiddle is a platform that uses Artificial Intelligence with a focus on sound, for content creators. We apply the most innovative AI technologies and advanced neural networks to automate the process of identifying, recommending and positioning the best matching sound effects and music in videos. Phase A: The already available Twiddle Mobile App, which is meant to showcase the core of our AI-powered technology by organically attracting users which also helps in building synergies with music & sound licensers. The Twiddle Mobile App is already available in 40 countries and in 7 languages, in both the Apple App Store and Google Play where it entered the top 10 Trending Entertainment Apps soon after its release. The Twiddle mobile App also houses a social-interaction feature, where users can upload their creations, follow other creators, interact with the uploaded content, message each other and more. This feature is currently available in a limited number of regions. Phase B: In anticipation of our next funding round, we are further developing our AI-powered technology to be made available through plugins in established video editing software. That plug-in offering will allow professionals to save up to 60% of the time it takes to create content will also offer to novice creators the opportunity of creating quality content without the steep learning curve of sound embedment. It will be available with simple subscription for consumers and custom case-by-case pricing for Enterprise accounts."

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Since the beginning of computing, AI has always been the end target, and with modern cognitive computing models, we seem to be getting closer and closer to that goal every day. Due to the amalgamation of cognitive science and based on the fundamental principle of simulating the cycle of human thought, cognitive AI applications are expected to have far-reaching impacts not only on our private lives but also on industries such as medicine, banking and more. The benefits of cognitive technology are well and truly a step further than conventional AI systems. While the basic use case of artificial intelligence is to apply the best algorithm for solving a problem, cognitive computing tries to mimic human intelligence and logical abilities by evaluating a set of variables. The cognitive computing process uses a mixture of artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and contextual awareness to solve everyday problems just as human beings do.

If Sunspring is anything to go by, artificial intelligence in film-making has some way to go. This short film, made as an entry to Sci-Fi London's 48-hour film-making competition in 2016, was written entirely by an AI. The director, Oscar Sharp, fed a few hundred sci-fi screenplays into a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (the type of software behind predictive text in a smartphone), then told it to write its own. The result was almost, but not quite, incoherent nonsense, riddled with cryptic nonsequiturs, bizarre turns of phrase and unfathomable stage directions such as "he is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor". All of which Sharp and his actors filmed with sincere commitment.

We live in an era when humans are busy training a new intelligence on this planet. Every once in a while, researchers come up with a novel way to speed up that teaching process. That's what happened at Microsoft Research where computer scientists recently developed a new approach to using human emotion to train machines how to learn.[i] The research used virtual agents to facilitate learning various tasks in a simulated environment. What is most significant about this research is that it trained those agents by exposing them to the smiles of human subjects as they interacted with the system.

In its annual report, the AI Now Institute, an interdisciplinary research center studying the societal implications of artificial intelligence, called for a ban on technology designed to recognize people's emotions in certain cases. Specifically, the researchers said affect recognition technology, also called emotion recognition technology, should not be used in decisions that "impact people's lives and access to opportunities," such as hiring decisions or pain assessments, because it is not sufficiently accurate and can lead to biased decisions. What is this technology, which is already being used and marketed, and why is it raising concerns? Researchers have been actively working on computer vision algorithms that can determine the emotions and intent of humans, along with making other inferences, for at least a decade. Facial expression analysis has been around since at least 2003 .

I have been working in the M2M, IoT, and data space since founding Pod Group (a provider of IoT connectivity & billing software) in 1999, and have become greatly interested in how new technologies affect our working lives. Seeing the changes brought by automation, sensor technology, and artificial intelligence first-hand has given me insight into the everyday effects of technological progress. This led me to develop a management structure that promotes our human skills, in order to help us take full advantage of AI and the future of tech, and to ensure that businesses are prepared for radical change. Follow me on Twitter @ctowersclark and send your suggestions on what I should write next to content@podgroup.com