Researchers put A.I. inside a camera lens to compute 'at the speed of light'

The camera is the eye for many automated devices and the computer is the brain -- but researchers at Stanford University recently combined the two in an attempt to make smart cameras more compact. A team of graduate students recently created an artificially intelligent camera that doesn't need a large, separate computer to process all the data -- because it's built into the optics itself. Current object recognition technology uses A.I. on a separate computer to run the images or footage through algorithms to identify objects. As the Stanford researchers explain, driverless cars have a large computer in the trunk in order to recognize when a pedestrian steps out in front of the car's path. Those computers are big, require lots of energy and are often slow.