AI is beginning to understand the 3-D world

There's been some stunning progress in artificial intelligence of late, but it's been surprisingly flat. Now AI researchers are moving beyond two-dimensional images and pixels. The work could have a big impact on robotics and self-driving cars, helping to make machines that can learn how to act more intelligently in the real world. "An exciting and important trend is the move in learning-based vision systems from just doing things with images to doing things with three-dimensional objects," says Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "That includes seeing objects in depth and modeling whole solid objects--not just recognizing that this pattern of pixels is a dog or a chair or table." Tenenbaum and colleagues used a popular machine-learning technique known as generative adversarial modeling to have a computer learn about the properties of three-dimensional space from examples.