AI Weekly: Cutting-edge research promises to imbue AI with contextual knowledge

Viewing scenes and making sense of them is something people do effortlessly every day. Whether it's sussing out objects' colors or gauging their distances apart, it doesn't take much conscious effort to recognize items' attributes and apply knowledge to answer questions about them. That's patently untrue of most AI systems, which tend to reason rather poorly. But emerging techniques in visual recognition, language understanding, and symbolic program execution promise to imbue them with the ability to generalize to new examples, much like humans. Scientists at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a joint 10-year, $240 million partnership to propel scientific breakthroughs in machine learning, are perfecting an approach they say might overcome longstanding barriers in AI model design.