Artificial intelligence for all

As a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, Bilenko met students Asako Miyakawa and James Gao, who would become co-creators of Dr. Brainlove and the Cognitive Technologies exhibit. She became a researcher in Professor Jack Gallant's lab, collaborating with him on a project to train a computer to reconstruct a person's visual experience by interpreting EEG signals from the brain. The researchers created a computer algorithm that could interpret the brain impulses, match them against visuals collected from thousands of hours of YouTube videos, and generate movies that illustrate likely images based on the impulses. To outside observers, the results looked freakishly like computer-assisted mind reading. While the resulting visualizations were hazy, the work made a big splash in the tech community. It even prompted Mark Zuckerberg to declare that in the future "you're going to be able to capture a thought."