IBM Watson's Chief Architect Talks Democratizing AI, Starting With Fifth Graders (EdSurge News)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can recognize your speech like Siri or identify images like Facebook, but these types of machine intelligences are built on statistical approximation, using loads of data to make educated guesses. Though statistical approximation was a significant technological advancement for devices, experts at Future Lab's AI Summit in New York City believe that it is time to expand the bounds of artificial intelligence--to democratize it--by "engineering knowledge." For Puri, that is the next level of AI--its ability to not only say what something is, but to reason and understand the intent of its being, to answer the'why' question. "Working with kids gives you grounding. They ask questions because they are not shy," says IBM Watson's Chief Architect, Dr. Ruchir Puri, in an interview with EdSurge.