'Learning to see and learning to read': Artificial intelligence enters a new era

For artificial intelligence to realize its potential -- to relieve humans from mundane tasks, make life easier, and eventually invent entirely new solutions to our problems -- computers will need to surpass us at two things that we humans do pretty well: see the world around us and understand our language. "Learning to see and learning to read are the two main things we need for the computer to do to gain knowledge," said Jen Rexford, chair of Princeton's computer science department and the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering. "We call these fields computer vision and natural language processing. These two fields have evolved independently but our faculty are bringing them together in interesting ways." In recent years, researchers at Princeton and beyond have made major strides in these two fields, opening up rapid progress across a variety of applications.