IBM and MIT partner up to create AI that understands sight and sound the way we do

When you see or hear something happen, you can instantly describe it: "a girl in a blue shirt caught a ball thrown by a baseball player," or "a dog runs along the beach." It's a simple task for us, but an immensely hard one for computers -- fortunately, IBM and MIT are partnering up to see what they can do about making it a little easier. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension -- we'll just call it BM3C -- is a multi-year collaboration between the two organizations that will be looking specifically at the problem of computer vision and audition. The problem of computer vision spans multiple disciplines, so it has to be attacked from multiple directions. Say your camera is good enough to track objects minutely -- what good is it if you don't know how to separate objects from their background?