Meet the professor who will help robots learn common sense

Sergey Levine is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley whose research is focused on the thing our parents used to make such a fuss over, whenever we made stupid mistakes or should have known to avoid this or that and how on earth we could be so clueless. He has a keen interest in teaching common sense. It might sound frivolous or a fool's errand, but it's in line with the pursuit you begin to hear a lot about these days among experts focused on machine learning and computer vision and the like. Okay, so we want to get robots to a state where they're useful and able to operate and mingle among humans and be an everyday fixture of everyday life. Those machines don't have the benefit of decades of acquired knowledge -- schooling, social skills acquired through interactions and so forth -- which means someone needs to program responses that fit scenarios.