Can Artificial Intelligence Predict Reality TV Winner? - Alizila

Last month artificial intelligence technology reached a widely heralded milestone when a Google computer program called AlphaGo defeated the Go master Lee Se-dol at the ancient board game in a five-game series. Impressive, but can AliphaGo do this? On April 8, a computer program developed by Alibaba Group will attempt to predict the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show by analyzing not potential moves on a glorified checkerboard but a range of complex and amorphous factors such as social media feedback, responses from a studio audience, and the "energy" of performers. The reality show in question is "I'm a Singer," an annual singing competition that pits well-known Asian pop stars--this week's season-ending finale features CoCo Lee, Hacken Lee, Jeff Chang and Joey Yung--against each other. Alibaba's cloud-computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, is using the competition to showcase a program it developed in-house called Apsara-I (Ai) that is able to gather insights from a multitude of inputs, can learn by analyzing data and even has the potential to understand human emotions, according to the company.