This Technique Can Make It Easier for AI to Understand Videos

Whether it's dubious viral memes, gaffe-prone presidential debates, or surreal TikTok remixes, you could spend the rest of your life trying to watch all the video footage posted on YouTube in a single day. Researchers want to let artificial intelligence algorithms watch and make sense of it instead. A group from MIT and IBM developed an algorithm capable of accurately recognizing actions in videos while consuming a small fraction of the processing power previously required, potentially changing the economics of applying AI to large amounts of video. The method adapts an AI approach used to process still images to give it a crude concept of passing time. The work is a step towards having AI recognize what's happening in video, perhaps helping to tame the vast amounts now being generated.