Teaching machines to reason about what they see

A child who has never seen a pink elephant can still describe one -- unlike a computer. "The computer learns from data," says Jiajun Wu, a PhD student at MIT. "The ability to generalize and recognize something you've never seen before -- a pink elephant -- is very hard for machines." Deep learning systems interpret the world by picking out statistical patterns in data. This form of machine learning is now everywhere, automatically tagging friends on Facebook, narrating Alexa's latest weather forecast, and delivering fun facts via Google search. But statistical learning has its limits.