Teaching AI to appreciate stories

Originally posted on The Horizons Tracker. The past year has seen a big jump in artificial approaches to learning. For instance, the Cornell-led Tell Me Dave project uses human volunteers to'train' the machine using a game interface. A team from Georgia Tech, by contrast, used a traditional expert systems style approach to train IBM's Watson to get better at answering specific queries. Researchers at Maryland University meanwhile trained their robots by showing them YouTube videos of humans performing certain tasks that the machines were subsequently able to pick up.