Google is teaching its AI how humans hug, cook, and fight

The artificial intelligence that will power future robots and content filters now has a new resource for understanding humans. Google, which owns YouTube, announced on Oct. 19 a new dataset of film clips, designed to teach machines how humans move in the world. Called AVA, or "atomic visual actions," the videos aren't anything special to human eyes--they're three second clips of people drinking water and cooking curated from YouTube. But each clip is bundled with a file that outlines the person that a machine learning algorithm should watch, as well as a description of their pose, and whether they're interacting with another human or object. When more than one person is doing something in a video, each person has their own label.