New AI programming language goes beyond deep learning

A team of MIT researchers is making it easier for novices to get their feet wet with artificial intelligence, while also helping experts advance the field. In a paper presented at the Programming Language Design and Implementation conference this week, the researchers describe a novel probabilistic-programming system named "Gen." Users write models and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied -- such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics -- without having to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code. Gen also lets expert researchers write sophisticated models and inference algorithms -- used for prediction tasks -- that were previously infeasible. In their paper, for instance, the researchers demonstrate that a short Gen program can infer 3-D body poses, a difficult computer-vision inference task that has applications in autonomous systems, human-machine interactions, and augmented reality.