Developing artificial intelligence systems that can interpret images

Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games, but writing his own artificial intelligence (AI) programs. Growing up on the island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, Torralba spent his teenage years designing simple algorithms to recognize handwritten numbers, or to spot the verb and noun in a sentence. But he was perhaps most proud of a program that could show people how the night sky would look from a particular direction. Or you could move to another planet, and it would tell you how the stars would look from there, he says.