Microsoft Is Teaching Computers to See Like People

Microsoft's quest to build computing systems that understand the world around them doesn't end with the company's Project Oxford machine-learning technology. Researchers at the Redmond, Wash., software maker are also developing systems that mimic how humans pull information from the things they see. "When a person is asked about something in a photo, they're taking in a lot of details--a lot of words--to answer questions about it," blogged Microsoft spokesperson Athima Chansanchai. "Now, a team of Microsoft researchers, together with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University, has created a system that uses computer vision, deep learning and language understanding to analyze images and answer questions the same way humans would." Together, the researchers created a model that "applies multi-step reasoning to answer questions about pictures," said Chansanchai.