Algorithm Binge Watches TV To Predict Human Behavior

Watching TV can be a very educational experience for a computer. In a paper that will be presented this week at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) created an algorithm that can predict how humans will behave in certain situations. The algorithm'watched' 600 hours of TV shows culled from clips posted on YouTube, including The Office, Big Bang Theory, and Desperate Housewives. The purpose was to see if it could accurately predict what humans would do during an interaction--would they shake hands? After feeding it the background material, the researchers had the algorithm watch new clips, and froze the clip just before an action was about to happen, and asked the algorithm to predict what happened next. That's worse than humans, who were able to correctly predict what would happen 71 percent of the time.