A.I. Could Now Help Fix Your Hair

Bad hair days may soon be prevented by just looking at your smart phone. Parham Aarabi and Wenzhi Guo, researchers at the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, have developed a machine learning algorithm that learns directly from human instructions rather than an existing set of examples. The algorithm outperformed conventional methods of training neural networks by 160 percent and outperformed its own training by 9 percent. The algorithm is seen as a significant leap forward for artificial intelligence as it learned to recognize hair in pictures with greater reliability than that enabled by the training. The two researchers were able to train the algorithm to identify people's hair in photographs--a much more difficult task for computers than it is for humans.