IBM and MIT team up to help AI see and hear like humans

Autonomous robots and other AI systems still don't do a great job of understanding the world around them, but IBM and MIT think they can do better. They've begun a "multi-year" partnership that aims to improve AI's ability to interpret sight and sound as well as humans. IBM will supply the expertise and technology from its Watson cognitive computing platform, while MIT will conduct research. It's still very early, but the two already have a sense of what they can accomplish. One of the biggest challenges will be to advance pattern recognition and prediction.