Researchers Find Way to Harness AI Creativity – Dramatic Performance Boost to Deep Learning

Researchers have found a way to marry human creativity and artificial intelligence (AI) creativity to dramatically boost the performance of deep learning. A team led by Alexander Wong, a Canada Research Chair in the area of AI and a professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, developed a new type of compact family of neural networks that could run on smartphones, tablets, and other embedded and mobile devices. The networks, called AttoNets, are being used for image classification and object segmentation, but can also act as the building blocks for video action recognition, video pose estimation, image generation, and other visual perception tasks. "The problem with current neural networks is they are being built by hand and incredibly large and complex and difficult to run in any real-world situation," said Wong, who also co-founded a startup named DarwinAI to commercialize the technology. "These on-the-edge networks are small and agile and could have huge implications for the automotive, aerospace, agriculture, finance, and consumer electronics sectors."