Playing the name game with Intel's object recognition software

Intel does a lot of the heavy lifting to power some of our most-used products, working silently behind the scenes to make things run. But South by Southwest is far from a subtle, behind-the-scenes kind of place--and Intel's pop-up lounge was full of demos that showed off what the company is doing in the AI space. My favorite demo may not have been flashy, but it showed off a key component of machine learning: object recognition. I held up a series of photos showing a wide variety of stuff--animals, people, vehicles, household items, plants--and the software correctly named it all. It also told me how confident it was in its answer, and many objects were named with 100-percent accuracy. The demo was limited to just 20 objects, but the full scale of Intel's platform can process many, many more.