Artificial intelligence in action

By Meg Murphy A person watching videos that show things opening -- a door, a book, curtains, a blooming flower, a yawning dog -- easily understands the same type of action is depicted in each clip. "Computer models fail miserably to identify these things. How do humans do it so effortlessly?" asks Dan Gutfreund, a principal investigator at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Laboratory and a staff member at IBM Research. "We process information as it happens in space and time. How can we teach computer models to do that?"