The path to real-world artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has made significant strides in recent years, but modern AI techniques remain limited, a panel of MIT professors and the director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab said during a webinar this week. Neural networks can perform specific, well-defined tasks but they struggle in real-world situations that go beyond pattern recognition and present obstacles like limited data, reliance on self-training, and answering questions like "why" and "how" versus "what," the panel said. The future of AI depends on enabling AI systems to do something once considered impossible: Learn by demonstrating flexibility, some semblance of reasoning, and/or by transferring knowledge from one set of tasks to another, the group said. The panel discussion was moderated by David Schubmehl, a research director at IDC, and it began with a question he posed asking about the current limitations of AI and machine learning. "The striking success right now in particular, in machine learning, is in problems that require interpretation of signals--images, speech and language," said panelist Leslie Kaelbling, a computer science and engineering professor at MIT.