The original dream of research in artificial intelligence was to understand what it is that makes us who we are. Because of this, artificial intelligence has always been close to cognitive science, even if the two have been somewhat far apart in practice. Functional AIs have tended to do best at quickly finding'good-enough' approaches to problems that are easy to state but whose solutions are difficult or tedious to describe explicitly. A more modest definition of artificial intelligence might read as'computer programs that can learn how to perform tasks rather than require specific hardwired instructions.' It turns out this encompasses a lot--think language processing in Amazon's Alexa, or Google's AlphaGo--and AI has recently even been able to produce art.

The team recently published a paper detailing their findings: "Creating Glasswing-Butterfly Inspired Durable Antifogging Omniphobic Supertransmissive, Superclear Nanostructured Glass Through Bayesian Learning and Optimization" in Materials Horizons (doi:10.1039/C9MH00589G). They recently presented this work at the ICML conference in the "Climate Change: How Can AI Help?" workshop. The nanostructured glass has random nanostructures, like the glasswing butterfly wing, that are smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. This allows the glass to have a very high transparency of 99.5% when the random nanostructures are on both sides of the glass. This high transparency can reduce the brightness and power demands on displays that could, for example, extend battery life.