A research team at the University of Southern California has developed a new artificial intelligence system that uses human-like abilities to imagine never-before-seen objects. By using systems that extrapolate data, researchers were able to envision an object and change its attributes in a similar process to human imagination. "We were inspired by human visual generalization capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines," Yunhao Ge, one of the researchers and a computer science PhD student at USC said in a statement. "Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes -- for instance, shape, pose, position, color -- and then recombine them to imagine a new object. Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks," Ge added.

Researchers have trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to understand and predict visual humor, representing a major development towards creating "common sense" machines. The machine-learning algorithm, created by scientists at Virginia Tech, is capable of both recognising and creating humorous scenes by analysing certain aspects of an image considered to be funny. According to the researchers, humor is a major barrier to the advancement of AI and could hold the key to unlocking emotional intelligence. "Humor is an integral part of human lives," the paper's abstract states. "Despite being tremendously impactful, it is perhaps surprising that we do not yet have a detailed understanding of humor."