What can artificial intelligence learn from dogs? Quite a lot, say researchers from the University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI. They recently trained neural networks to interpret and predict the behavior of canines. Their results, they say, show that animals could provide a new source of training data for AI systems -- including those used to control robots. To train AI to think like a dog, the researchers first needed data. They collected this in the form of videos and motion information captured from a single dog, a Malamute named Kelp.

A team of international researchers recently taught AI to justify its reasoning and point to evidence when it makes a decision. The'black box' is becoming transparent, and that's a big deal. Figuring out why a neural network makes the decisions it does is one of the biggest concerns in the field of artificial intelligence. The black box problem, as it's called, essentially keeps us from trusting AI systems. The team was comprised of researchers from UC Berkeley, University of Amsterdam, MPI for Informatics, and Facebook AI Research.