Computer Vision News - October 2016

Networks are applicable. In particular, recurrent neural networks, such as LSTM, are now widely applied not only to vision but also to speech recognition, machine translation, automatic email answering, natural language processing, etc. Generally speaking, such networks learn by changing the strengths of connections between their artificial neurons to solve practical tasks. Such a task could be pretty much anything that you can imagine. One of the most important applications is in health care, which can be greatly improved by artificial Neural Networks: they can imitate doctors, for example, by learning to recognize cancer in images of breast tissue. In 2012, our deep neural nets were the first to win a contest of that kind, having learned from examples how to distinguish between harmless conditions and dangerous pathologies. In the future it should be possible to provide reasonable diagnostics to many people who today cannot afford it, e.g. in developing countries where decent health care is not available. For example, take an image of a dark brown spot on your skin with a smartphone camera and send it to an AI medical doctor, who may decide whether that needs to be examined further by a human expert. CVN: In conclusion, what would you like to tell our readers? Prof. Schmidhuber: We are living in extremely exciting times, when great things are happening: in not so many decades, for the first time intelligent machines may be better general problem solvers than humans . Soon, the most important decision- makers will not be humans anymore: every aspect of civilization will be transformed by that. It will not stop there, since these smart AI beings will realize that most of the resources of the solar system are not within the thin film of biosphere but out there in space. They will colonize the solar system and the entire Milky Way and beyond, in a way which is completely impossible for humans. CVN: That sounds fascinating. Do you look forward to that civilization? Prof. Schmidhuber: I do. Since the 1970s it has seemed clear to me that I am living at a time when the universe wants to make its next step towards greater complexity , a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3 billion years ago. This is more than just another industrial revolution. This is something new that transcends humankind and even biology . It is a privilege to witness its beginnings, and contribute something to it. “ For the first time intelligent machines may be better general problem solvers than humans ” Computer Vision News Guest 5 Guest Image: FAZ/Bieber