App uses artificial intelligence to automatically edit videos | Machines Like Us

If you struggle with editing videos, then an app called Magisto might be just what you’re looking for. Available for iOS and Android as well as on the web, the app takes your videos and edits them automatically, creating high-quality movies you can then turn around and share with friends or family, or upload to the web to share with the masses. There are plenty of apps that help the average user create professional looking photos, but nothing has done that for video, said Oren Boiman, CEO of Magisto. He said, “We dove deep into the art of editing and production and given people the ability to truly tell their stories. We’ve fully automated and simplified an extremely sophisticated process to a few clicks, and believe this will solve for what’s missing in social video today.”

App uses artificial intelligence to automatically edit videos | Machines Like Us

WHAT do you get when you cross a fragrance with an actor?

Answer: a smell Gibson.

Groan away, but you should know that this joke was written by a computer. “Smell Gibson” is the C.P.U. child of something called Standup (for System to Augment Non-Speakers’ Dialogue Using Puns), a program that generates punning riddles to help kids with language disabilities increase their verbal skills.

Though it’s not quite Louis C. K., the Standup program, engineered by a team of computer scientists in Scotland, is one of the more successful efforts to emerge from a branch of artificial intelligence known as computational humor, which seeks to model comedy using machines.

As verbal interaction between humans and computers becomes more prominent in daily life — from Siri, Apple’s voice-activated assistant technology, to speech-based search engines to fully automated call centers — demand has grown for “social computers” that can communicate with humans in a natural way. Teaching computers to grapple with humor is a key part of this equation.

“Humor is everywhere in human life,” says the Purdue computer scientist Julia M. Taylor, who helped organize the first-ever United States symposium on the artificial intelligence of humor, in November. If we want a computational system to communicate with human life, it needs to know how to be funny, she says.

As it turns out, this is one of the most challenging tasks in computer science. Like much of language, humor is loaded with abstraction and ambiguity. To understand it, computers need to contend with linguistic sleights like irony, sarcasm, metaphor, idiom and allegory — things that don’t readily translate into ones and zeros.

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[Artificial Intelligence] may well be the most vital of all commodities, surpassing water, food, heat and light. Without it, we will certainly not survive as a species.
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One of our problems is data – masses of it. A few hundred years of scientific inquiry and the invention of the data-generating and sharing mechanism that is the internet has left reams of crucial information unused and unanalysed.
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AI is not about sentient robots, but machines that mimic our organic intelligence by adapting to, as well as recognising, patterns in data. AI is about making machines understand.

Jamie Carter / Peter Cochrane, { South China Morning Post } (via olena)

Earlier this year, an artificial intelligence system called, Angelina created a lot of buzz when it created a video game. Created by PhD student Michael Cook Angelina (“A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I’ve Named ANGELINA”) was special because she was creating games from scratch with a little help from her human counterparts. By dividing the concept of a computer game up into three defined “species,” or sub-tasks—maps, layouts, and rule sets—Cook and his compatriots at Imperial College in London helped their system auto-generate some simple arcade games. Now, Cook has released a game called A Puzzling Present which is a lot more complex than Angelina’s previous games. Instead of a simple interface with maps and obstacles, the latest game now include new mechanics for the player at each level. In the new game, users help Santa escape some fiendish and fun puzzles. For example, in the first level of A Puzzling Present, hitting x (or a touch-screen b key in the mobile version) gives the main character, Santa an anti-gravity power that sends him to the top of the screen and hitting x again sends him back down. These mechanics, Cook says, were created artificially by Angelina for this particular game as part of a new system he developed called Mechanic Miner. (via 33rd Square | Artificial Intelligence Creates A Holiday-Themed Video Game)

As director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich, Dr. Rolf Pfeifer has long argued that embodiment is one of the best methods for attaining artificial general intelligence (AGI). The embodiment hypothesis, is based on the idea that human intelligence is largely derived from our motor abilities, and therefore to create artificial general intelligence, a robotic body that interacts with the physical environment is crucial. Previously Pfeifer worked to this end via the humanoid robot ECCEROBOT, that was also referred to as Cronos. Now Pfeifer and his team of of researchers, have stated the ambitious goal of building a new humanoid robot, Roboy, in a record nine months. (via 33rd Square | Rolf Pfeiffer And His Team Working On Crowd Funded, Open-Source Humanoid Robot)

I do not consider this question to be answerable, as I do not accept this (common) notion of “human-level intelligence” as meaningful. Artificially intelligent artifacts are in some ways superhuman, and have been for many years now; but in other ways, they are sub-human, or perhaps it would be better to say, non-human. They simply differ from human intelligences, and it is inappropriate to speak of “levels” of intelligence in this way. Intelligence is too complex and multifacetted a topic to be spoken of as though it were something like sea level that can be calibrated on a simple linear scale. If by ‘human-level’ you mean, the AI will be an accurate simalcrum of a human being, or perhaps a human personality (as is often envisioned in science fiction, eg HAL from “2001″) my answer would be, never. We will never create such a machine intelligence, because it is probably technically close to impossible, and not technically useful (note that HAL failed in its mission through being TOO “human”: it had a nervous breakdown. Bad engineering.) But mostly because we have absolutely no need to do so. Human beings are not in such short supply at resent that it makes sense to try to make artificial ones at great cost. And actual AI work, as opposed to the fantasies often woven around it by journalists and futurists, is not aiming to create such things. A self-driving car is not an artificial human, but it is likely to be a far better driver than any human, because it will not be limited by human-level attention spans and human-level response times. It will be, in these areas, super-human, just as present computers are superhuman at calculation and keeping track of large numbers of complex patterns, etc..

Kruel AGI Risks Roundtable

In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology.

Quote by Cambridge philosophy professor Huw PriceCambridge.  Quote found at phys.org website article “Cambridge to study technology’s risk to humans” (via horizonwatching)