YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.,
Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/
-- IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced a multi-year
collaboration with the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
at MIT to advance the scientific field
of machine vision, a core aspect of artificial intelligence. The
new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine
Comprehension's (BM3C) goal will be to develop cognitive computing
systems that emulate the human ability to understand and integrate
inputs from multiple sources of audio and visual information into a
detailed computer representation of the world that can be used in a
variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare,
education, and entertainment.
The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern
recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision
that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish. For
instance, humans watching a short video of a real-world event can
easily recognize and produce a verbal description of what happened
in the clip as well as assess and predict the likelihood of a
variety of subsequent events, but for a machine, this ability is
currently impossible.
Beginning in September 2016 in
Cambridge, the BM3C collaboration
will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer
scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine
understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from
next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine
vision. The vision is that this integrated cross-disciplinary
research will lead to advances that are likely to change both our
personal and professional lives - from helping clinicians improve
elderly and disabled care to helping organizations maintain and
repair complex machinery as well as a host of cross-industry
applications.
"In a world where humans and machines are working together in
increasingly collaborative relationships, breakthroughs in the
field of machine vision will potentially help us live healthier
more productive lives," said Guru Banavar, Chief Scientist,
Cognitive Computing and VP at IBM Research. "By bringing together
brain researchers and computer scientists to solve this complex
technical challenge, we will advance the state-of-the-art in AI
with our collaborators at MIT."
The BM3C will be led by Professor James
DiCarlo, head of the Department of Brain & Cognitive
Sciences (BCS) at MIT, who will be
supported by a team of faculty members, researchers, and graduate
students from both the Brain & Cognitive Sciences department
and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
(CSAIL). MIT researchers will
collaborate with IBM scientists and engineers who will provide
technology expertise and advances from the IBM Watson platform.
"Our brain and cognitive scientists are excited to team up with
cognitive computing scientists and engineers from IBM to achieve
next-generation cognitive computing advances as exposed by
next-generation models of the mind," said Jim DiCarlo. "We believe that our fields
are poised to make key advances in the very challenging domain of
unassisted real-world audio-visual understanding and we are looking
forward to this new collaboration."
Cognitive computing systems collaborate with human experts in
natural ways, learn through this interaction, and help enable
individuals and teams to make more informed decisions by making
sense of massive amounts of unstructured data. Key to the success
of these systems is ongoing research in machine learning and
reasoning, machine vision, decision techniques, domain-specific
knowledge understanding, data assurance and trust, and radically
efficient computing infrastructures.
To this end, IBM Research has built a network of university
research collaborations that put together IBM researchers with
academic researchers in fields including computer science,
engineering, brain and cognitive science, to help make fundamental
advances in AI. The goal is to apply the advances to domains such
as health, education, law, and business decisions. The
network addresses the entire spectrum of cognitive computing
capabilities from curating data and knowledge and developing new
algorithms, to building the new computing infrastructures needed to
optimize the new data-intensive workloads of a truly digital
world.
IBM currently works with more than 250 universities to help
teach courses in various cognitive computing disciplines. These
courses offer students real-world case study learning experiences
and access to Watson technology
via the cloud. IBM also hosts university competitions, challenging
students to identify industry-specific challenges and providing
support to commercialize their ideas.
About IBM Research
For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of
information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 13 labs
located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have
produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of
Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing
Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 19
inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.
For more information about IBM Research, visit
www.ibm.com/research.
Media Contact:
Anna Sekaran
IBM
1 (203) 434-3975
amsekara@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM