Communications of the ACM
Ursi Project Pushes Bounds of Artificial Intelligence
While AI has helped robots perform narrowly focused tasks, Vassar Professor Ken Livingston is tackling the problem of "building general purpose intelligence."
Credit: Vassar College
Vassar College professor Ken Livingston works at Vassar's Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI) to study ways of creating human-like intelligence. "We are trying to replicate some of the features of primate cortex to see whether we can solve a certain set of problems in learning and intelligence," Livingston says.
The URSI project aims to use the understanding of how the human brain processes complex tasks and reproduce it in machines. "Ultimately we want to get to the point where we can turn the robot loose in the world without having to program it," Livingston says. The URSI project presents a robot with a series of simple perceptual patterns, after which the robot makes predictions based on the information.
The team also experimented with obstructing the robot's visual and audio input, making it more difficult to recognize the patterns. The researchers found that they could obstruct almost half of the robot's visual field and it would still be able to recognize an object. Livingston hopes the research could lead to a robot that can learn to do complex tasks, such as cleaning a home.
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