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]]>Of course there are a tons of different Frameworks but I
keras
I came to I love keras as the meta language is able to work on top of TensorFlow, theano and also Microsoft CTNK is in development of supporting it.
Even for some, and I believe only a few, use cases the pure frameworks are more powerful – in most cases development time, optimisation, collaboration and education with it is amazingly efficient.
Read about keras: https://keras.io
Additionally, also Lasagne is such a good meta language approach. As I didn’t implement it yet in any projects, I can’t compare it much.
I will give a deeper insight in my following speeches and webinar.
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Within Automotive there are news everyday about new accomplishmens. Like from Audi, Mercedes, Telsa and all the others. Also IT gigants like Google and open-secretly Apple as well as often critizised Uber.
Even there are many restrictions often commented – mostly within the areas of ethics and laws – it’s a clear trend towards autonomous driving with more and more driver assistance systems.
Already for me, as digital native, the software features running within a car trumps the design & interrieur etc.
Working within the Automotive area on machine learning and artificial intelligence means having great changes ahead.
So more will follow 
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]]>In Germany we already call a car them ‘Auto’ which is a short for ‘Automobil’, deriving from the greek αὐτός and latin ‘mobilis’ – “self moving”. Well the name has it already in it – and this year there were so many news about the selfdriving cars.
Daimlers concept car F015 has some nice elements for people inside and outside the car.
Will the be no traffic jams if all cars drive in a steady way, with a secure but short distance to each other without any surprising behaviour? No traffic lights needed when cars are connected? Order a car with a desk during daytime or a comfy couch on the evening. No need of an all purpose car – enjoy a nice sporty one if you feel like it – or an super energy efficient if you prefer.
As soon as most traffic is done by autonomous cars – or as I like to call them Auto Autos safety will increase incredible – and small cars will be as nearly as safe as huge ones.
Check out some of the latest headlines:
Some numbers say, the most advanced autonomous car already drives better then 99% of the people. This is a huge increase in saftey, plus more comfort.
My opinion: A computer scientist should not decide about life and death in a car accident – in a split-second.
But nowadays that is the case, and I am a programmer and possibly need to react in an accident in less then a second. Better have a thousand people think, talk and collaborate on programming the car to find the best moral and practical solution.
Autonomous Cars and Artificial Intelligence
Autos will be a huge field for predictive analytics, as image recognition and pattern recognition as part of machine learning is one of the ost important areas for the future autonomous cars.
[This article will be extended possibly during christmas time]
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]]>Hadoop is an open-source Apache Project derived 2006 from Yahoo! and based on papers from Google in 2003, is such a widely used system. Even though it is basically ‘mostly just’ a filesystem it’s three biggest advantages are
At the core of Hadoop is the filesystem HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) which stores it’s data in blocks across all DataNode machines. The data is replicated usually on a (or more) machine in the same rack, as well as on an other rack. Clients connecting to Hadoop to read or write will first question the NameNode which will tell them at which DataNodes they can attempt to access.
The current Hadoop 2.x version rely on YARN (Yet another Resource Negotiater) for that and with data and server replication there is no single-point-of-failure anymore. On top of that Hadoop uses MapReduce as key/value database. Therefore Hadoop is great for lots of data retrievals and querying.
It’s drawbacks are: the data in HDFS is not editable, only append able, it takes a lot of configuration work and without any additions and it’s not for real-time queries.
As for machine learning the more data the merrier – so many experts, e.g. from Spring, believe that for data with an amount of 10 Terrabyte and more Hadoop is a great solution.
There are countless derivations and distributors, for BI cases, besides IBM there is also HortonWorks Data Plattform utilising SAS in-Memory Statistics for Hadoop and SAS Visual Statistics for machine learning.
StatSoft’s Statistica, since 2014 owned by DELL is one of the most well known statistic Suits, offering Statistica HP – High Performance for massive parallel processing in-memory. This software works with a wide number of systems, including Hadoop as well as SAP Hana, Windows HPC Server / Polybase / Parallel Data Warehouse, Oracle Exadata, Teradata Aster, Pig, Hive, Sqoop as well as IBM’s Netezza.
It’s been widley used worldwide abroad all branches for data analytics ans well as Predictive Analytics.
Besides offering IT consulting in the field of Predictive Data Analytics IBM is also offering a wide variety of own tools.
Since 2009 this includes SPSS Statistics (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) the standard software for statistical analysis in social and other sciences.
And IBM’s Hadoop and Watson Analytics will be discussed in this blog as well.
The german SAP HANA system is as well one of the leading software for business data and analytics. Using Hadoop as filesystem HANA is able to do predictive data analystics with the in-memory HANA system.
More about SAP HANA and Hadoop
Read more about Hadoop, IBM’s Hadoop as well as SAS for BI the following articles.
Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark : Learn how to apply data science techniques using parallel programming in Apache Spark to explore big (and small) data. by UC Berkley @ edX
Data, Analytics and Learning : An introduction to the logic and methods of analysis of data to improve teaching and learning. by U Texas Arlington @ edX
Big Data and Social Physics : Understanding big data, how to use it to improve companies, cities, and government, and best-practice for privacy. by MIT @edX
Knowledge Management and Big Data in Business : Learn why and how knowledge management and Big Data are vital to the new business era. by HongKong Polytechnic U
Foundations of Data Analysis : This is a hands on course with a data lab to teach fundamental statistical topics such as descriptive statistics, inferential testing, and modeling. by Texas U Austin
The Analytics Edge : Through inspiring examples and stories, discover the power of data and use analytics to provide an edge to your career and your life. by MIT @ edX
And many more at edX
Or check out the Data Analyst Nanodegree @ Udacity
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All-New Google Photos is using improved face and pattern recognition. Not only the face recognition was improved, which was already available in Google Picasa and other apps. But additionally and new to consumer photo album software – it also will use pattern recognition to add automatically searchable text tags.
Additional automatically cut and edited videos known as “auto awesome” will be improved as Google Photos “Assistant” – using A.I. internally to figure out which video sequences and photos to use.

Copyright Techcrunch.com
Google Now has more then 1 billion information pieces able to show users to assist them at their current action. Simple via (A.I. powered) speech-recognition connected information are shown.
They have mentioned that since 2013, when speech recognition had a failure of about 23%, it’s down today to 8%. So we can expect this number to go down even further.

Copyright Techcrunch.com
With the “Context” Element in Google Now, also the speech recognition will look for textual context in a current App to easier identify words, such as international names of food. Here sometimes even the correct pronunciation is a mystery to user.

Copyright Techcrunch.com
Mr. Sundar explained that Google’s machine-learning and image recognition improved much more through Deep Learning and Deep Neuronal Networks.

Copyright Techcrunch.com
Driverless Cars
Showing the cars point of view: The cars drive on A.I.

All together it’s clear that A.I. is not only at the core of Google, it’s search algorithm, but also in many products and features – some shown above. Looking forward to see more about that within the following days of Google I/O and afterwards.
(Read all about it in the live-blog at Techcrunch, also copyright owner of some pictures in this article.)
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]]>Just a little after the ‘Future of Life Institute’ published an open letter on Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence, which states many risks and examples including many research ideas to avoid those risks. You can read our article Demonic A.I.! What are we afraid of? Solutions to the risks! about that.
Bill Gates: I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned
Source: thisisbillgates @ Reddit
But he also is very exited and enthusiastic about A.I.:
Well, he should be happy, as the development in the ice age of A.I. was not as fast as predicted. So he did not miss the development of real A.I. and will be able to play a bigger role in this field now:
Bill Gates: There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.
One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.
Amazing. We are as exited about A.I. as he is.!
Luckily he also thinks, that becoming a software developer is still safe for now, and not currently doomed through automation.
Please have a look at our latest articles on A.I.
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]]>About the dangers and far-reaching consequences was written very much in various media lately. As most readers have probably already read most of potential problems – here are solutions instead, from the brightest minds of A.I. and me.
I wrote this article for the german tech magazine Mobile Geeks. I mostly used (A.I.) automated translations and fixed only the major errors. Thats why it may sound weird, but I hope you still can get some points.
“Future of Life Institute” sounds quite strange and unreal at first. It reminds me more of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “. But the Institute, in short FLI, is serious and has drummed up earlier this year, many of the brightest minds in and around A.I. research. They have discussed all potential disasters by A.I. and approaches to avoid those. They have published it as an open letter with a attachment. (Here the whole letter, which you can also sign.)

Future of Life Conference Jan. 2015 of risks of A.I.
Back row, from left to right: Tom Mitchell, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Huw Price, Shamil Chandaria, Jaan Tallinn, Stuart Russell, Bill Hibbard, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Anders Sandberg, Daniel Dewey, Stuart Armstrong, Luke Muehlhauser, Tom Dietterich, Michael Osborne, James Manyika, Ajay Agrawal, Richard Mallah, Nancy Chang, Matthew Putman
Other standing, left to right: Marilyn Thompson, Rich Sutton, Alex Wissner-Gross, Sam Teller, Toby Ord, Joscha Bach, Katja Grace, Adrian Weller, Heather Roff-Perkins, Dileep George, Shane Legg, Demis Hassabis, Wendell Wallach, Charina Choi, Ilya Sutskever, Kent Walker, Cecilia Tilli, Nick Bostrom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Steve Crossan, Mustafa Suleyman, Scott Phoenix, Neil Jacobstein, Murray Shanahan, Robin Hanson, Francesca Rossi, Nate Soares, Elon Musk, Andrew McAfee, Bart Selman, Michele Reilly, Aaron VanDevender, Max Tegmark, Margaret Boden, Joshua Greene, Paul Christiano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, David Parkes, Laurent Orseau, JB Straubel, James Moor, Sean Legassick, Mason Hartman, Howie Lempel, David Vladeck, Jacob Steinhardt, Michael Vassar, Ryan Calo, Susan Young, Owain Evans, Riva-Melissa Tez, János Kramár, Geoff Anders, Vernor Vinge, Anthony Aguirre
Seated: Sam Harris, Tomaso Poggio, Marin Soljačić, Viktoriya Krakovna, Meia Chita-Tegmark
and Photographer Anthony Aguirre edited into on his left
Elon Musk, the Institute has also been boosted by a donation of US $ 10 million.
The aim of the FLI is that the research and the use of KI is used positively:
The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is valuable to investigate how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. (FutureOfLife.org)
There is much research needed to address all threats and to create a useful and robust A.I.. “Robust” stands for, it is guaranteed, that intelligent machines, do what you want them to do. In this article are first the imminent dangers, which are warned by the FLI, then secondly those which are further in the future:
Weak A.I. begins with things like handwriting recognition and translation programs. Stock market trading computers, robot controllers and autonomous cars are also included.
These usually resolve only those tasks, which they were trained for. However, a large amount of hazards arise by them. More about the solutions to avoid these problems:
Autonomous Vehicles decide in dangerous situations over life and deathHere are ethical discussions and new laws needed. Considerations in which situations a driver and in which pedestrians have to be more protected, must be taken.
Autonome weapons to kill people without responsibilityWhether autonomous weapons systems, as here, are legal with UN human rights is doubtful. Nevertheless, against these dangers, the best solution is a global and UN-wide ban. The use is difficult to control, but a development ban will at least least largely restrict the danger.
Unemployment through automationAs stated recently in my articles, innovation, education and flexibility is important then ever for a healthy future. A social development is also necessary.
Coding mistakes: Who can guarantees, that a robot won’t crush someones hand?Formal and mathematical verification of A.I. program code has to be done, hopefully like it already exists within banks and aircraft control, to help to avoiding programming errors. This is complex but useful. A secure minimal open source (robots) OS is available with SEL4 already.
Modular development also helps – then each part can be tested individually. In addition, it provides a verifiable meta-level that is in control of everything.
Learning means making mistakes: Children sometimes get themselves into dangerous situations, that should hardly happen with (strong) robotsEven before delivery, robots and A.I. should be able to deal with as many situations as possible.
However, every real situation is different. But if robots, under safe laboratory conditions, were trained with nearly all physically possible situations in a test room with e.g. mother, children and all the usual household items – this would already help enormously.
I also think that when A.I. will be able to extract context and connections from text, images and videos, training on Wikipedia, books (documentary-)movies and other media will be extremely helpful. Although machines might not be able to feel: “moral values” and feelings, can be recognised by statistical behaviour of people. (You would then hold up a mirror to society. Oh oh)
Should there be an international stop-word for robots in your household?
Misunderstandings and unexpected results, such as stock market crashThus, even in the event of error-free A.I. and robots there will be many problems. As a task and the work environment must be specified for A.I. and robots – this has to be as precisely as possible. And we cannot always do it right. Also, our understanding of “good behavior” is often common sense and needs to be established in machine understandable form.
A.I. networks might get supplied with manipulated dataTo help A.I. learn better and faster, they will be connected. There are already robot databases such as RoboEarth. In order to use non-manipulated data, a trust system for A.I. systems must be established.
And general IT security and privacy of people in A.I. should play a big role at the design time.
Unintentional Cyber WarsSince the first militaries sometimes automates DoS attacks shooting back, probably soon between 192 to 205 other countries – additionally other non-state powers will do the same. But Error, negligence, misunderstandings, mistakes and technical IT security gaps should be (like many others things) not trigger wars.
The solution is (would be) to allow digital weapons and controlling systems of physical weapons, at the technical level only by human control.
The best A.I. Scientists, SciFi authors, astrologers and physicists are very divided on whether A.I. can reach a human level or even or higher level of intelligence in the foreseeable future .
If so, then the precautions above, for weak AI, are not sufficient. Therefore, they all agree that we should start looking for solutions for today.
As described in a previous article, I think due to illustrations of Shane Legg, that around 2030 A.I. might reach human-like level.
Stephen Hawking – Theoretical physicist, cosmologist and one of the smartest people of our time – has used Artificial Intelligence for his research – and sees it as possibly the biggest threat to our civilisation. In all seriousness, he stated, that the movie Transcendence, which is about singularity, should be taken as a warning.
Hawking describes, that the creation of truly intelligent machines would be the greatest achievement in the history of mankind. It may, however, also be our last, if we do not learn how to deal with the risks they.
experience of unexpected generalizationsTo ensure that A.I. and robots won’t imprison us “for our own safety” in rooms with cotton wool, systems should provide us with all the important decisions and plans they came up with. A.I. should also represent the sub-objectives and tasks in a human understandable, concise but complete way including probable and possible consequences.
Self optimising systems are not formally verifiableA formal code verification is impossible on systems that change their own code and improve at any time. A modular design helps, possibly the control units could be minimal, more static and thus controllable.
Accidents by misperceptions of the environment by the AIA.I. systems must recognise not only the environment, but also learn to assess how other people and systems will possibly behave. For this purpose, systems must conclude logically under uncertainty and learn to decide. Also, they need to pay attention to negative consequences of each decision. The relationship between calculations and assumptions must be further developed to do so.
Intelligent machines beyond effective human controlTo perform tasks as good as possible, intelligent machine would naturally try to prevent to be switched off or halted likewise. Therefore is would be a naturally goal to avoid human control. Therefore receiving the wish of interception by the machines administrators should be a very high level goal.
Again, a modular structure in which the central control unit can not autonomously expanded is helpful. Additionally, the display of machines goals and sub-goals, in an intelligible form, is a must.
Adopting new knowledge from neuroscience into the AI development is needed as well.
Laws and morality are too complex for AI – and insufficientLaws are on the one hand too extensive and complex for A.I. (or people:-)) to be understood at the whole. Moreover, they are not sufficient. Therefore, courts decide by taking conventions in account of , morals, and especially the respective situation.
Certainly, it is necessary to create laws and rules of conduct that are specifically tailored for machines. Possibly even according to the principle: anything not explicitly allowed is forbidden?
Broken or harmful A.I. without boundsUntested, unfinished or potentially harmful A.I. should be processed, off the internet, in containers. However, this requires a high level of IT security and well-developed systems. A.I. must be trained with real world data without the possibility spreading via steganography or airgap-hacking.
Infinite resource devouring A.I. – a natural targetIn order to carry out tasks as well as possible, an intelligent system will use all resources made available. This also resources are used, which are available only by exploiting security vulnerabilities and specification.
This would allow foreign computer systems and energy sources are captured. And just limited temporal resources could be consumed excessively.
K.I. tricks us – according to Goodhart’s ruleA.I. mostly works on the reward/reinforcement systems. Each system tries the easiest and fastest way to get a reward. Finally, these systems do not try to do the task conscientiously, but rather only trying to meet the evaluation criterion.
The evaluation criterion must therefore be precisely linked to the fulfilment of the task without any possible undesirable effect.
A.I. behaves different when you look away – Heisenberg uncertainty principleIf auditors are present, students, adults, restaurants and companies behave differently than usual. Unfortunately, the same is true for intelligent machines.
But those should always stick to the rules, smart machines should therefore rather be ‘ideal’ and less ‘human’ and perhaps also receive as little information about when and what there are tested for.
We can not know, what super intelligent machines will doThis problem remains: It is impossible for us to foresee the behaviour of people or machines that are smarter than we are. We can guess, but it is not for sure.
Whether one should limit the resources in systems before crossing the IQ of 200?
Finally! We have been warned mostly by sci-fi authors and from time to time by journalists or individuals about the dangers of A.I.. Often many true thoughts were mixed in imaginative stories.
Now at the conference of the Future of Life Institute, a large number of leading scientists of different fields, top researchers in the industry and some others came together. They have discussed together about the potential dangers and solution ideas. With the publication of the Open Letter and the research objectives, this finally has a scientific nature, which can be cited – and contains the consensus of the A.I. elite.
Good: There are concrete solutions for many examples. Bad: Those are only concepts and the general solution is: we need to do research on it.
Although the scientists want to track these charitable goals, I guess currently the most research money is spent for the productivity increase of A.I. systems.
I agree with the points and the letter and will try to contribute a part in that research!
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]]>The post Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: an Open Letter appeared first on ai-claudio Artificial Intelligence.
]]>This page contains the open letter of the Future of Life Institute including a HTML version of it’s attached PDF document, soon to be enriched, with links of mentioned Research papers, Researchers and Wikipedia.
The original including the signees can be found at the source: http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter
(If you have questions about this letter, please contact tegmark@mit.edu)
Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: an Open Letter
Artificial intelligence (AI) research has explored a variety of problems and approaches since its inception, but for the last 20 years or so has been focused on the problems surrounding the construction of intelligent agents – systems that perceive and act in some environment. In this context, “intelligence” is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality – colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences. The adoption of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations and statistical learning methods has led to a large degree of integration and cross-fertilization among AI, machine learning, statistics, control theory, neuroscience, and other fields. The establishment of shared theoretical frameworks, combined with the availability of data and processing power, has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.
As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research. There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.
The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI. Such considerations motivated the AAAI 2008-09 Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures and other projects on AI impacts, and constitute a significant expansion of the field of AI itself, which up to now has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose. We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do. The attached [research priorities document, see below] gives many examples of such research directions that can help maximize the societal benefit of AI. This research is by necessity interdisciplinary, because it involves both society and AI. It ranges from economics, law and philosophy to computer security, formal methods and, of course, various branches of AI itself.
In summary, we believe that research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial is both important and timely, and that there are concrete research directions that can be pursued today.
List of signatories [External link to futureoflife.com]
The following content is a HTML version of the document future_of_life_research_priorities.pdf which is attached to the open letter above.
January 11, 2015∗
∗The initial version of this document was drafted by Stuart Russell, Daniel Dewey & Max Tegmark, with major input from Janos Kramar & Richard Mallah, and reflects valuable feedback from Anthony Aguirre, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Tom Dietterich, Dileep George, Bill Hibbard, Demis Hassabis, Eric Horvitz, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, James Manyika, Luke Muehlhauser, Michael Osborne, David Parkes, Heather Roff Perkins, Francesca Rossi, Bart Selman, Murray Shanahan, and many others.
Executive Summary: Success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This document gives numerous examples (which should by no means be construed as an exhaustive list) of such worthwhile research aimed at ensuring that AI remains robust and beneficial.
Artificial intelligence (AI) research has explored a variety of problems and approaches since its inception, but for the last 20 years or so has been focused on the problems surrounding the construction of intelligent agents—systems that perceive and act in some environment. In this context, the criterion for intelligence is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality—colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences. The adoption of probabilistic representations and statistical learning methods has led to a large degree of integration and cross-fertilization between AI, machine learning, statistics, control theory, neuroscience, and other fields. The establishment of shared theoretical frameworks, combined with the availability of data and processing power, has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.
As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research. There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is valuable to investigate how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.
The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI. Such considerations motivated the AAAI 2008–09 Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures [42] and other projects and community efforts on AI impacts. These constitute a significant expansion of the field of AI itself, which up to now has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose. The present document can be viewed as a natural continuation of these efforts, focusing on identifying research directions that can help maximize the societal benefit of AI. This research is by necessity interdisciplinary, because it involves both society and AI. It ranges from economics, law, and philosophy to computer security, formal methods and, of course, various branches of AI itself. The focus is on delivering AI that is beneficial to society and robust in the sense that the benefits are guaranteed: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.
End of page 1
The successes of industrial applications of AI, from manufacturing to information services, demonstrate a growing impact on the economy, although there is disagreement about the exact nature of this impact and on how to distinguish between the effects of AI and those of other information technologies. Many economists and computer scientists agree that there is valuable research to be done on how to maximize the economic benefits of AI while mitigating adverse effects, which could include increased inequality and unemployment [50, 12, 25, 26, 71, 52, 48]. Such considerations motivate a range of research directions, spanning areas from economics to psychology. Below are a few examples that should by no means be interpreted as an exhaustive list.
The development of systems that embody significant amounts of intelligence and autonomy leads to im- portant legal and ethical questions whose answers impact both producers and consumers of AI technology. These questions span law, professional ethics, and philosophical ethics, and will require expertise from computer scientists, legal experts, policy experts, and ethicists. For example:
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From a policy perspective, AI (like any powerful new technology) enables both great new benefits and novel pitfalls to be avoided, and appropriate policies can ensure that we can enjoy the benefits while risks are minimized. This raises policy questions such as these:
1. What is the space of policies worth studying?
2. Which criteria should be used to determine the merits of a policy? Candidates include verifiability of compliance, enforceability, ability to reduce risk, ability to avoid stifling desirable technology development, adoptability, and ability to adapt over time to changing circumstances.
As autonomous systems become more prevalent in society, it becomes increasingly important that they robustly behave as intended. The development of autonomous vehicles, autonomous trading systems, autonomous weapons, etc. has therefore stoked interest in high-assurance systems where strong robustness guarantees can be made; Weld and Etzioni have argued that “society will reject autonomous agents unless we have some credible means of making them safe” [88]. Different ways in which an AI system may fail to perform as desired correspond to different areas of robustness research:
End of page 3
By verification, we mean methods that yield high confidence that a system will satisfy a set of formal constraints. When possible, it is desirable for systems in safety-critical situations, e.g. self-driving cars, to be verifiable.
Formal verification of software has advanced significantly in recent years: examples include the seL4 kernel [43], a complete, general-purpose operating-system kernel that has been mathematically checked against a formal specification to give a strong guarantee against crashes and unsafe operations, and HACMS, DARPA’s “clean-slate, formal methods-based approach” to a set of high-assurance software tools [24]. Not only should it be possible to build AI systems on top of verified substrates; it should also be possible to verify the designs of the AI systems themselves, particularly if they follow a “componentized architecture”, in which guarantees about individual components can be combined according to their connections to yield properties of the overall system. This mirrors the agent architectures used in Russell and Norvig [68], which separate an agent into distinct modules (predictive models, state estimates, utility functions, policies, learning elements, etc.), and has analogues in some formal results on control system designs. Research on richer kinds of agents—for example, agents with layered architectures, anytime components, overlapping deliberative and reactive elements, metalevel control, etc.—could contribute to the creation of verifiable agents, but we lack the formal “algebra” to properly define, explore, and rank the space of designs.
Perhaps the most salient difference between verification of traditional software and verification of AI systems is that the correctness of traditional software is defined with respect to a fixed and known machine model, whereas AI systems—especially robots and other embodied systems—operate in environments that are at best partially known by the system designer. In these cases, it may be practical to verify that the system acts correctly given the knowledge that it has, avoiding the problem of modelling the real environ- ment [21]. A lack of design-time knowledge also motivates the use of learning algorithms within the agent software, and verification becomes more difficult: statistical learning theory gives so-called ε-δ (probably approximately correct) bounds, mostly for the somewhat unrealistic settings of supervised learning from i.i.d. data and single-agent reinforcement learning with simple architectures and full observability, but even then requiring prohibitively large sample sizes to obtain meaningful guarantees.
Research into methods for making strong statements about the performance of machine learning algorithms and managing computational budget over many different constituent numerical tasks could be improve our abilities in this area, possible extending work on Bayesian quadrature [33, 28]. Work in adaptive control theory [7],the theory of so-called cyberphysical systems [57], and verification of hybrid or robotic systems [2, 90] is highly relevant but also faces the same difficulties. And of course all these issues are laid on top of the standard problem of proving that a given software artifact does in fact correctly implement, say, a reinforcement learning algorithm of the intended type. Some work has been done for verifying neural network applications [61, 80, 70] and the notion of partial programs [4, 78] allows the designer to impose arbitrary “structural” constraints on behavior, but much remains to be done before it will be possible to have high confidence that a learning agent will learn to satisfy its design criteria in realistic contexts.
A verification theorem for an agent design has the form, “If environment satisfies assumptions φ then behavior satisfies requirements ψ.” There are two ways in which a verified agent can, nonetheless, fail to be a beneficial agent in actuality: first, the environmental assumption φ is false in the real world, leading to behavior that violates the requirements ψ; second, the system may satisfy the formal requirement ψ but still behave in ways that we find highly undesirable in practice. It may be the case that this undesirability is a consequence of satisfying ψ when φ is violated; i.e., had φ held the undesirability would not have been manifested; or it may be the case that the requirement ψ is erroneous in itself. Russell and Norvig [68] provide a simple example: if a robot vacuum cleaner is asked to clean up as much dirt as possible, and has an action to dump the contents of its dirt container, it will repeatedly dump and clean up the same dirt. The requirement should focus not on dirt cleaned up but on cleanliness of the floor. Such specification errors are ubiquitous in software verification, where it is commonly observed that writing correct specifications can be harder than writing correct code. Unfortunately, it is not possible to verify the specification: the notions of “beneficial” and “desirable” are not separately made formal, so one cannot straightforwardly prove that satisfying ψ necessarily leads to desirable behavior and a beneficial agent.
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In order to build systems that robustly behave well, we of course need to decide what “good behavior” means in each application domain. This ethical question is tied intimately to questions of what engineering techniques are available, how reliable these techniques are, and what trade-offs can be made –– all areas where computer science, machine learning, and broader AI expertise is valuable. For example, Wallach and Allen [86] argue that a significant consideration is the computational expense of different behavioral standards (or ethical theories): if a standard cannot be applied efficiently enough to guide behavior in safety-critical situations, then cheaper approximations may be needed. Designing simplified rules – for example, to govern a self-driving car’s decisions in critical situations – will likely require expertise from both ethicists and computer scientists. Computational models of ethical reasoning may shed light on questions of computational expense and the viability of reliable ethical reasoning methods [5, 79]; for example, work could further explore the applications of semantic networks for case-based reasoning [49], hierarchical constraint satisfaction [46], or weighted prospective abduction [56] to machine ethics.
Security research can help make AI more robust. As AI systems are used in an increasing number of critical roles, they will take up an increasing proportion of cyber-attack surface area. It is also probable that AI and machine learning techniques will themselves be used in cyber-attacks.
Robustness against exploitation at the low level is closely tied to verifiability and freedom from bugs. For example, the DARPA SAFE program aims to build an integrated hardware-software system with a flexible metadata rule engine, on which can be built memory safety, fault isolation, and other protocols that could improve security by preventing exploitable flaws [20]. Such programs cannot eliminate all security flaws (since verification is only as strong as the assumptions that underly the specification), but could significantly reduce vulnerabilities of the type exploited by the recent “Heartbleed bug” and “Bash Bug”. Such systems could be preferentially deployed in safety-critical applications, where the cost of improved security is justified.
At a higher level, research into specific AI and machine learning techniques may become increasingly useful in security. These techniques could be applied to the detection of intrusions [45], analyzing malware [63], or detecting potential exploits in other programs through code analysis [11]. It is not implausible that cyberattack between states and private actors will be a risk factor for harm from near-future AI systems, motivating research on preventing harmful events. As AI systems grow more complex and are networked together, they will have to intelligently manage their trust, motivating research on statistical-behavioral trust establishment [60] and computational reputation models [69].
For certain types of safety-critical AI systems – especially vehicles and weapons platforms – it may be desirable to retain some form of meaningful human control, whether this means a human in the loop, on the loop [35, 55], or some other protocol. In any of these cases, there will be technical work needed in order to ensure that meaningful human control is maintained [22].
Automated vehicles are a test-bed for effective control-granting techniques. The design of systems and protocols for transition between automated navigation and human control is a promising area for further research. Such issues also motivate broader research on how to optimally allocate tasks within human- computer teams, both for identifying situations where control should be transferred, and for applying human judgment efficiently to the highest-value decisions.
A frequently discussed long-term goal of some AI researchers is to develop systems that can learn from experience with human-like breadth and surpass human performance in most cognitive tasks, thereby having a major impact on society. If there is a non-negligible probability that these efforts will succeed in the foreseeable future, then additional current research beyond that mentioned in the previous sections will be motivated as exemplified below, to help ensure that the resulting AI will be robust and beneficial.
Assessments of this success probability vary widely between researchers, but few would argue with great confidence that the probability is negligible, given the track record of such predictions. For example, Ernest Rutherford, arguably the greatest nuclear physicist of his time, said in 1933 that nuclear energy was
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“moonshine”1, and Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley called interplanetary travel “utter bilge” in 1956 [62]. Moreover, to justify a modest investment in this AI robustness research, this probability need not be high, merely non-negligible, just as a modest investment in home insurance is justified by a non-negligible probability of the home burning down.
Reprising the themes of short-term research, research enabling verifiable low-level software and hardware can eliminate large classes of bugs and problems in general AI systems; if the systems become increasingly powerful and safety-critical, verifiable safety properties will become increasingly valuable. If the theory of extending verifiable properties from components to entire systems is well understood, then even very large systems can enjoy certain kinds of safety guarantees, potentially aided by techniques designed explicitly to handle learning agents and high-level properties. Theoretical research, especially if it is done explicitly with very general and capable AI systems in mind, could be particularly useful.
A related verification research topic that is distinctive to long-term concerns is the verifiability of sys- tems that modify, extend, or improve themselves, possibly many times in succession [27, 84]. Attempting to straightforwardly apply formal verification tools to this more general setting presents new difficulties, including the challenge that a formal system that is sufficiently powerful cannot use formal methods in the obvious way to gain assurance about the accuracy of functionally similar formal systems, on pain of inconsistency via G ̈odel’s incompleteness [23, 87]. It is not yet clear whether or how this problem can be overcome, or whether similar problems will arise with other verification methods of similar strength.
Finally, it is often difficult to actually apply formal verification techniques to physical systems, espe- cially systems that have not been designed with verification in mind. This motivates research pursuing a general theory that links functional specification to physical states of affairs. This type of theory would allow use of formal tools to anticipate and control behaviors of systems that approximate rational agents, alternate designs such as satisficing agents, and systems that cannot be easily described in the standard agent formalism (powerful prediction systems, theorem-provers, limited-purpose science or engineering systems, etc.). It may also be that such a theory could allow rigorously demonstrating that systems are constrained from taking certain kinds of actions or performing certain kinds of reasoning.
As in the short-term research priorities, validity is concerned with undesirable behaviors that can arise despite a system’s formal correctness. In the long term, AI systems might become more powerful and autonomous, in which case failures of validity could carry correspondingly higher costs.
Strong guarantees for machine learning methods, an area we highlighted for short-term validity re- search, will also be important for long-term safety. To maximize the long-term value of this work, machine learning research might focus on the types of unexpected generalization that would be most problematic for very general and capable AI systems. In particular, it might aim to understand theoretically and practically how learned representations of high-level human concepts could be expected to generalize (or fail to) in radically new contexts [81]. Additionally, if some concepts could be learned reliably, it might be possible to use them to define tasks and constraints that minimize the chances of unintended consequences even when autonomous AI systems become very general and capable. Little work has been done on this topic, which suggests that both theoretical and experimental research may be useful.
Mathematical tools such as formal logic, probability, and decision theory have yielded significant insight into the foundations of reasoning and decision-making. However, there are still many open problems in the foundations of reasoning and decision. Solutions to these problems may make the behavior of very capable systems much more reliable and predictable. Example research topics in this area include reasoning and decision under bounded computational resources `a la Horvitz and Russell [40, 66], how to take into account correlations between AI systems’ behaviors and those of their environments or of other agents [82, 44, 39, 29, 76], how agents that are embedded in their environments should reason [72, 54], and how to reason about uncertainty over logical consequences of beliefs or other deterministic computations [75, 59]. These topics may benefit from being considered together, since they appear deeply linked [30, 31].
In the long term, it is plausible that we will want to make agents that act autonomously and powerfully across many domains. Explicitly specifying our preferences in broad domains in the style of near-future
1“The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Any one who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine” [58].
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machine ethics may not be practical, making “aligning” the values of powerful AI systems with our own values and preferences difficult [73, 74]. Consider, for instance, the difficulty of creating a utility function that encompasses an entire body of law; even a literal rendition of the law is far beyond our current capabilities, and would be highly unsatisfactory in practice (since law is written assuming that it will be interpreted and applied in a flexible, case-by-case way). Reinforcement learning raises its own problems: when systems become very capable and general, then an effect similar to Goodhart’s Law is likely to occur, in which sophisticated agents attempt to manipulate or directly control their reward signals [9]. This motivates research areas that could improve our ability to engineer systems that can learn or acquire values at run-time. For example, inverse reinforcement learning may offer a viable approach, in which a system infers the preferences of another actor, assumed to be a reinforcement learner itself [67, 51]. Other approaches could use different assumptions about underlying cognitive models of the actor whose preferences are being learned (preference learning, [17]), or could be explicitly inspired by the way humans acquire ethical values. As systems become more capable, more epistemically difficult methods could become viable, suggesting that research on such methods could be useful; for example, Bostrom [9] reviews preliminary work on a variety of methods for specifying goals indirectly.
It is unclear whether long-term progress in AI will make the overall problem of security easier or harder; on one hand, systems will become increasingly complex in construction and behavior and AI-based cy- berattacks may be extremely effective, while on the other hand, the use of AI and machine learning techniques along with significant progress in low-level system reliability may render hardened systems much less vulnerable than today’s. From a cryptographic perspective, it appears that this conflict favors defenders over attackers; this may be a reason to pursue effective defense research wholeheartedly.
Although the research topics described in 2.3.3 may become increasingly important in the long term, very general and capable systems will pose distinctive security problems. In particular, if the problems of validity and control are not solved, it may be useful to create “containers” for AI systems that could have undesirable behaviors and consequences in less controlled environments [92]. Both theoretical and practical sides of this question warrant investigation. If the general case of AI containment turns out to be prohibitively difficult, then it may be that designing an AI system and a container in parallel is more successful, allowing the weaknesses and strengths of the design to inform the containment strategy [9]. The design of anomaly detection systems and automated exploit-checkers could be of significant help. Overall, it seems reasonable to expect this additional perspective – defending against attacks from “within” a system as well as from external actors – will raise interesting and profitable questions in the field of computer security.
It has been argued that very general and capable AI systems operating autonomously to accomplish some task will often be subject to effects that increase the difficulty of maintaining meaningful human control [53, 10, 9, 71]. Research on systems that are not subject to these effects, minimize their impact, or allow for reliable human control could be valuable in preventing undesired consequences, as could work on reliable and secure test-beds for AI systems at a variety of capability levels.
If an AI system is selecting the actions that best allow it to complete a given task, then avoiding conditions that prevent the system from continuing to pursue the task is a natural subgoal [53, 10] (and conversely, seeking unconstrained situations is sometimes a useful heuristic [91]). This could become problematic, however, if we wish to repurpose the system, to deactivate it, or to significantly alter its decision-making process; such a system would rationally avoid these changes. Systems that do not exhibit these behaviors have been termed corrigible systems [77], and both theoretical and practical work in this area appears tractable and useful. For example, it may be possible to design utility functions or decision processes so that a system will not try to avoid being shut down or repurposed [77], and theoretical frameworks could be developed to better understand the space of potential systems that avoid undesirable behaviors [36, 38, 37].
It has been argued that another natural subgoal is the acquisition of fungible resources of a variety of kinds: for example, information about the environment, safety from disruption, and improved freedom of action are all instrumentally useful for many tasks [53, 10]. Hammond [32] gives the label stabilization to the more general set of cases where “due to the action of the agent, the environment comes to be
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better fitted to the agent as time goes on”. This type of subgoal could lead to undesired consequences, and a better understanding of the conditions under which resource acquisition or radical stabilization is an optimal strategy (or likely to be selected by a given system) would be useful in mitigating its effects. Potential research topics in this area include “domestic” goals that are limited in scope in some way [9], the effects of large temporal discount rates on resource acquisition strategies, and experimental investigation of simple systems that display these subgoals.
Finally, research on the possibility of superintelligent machines or rapid, sustained self-improvement (“intelligence explosion”) has been highlighted by past and current projects on the future of AI as po- tentially valuable to the project of maintaining reliable control in the long term. The the AAAI 2008–09 Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures’ “Subgroup on Pace, Concerns, and Control” stated that
There was overall skepticism about the prospect of an intelligence explosion… Nevertheless, there was a shared sense that additional research would be valuable on methods for under- standing and verifying the range of behaviors of complex computational systems to minimize unexpected outcomes. Some panelists recommended that more research needs to be done to better define “intelligence explosion,” and also to better formulate different classes of such accelerating intelligences. Technical work would likely lead to enhanced understanding of the likelihood of such phenomena, and the nature, risks, and overall outcomes associated with different conceived variants [42].
Stanford’s One-Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence includes “Loss of Control of AI systems” as an area of study, specifically highlighting concerns over the possibility that
we could one day lose control of AI systems via the rise of superintelligences that do not act in accordance with human wishes – and that such powerful systems would threaten humanity. Are such dystopic outcomes possible? If so, how might these situations arise? …What kind of investments in research should be made to better understand and to address the possibility of the rise of a dangerous superintelligence or the occurrence of an “intelligence explosion”? [41]
Research in this area could include any of the long-term research priorities listed above, as well as the- oretical and forecasting work on intelligence explosion and superintelligence [16, 9], and could extend or critique existing approaches begun by groups such as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute [74].
In summary, success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This document has given numerous examples (which should by no means be construed as an exhaustive list) of such worthwhile research aimed at ensuring that AI remains robust and beneficial, and aligned with human interests.
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]]>The lecturers will be Pieter Abbeel and Dan Klein, which both have masses of very positive student reviews and previous experience.
Artificial Intelligence | edX.
Stay also tuned for further information as well as lecture notes and possible discussions about this course on ai-claudio.com. If you can’t wait, have a look at UDACITY Machine Learning – 1 Supervised.
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]]>If you cannot attend, you still will be able get some of their papers and further resources on their linked event page.
Please feel free to send me further events or comments, they are as always appreciated! 
02-05 January 2015, The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges in San Juan, Puerto Rico
21-23 January 2015, International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics (AROB 2015), in Beppu, Japan
25-30 January 2015, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15) in Austin, Texas, USA.
05-07 February 2015, Australasian Conference on Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence (ACALCI 2015), in Newcastle, Australia
25-28 March 2015, SMART Cognitive Science International Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands
07-11 April 2015, International Neuroscience Winters Conference (17.) in Soelden, Österreich
08 – 10 April 2015, Evostar 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark
19-22 April 2015, Spring Brain Conference, Bridging Neural Mechanisms and Cognition by FENS in Copenhagen, Denmark
22-24 April 2015, European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (ESANN 2015) (23.) in Bruges, Belgium
18-22 May 2015, International Conference on Integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques in Constraint Programming (CP-AI-OR 2015) in Barcelona, Spain
19-20 May 2015 ICT Spring Europe 2015 with a AI&ROBOT AREA special in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
26-30 May 2015, IEEE Robotics & Automation Societys Conference, (ICRA 2015) in Seattle, USA
25-28 May 2015, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2015) in Sendai, Japan
01-04 June 2015, International Conference on Brain Engineering and Neuro-computing (IC-BrainEngiNe 2015) in Mykonos, Greece
14-18 June 2015 the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (ICAISC 2015) in Zakopane, Poland
17-20 June 2015 the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2015) (15.) in Pavia, Italy
22-25 July, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI 2015) in Berlin, Germany
25-27. June 2015, Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2015) in Bucharest, Romania
6-11 July 2015 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2015) by IMLS in Lille, France
22/23-25 July, the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI 2015) in Pasadena, USA
25-31 July 2015, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-15) in Buenos Aires, Argentina
28 September – 03 October 2015, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2015) in Hamburg, Germany
24-26 February 2016, International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2016 in conjunction with ICORES 2016 and ICPRAM 2016), Rome, Italy
The most valuable list of Upcoming Conferences & Workshops (as well as previous ones) I could find is provided by the Biointelligence Laboratory of the School of Computer Sci. & Eng. at the Seoul National University: http://bi.snu.ac.kr/Info/conferences.html
A broad Conference Listing Page, partly in German language only: http://www.conference-service.com/konferenzkalender/neuronale-netze.html
The Human Brain Project of the EU Events: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/upcoming-events-viewer
The Wiki Call for Papers: http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/
K.I. (A.I.) of the Germany in http://konferenz.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/
The Germany A.I. Magazine: http://link.springer.com/journal/13218
Please feel free to tell me, if you like other conferences or resources to be added!
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