SCIENCE BOND

How often have we heard others talk about how ‘intelligent’ they consider someone to be? Intelligence is a description of how good someone is at mentally doing something. Intelligence involves thought. Intelligence includes the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language and to learn. Do you consider yourself to be intelligent? Schools and the education system would have us believe that we are only intelligent if we are able to solve complex abstract problems or remember facts and figures. I would agree that this is a type of intelligence and this type of intelligence is normally referred to as IQ or ‘intelligence quotient’ (a phrase coined by an American psychologist named Lewis Terman). A small proportion of the population has a high IQ and they find the academic type of learning and activities in school relatively easy. But the vast majority of people don’t. So where does that leave everyone else?  Well, the good news...

By 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already learning from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her.  It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones.  Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.First as a PhD student and latterly as director of the computer vision lab at Stanford University, she has pursued the painstakingly difficult goal with an aim of ultimately creating the electronic eyes for robots and machines to see and, more importantly, understand their environment.  Half of all human brainpower goes into visual processing even though it is something we all ...