Artificial Intelligence

The movie I, Robot presents us with a future that one day robot may take out humanity. Despite worries that robot will take jobs from human, we could hope that human life will be more efficient and convenient with the help of AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines and the main is programming. Scientist claim that intelligence is the ability to adapt one's behavior to fit a new circumstance. That means that the heart of AI is to make computer thinks rationally. Last year, an Go computer program called Alpha Go beat the world Go champion. This is considered to be a great leap of AI because playing Go requires more than just computation and repetition.

Intelligence requires many different components that are: learning, reasoning and problem-solving.
Learning is quite simple, which is performed by trial-and-error. Like the journal that I wrote earlier, the Eight Queen is a perfect example of trial-and-error program, when the program gets the right answer and memorize that, it learns.

Reasoning is the ability that one can distinguish from its judgement. An easy example is that: he is either in the dorm or dhall. So if he is not in dorm, he is in dhall. AI should be able to come out with this kind of conclusion based on its deductive base and also distinguish the relevance from the irrelevance.

One last component is problem-solving. Given a problem like finishing a math problem or wining a chess game, it should be able to solve the problem based on its learning and reasoning.

Although in our life nowadays there are a lot of examples of these kinds of programs like Siri, games that are able to solve some problems, they still can't satisfy scientist's expectation of AI: machine that can think and act rationally. This field is still very potential for us to explore.





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Reference:
1. http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/what%20is%20ai.html
2.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2906336/emerging-technology/what-is-artificial-intelligence.html

Snapchat and Facial Recognition Technology

Snapchat has been really popular since I came to America. There are a lot of people around me using it so I downloaded it to see why people are so crazy about it. It turned out that it is really fun using it. When you are taking selfie, it will automatically change your expression into something else, some are mimic of animal or some strange things. Although it seems a little bit weird, it works really well because the APP can recognize your facial expression clearly and when you move your head, it moves with you! So I was really curious about how Snapchat managed to do that.

It turns out that, Snapchat's lenses utilized a type of special selfie "filter." Basically, the APP spotted us based on contrast patterns seen in people's faces. However it is really hard to spot specifically how people's faces look like. Snapchat's system analyzed thousands of faces to spot where eyes, nose, and lips are. After that, it can set up different masks that can move with these spots accordingly.

Although it is really interesting to have this kind of technology for fun, it is also a little bit scary to have such tech in our life. If you can have a mask that will fit your face so well, why not people can try to put your face someone else's face? It may also offend people's privacy because your expression is analyzed so clearly and who knows what you can do with those data.

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(Here is a video about how Snapchat works)

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Photo Reference:
1.http://petapixel.com/2016/06/30/snapchats-powerful-facial-recognition-technology-works/
2.http://uatoday.tv/techandscience/deal-of-the-year-snapchat-buys-ukrainian-startup-looksery-for-usd-150-mln-494701.html

Siri

Previously when I was talking about machine learning, I mentioned a little bit about Siri as an example of our cell phone interacting with us. This time I want to talk more about how this amazing APP works.

Siri is a personal virtual assistant APP since iPhone 4S. It came as an APP to provide information and handle tasks for iPhone users, and it becomes more familiar with your preferences as you use more and more of it. 

How Siri works is really like what we learn in class. It records your voice and analyze the frequency and waves. And then it will translate those into codes. Then it will have a special program to identify the words, phrases and patterns. The command line argument and scanner input is just like this, but very elementary. It takes in input, and translate it into whether int, double or String and then run the program we coded to get the result that we want. In Siri, this becomes tremendously complex. There are thousands of possibilities for input, the algorithm has to run through thousand times to determine which possibility fits the input.

Then after it finds the input, it will run through the program according to the keywords of the phrases. For example, if it reads "weather today", it will run the weather program and output today's weather. Of course the reality is far more complex than this simple example. Sometimes even when we ask some really tricky questions, Siri is able to answer it or even make joke about it！

I still remember when I first learned about Jarvis in the Iron Man, it was amazing and unbelievable for me to think of a machine or program that can stay with me and assist me in such detail. But as technology goes on innovating, that may some days become true.  

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Writing Reference:

1.http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/siri.htm

2.http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/howitworks/how-siri-works.html

Photo Reference:

https://techcrunch.com/topic/product/siri/

Fingerprint Scanner

           
Have you ever experienced this: you forgot the password for one app because you have so many different kinds of passwords, either a combination of numbers and letter or something that requires capital letter or slash or some buzzard combination. At the same time you also have to worry that someday someone will hack your phone or app because they find a way to find your password. But actually we human have a unique "built-in" keyword: fingerprint.

On people's skin, there are tiny "ridges" and "valleys" that make us easier to grasp. And DNA and environmental factors that affect the formation of fingerprint so each person has a unique fingerprint pattern, even a twins. So the unique characteristic of fingerprint makes it a great password for us: it is a key that you will never forget and lose.

Most fingerprint system analyzes some specific fingerprint features, commonly known as minutiae. That is analyzers focus on the pints on the fingerprint where one ridge line split into two. Scanner systems usually use complex algorithm to to analyze these minutiae.Several minutiae points are scanned in memory when people first registered,and after that if a scanned fingerprint matches these minutiae then it will be considered a match and then log in for the device.
           



Sources:
1.http://www.androidauthority.com/how-fingerprint-scanners-work-670934/
2.http://gizmodo.com/how-the-iphone-5ss-fingerprint-scanner-works-and-what-1265703794
3.http://biometrics.mainguet.org/types/fingerprint/fingerprint_algo.htm