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"2017 has been a booming year for the field of artificial
intelligence. While A.I. and data-focused machine learning have been
around for decades, the algorithmic technologies have made their
presence known in a variety of industries and contexts this year" reports Christina Bonnington, Freelance writer & editor.
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| AlphaGo beat the world's best Go player in May. A few months later, a new version beat the human-defeating version 100 to 1. Photo: Saran_Poroong/Thinkstock |
Microsoft UK’s chief envisioning officer Dave Coplin has called A.I. “the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today,” and Silicon Valley companies seem to have taken that to heart: They’ve been hiring A.I. experts right and left, and with those in short supply, they’ve started teaching employees the fundamentals of A.I. themselves.
Not every A.I. achievement has been met with admiration and applause, though. Some are worried about the human prejudices that are being introduced into A.I. systems. ProPublica found in 2016, for example, that the software algorithms used to predict future criminals were heavily biased against black defendants. And earlier this year, Facebook came under fire for the algorithmically generated categories advertisers could use to target users, which included hateful groups and topics such as “Jew hater.” Situations like these have prompted experts to urge companies and developers to be more transparent about how their A.I. systems work. However, in many other cases—especially of late—A.I. has been used to good end: To make discoveries, to better itself, and to help us expand beyond the limits of our human brains.
A.I. Spotted An Eight-Planet Solar System
Successful astronomical discoveries often center around studying
data—lots and lots of data—and that is something A.I. and machine
learning are exceedingly good at handling. In fact, astronomers used
artificial intelligence to sift through years of data obtained by the
Kepler telescope to identify a distant eight-planet solar system
earlier this month. This solar system now ties our own for the most
known planets circling its star, in this case Kepler-90, located more
than 2,500 light years away.
From 2009 to 2013, the Kepler telescope’s photometer snapped 10 pixel images of 200,000 different stars every half hour in search of changes in star brightness. If a star dimmed and brightened in a regular, repeating pattern, that could be an indication that it has planets orbiting. (You can also use that information to estimate the size and length of orbit of a planet circling a particular star.) University of Texas at Austin astronomer Andrew Vanderburg and Google software engineer Christopher Shallue developed the neural network that made the discovery using 15,000 known exoplanet indicators. They zeroed in on 670 stars with known exoplanets, but focused specifically on weak signals—smaller exoplanets previous researchers may have missed. The planet the duo discovered, dubbed Kepler-90i, appears to be the third planet orbiting its star, much like our own Earth.
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Source: Slate Magazine
