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http://www.wired.com/2014/08/viv/?mbid=social_fb
Forget Siri: This Radical New AI Teaches
Itself and Reads Your Mind
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BY STEVEN LEVY
Viv was named after the Latin root meaning live. Its San Jose, California, offices are
decorated with tsotchkes bearing the numbers six and five (VI and V in roman
numerals).
ARIEL ZAMBELICH
When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not
about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new
feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice,
seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance
in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was
brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6:30?” or “Call Diane’s
mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would
demur with deft wisdom. “My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,” she’d say.
Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a
plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let
alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw
a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s
powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do
something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She
knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use OpenTable. But putting those
things together is, at the moment, beyond her.
Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of
realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only
perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will
be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation
will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to
answer almost any query and perform almost any function.
“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s cofounders.
He should know. Before working on Viv, he helped create Siri. So did his fellow cofounders,
Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham.
For the past two years, the team has been working on Viv Labs’ product—also named Viv, after
the Latin root meaning live. Their project has been draped in secrecy, but the few outsiders who
have gotten a look speak about it in rapturous terms. “The vision is very significant,” says Oren
Etzioni, a renowned AI expert who heads the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “If this
team is successful, we are looking at the future of intelligent agents and a multibillion-dollar
industry.”
Viv is not the only company competing for a share of those billions. The field of artificial
intelligence has become the scene of a frantic corporate arms race, with Internet giants snapping
up AI startups and talent. Google recently paid a reported $500 million for the UK deep-learning
company DeepMind and has lured AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil to its
headquarters in Mountain View, California. Facebook has its own deep-learning group, led by
prize hire Yann LeCun from New York University. Their goal is to build a new generation
of AI that can process massive troves of data to predict and fulfill our desires.
Viv strives to be the first consumer-friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise. It wants to
be not only blindingly smart and infinitely flexible but omnipresent. Viv’s creators hope that
some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv
founders say you’ll access its artificial intelligence as a utility, the way you draw on electricity.
Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain
can help power a million different apps and devices.
“I’m extremely proud of Siri and the impact it’s had on the world, but in many ways it could
have been more,” Cheyer says. “Now I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than
consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally
change the way software is built.”
Viv labs is tucked behind an unmarked door on a middle floor of a generic glass office
building in downtown San Jose. Visitors enter into a small suite and walk past a pool table to get
to the single conference room, glimpsing on the way a handful of engineers staring into monitors
on trestle tables. Once in the meeting room, Kittlaus—a product-whisperer whose career includes
stints at Motorola and Apple—is usually the one to start things off.
He acknowledges that an abundance of voice-navigated systems already exists. In addition to
Siri, there is Google Now, which can anticipate some of your needs, alerting you, for example,
that you should leave 15 minutes sooner for the airport because of traffic delays. Microsoft,
which has been pursuing machine-learning techniques for decades, recently came out with a Sirilike system called Cortana. Amazon uses voice technology in its Fire TV product.
But Kittlaus points out that all of these services are strictly limited. Cheyer elaborates: “Google
Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like ‘Where was Abraham
Lincoln born?’ And it can name the city. You can also say, ‘What is the population?’ of a
city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, ‘What is the population of
the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?’” The system may have the data for both these
components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a
smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to
do. *** can’t do unexpected query ***
Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers
required. Take a complicated command like “Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq
could fit in.” Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically
generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say,
Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of
legroom. And it can do all of this in a fraction of a second.
Viv is an open system that will let innumerable businesses and applications become part of its
boundless brain. The technical barriers are minimal, requiring brief “training” (in some cases,
minutes) for Viv to understand the jargon of the specific topic. As Viv’s knowledge grows, so
will its understanding; its creators have designed it based on three principles they call its
“pillars”: It will be taught by the world, it will know more than it is taught, and it will learn
something every day. As with other AI products, that teaching involves using sophisticated
algorithms to interpret the language and behavior of people using the system—the more people
use it, the smarter it gets. By knowing who its users are and which services they interact with,
Viv can sift through that vast trove of data and find new ways to connect and manipulate the
information.
Kittlaus says the end result will be a digital assistant who knows what you want before you ask
for it. He envisions someone unsteadily holding a phone to his mouth outside a dive bar at 2
am and saying, “I’m drunk.” Without any elaboration, Viv would contact the user’s
preferred car service, dispatch it to the address where he’s half passed out, and direct the
driver to take him home. No further consciousness required.
The founders of a stealth startup called Viv Labs—Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Chris
Brigham—are building a Siri-like digital assistant that can process massive troves of data,
teach itself, and write its own programs on the fly. The goal: to predict and fulfill our desires.
ARIEL ZAMBELICH
If Kittlaus is in some ways the Steve Jobs of Viv—he is the only non-engineer on the 10person team and its main voice on strategy and marketing—Cheyer is the company’s Steve
Wozniak, the project’s key scientific mind. Unlike the whimsical creator of the Apple II,
though, Cheyer is aggressively analytical in every facet of his life, even beyond the workbench.
As a kid, he was a Rubik’s Cube champion, averaging 26 seconds a solution. When he
encountered programming, he dove in headfirst. “I felt that computers were invented for me,” he
says. And while in high school he discovered a regimen to force the world to bend to his will. “I
live my life by what I call verbally stated goals,” he says. “I crystallize a feeling, a need, into
words. I think about the words, and I tell everyone I meet, ‘This is what I’m doing.’ I say it, and
then I believe it. By telling people, you’re committed to it, and they help you. And it works. ”
He says he used the technique to land his early computing jobs, including the most significant—
at SRI International, a Menlo Park think tank that invented the concept of computer windows and
the mouse. It was there, in the early 2000s, that Cheyer led the engineering of a Darpabacked AI effort to build “a humanlike system that could sense the world, understand it,
reason about it, plan, communicate, and act.” The SRI-led
team built what it called a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO. They
set some AI high-water marks, not least being the system’s ability to understand natural
language. As the five-year program wound down, it was unclear what would happen next.
That was when Kittlaus, who had quit his job at Motorola, showed up at SRI as an entrepreneur
in residence. When he saw a CALO-related prototype, he told Cheyer he could definitely build a
business from it, calling it the perfect complement to the just-released iPhone. In 2007, with
SRI’s blessing, they licensed the technology for a startup, taking on a third cofounder, an AI
expert named Tom Gruber, and eventually renaming the system Siri.
The small team, which grew to include Chris Brigham, an engineer who had impressed Cheyer
on CALO, moved to San Jose and worked for two years to get things right. “One of the hardest
parts was the natural language understanding,” Cheyer says. Ultimately they had an iPhone app
that could perform a host of interesting tasks—call a cab, book a table, get movie tickets—and
carry on a conversation with brio. They released it publicly to users in February 2010. Three
weeks later, Steve Jobs called. He wanted to buy the company.
“I was shocked at how well he knew our app,” Cheyer says. At first they declined to sell, but
Jobs persisted. His winning argument was that Apple could expose Siri to a far wider
audience than a startup could reach. He promised to promote it as a key element on every
iPhone. Apple bought the company in April 2010 for a reported $200 million.
The core Siri team came to Apple with the project. But as Siri was honed into a product that
millions could use in multiple languages, some members of the original team reportedly had
difficulties with executives who were less respectful of their vision than Jobs was. Kittlaus left
Apple the day after the launch—the day Steve Jobs died. Cheyer departed several months later.
“I do feel if Steve were alive, I would still be at Apple,” Cheyer says. “I’ll leave it at that.”
(Gruber, the third Siri cofounder, remains at Apple.)
This laser-armed drone could blow fighter jets out of the sky
An Air Force officer proposes a robot fighter with minimal
human control
By Michael Peck, War is Boring | August 12, 2014
Drones: The future of air battles? (USAf/Getty Images)
Here's an idea for an awesome dogfighting aircraft. Make it small, light, and fast. Build it
out of materials that are hard to detect on radar. Even give it a laser cannon.
Oh, and don't put a human in the cockpit. In fact, don't even closely tie the drone to human
ground control. Because in an aerial knife fight, a computer-controlled machine will beat a
human pilot.
That's the idea behind a controversial proposal by U.S. Air Force captain Michael Byrnes, an
experienced Predator and Reaper drone pilot. Byrnes is calling for the development of a
robotic dogfighter, which he calls the FQ-X, that could blow manned fighters out of the
sky.
"A tactically autonomous, machine-piloted aircraft … will bring new and unmatched
lethality to air-to-air combat," Byrnes writes in Air and Space Power Journal.
In Byrnes' conception, machines have the edge in making the lightning-fast decisions necessary
to win a close-quarters aerial battle. "Humans average 200 to 300 milliseconds to react to simple
stimuli, but machines can select or synthesize and execute maneuvers, making millions of
corrections in that same quarter of a second," he writes. ** presumes we could write
autonomous code to do that ***
Byrnes focuses on famed fighter pilot John Boyd's classic observe-orient-decide-act decision
cycle — the "OODA loop" — which predicts that victory in combat belongs to the warrior who
can assess and respond to conditions fastest.
Like a fighter pilot trying to out-turn his opponent in a dogfight, the trick to OODA is quickly
making the right decisions while your enemy is still trying to figure out what's going on.
It's a battle of wits in which computers are superior, according to Byrnes. "Every step in OODA
that we can do, they will do better."
Isis suicide bombing instructor blows up his
own class by accident
Terrorist commander detonated an explosive belt strapped to himself
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Isis fighters take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province
By Christopher Hooton – 11 August 2014
An Isis commander at a terrorist training camp north of Baghdad accidentally
detonated a belt packed with explosives during a demonstration in front of a
group militants on Monday, killing himself and 21 nearby trainees.
The accident was a source of dark humour for locals, with suicide attacks in public spaces having
become an almost daily occurrence in Iraq.
A bomber struck a falafel shop near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad last week, and
when told of the bungled training demonstration by the New York Times, Raad Hashim,
who works at a liquor store near the site of the bombing, burst out laughing.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/11/tech/innovation/spy-satellites-fighting-crime-from-space/
Spy satellites fighting crime from space
By Kieron Monks
August 12, 2014 -- Updated 0941 GMT (1741 HKT) | Filed under: Innovations
Experts predict advanced satellites will revolutionize crime fighting. British firm SA Catapult supplied technology to
British police investigating a murder case. Pictured, its TechDemoSat-1 satellite celebrates a successful LEOP
(Launch and Early Orbit) phase with a selfie.
satellites
Crime-fighting satellites
Crime-fighting satellites
Crime-fighting satellites
Crime-fighting satellites
Spy satellites
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Police begin to use next generation satellite tech in their investigations
 Until now, imagery had been too crude
 New methods well-suited to monitoring organized crime
Experts fear lack of privacy provision means anyone could spy on anyone
Edge of Discovery highlights awe-inspiring innovations and ideas.
(CNN) -- Months after the murder of Rania Alayed, the search for her body had ground to a halt.
Although her husband -- who had admitted to her killing -- indicated the approximate location where
he buried the body off a highway near Manchester, northern England, police were still left with miles
of open field to dig through.