DARPA Wants To Build 'Contextual' AI That Understands the World

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, is one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at a VentureBeat summit. From the report: One area of study is so-called 'common sense' AI -- AI that can draw on environmental cues and an understanding of the world to reason like a human. Concretely, DARPA's Machine Common Sense Program seeks to design computational models that mimic core domains of cognition: objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). 'You could develop a classifier that could identify a number of objects in an image, but if you ask a question, you're not going to get an answer,' Pierce said. 'We'd like to get away from having an enormous amount of data to train neural networks [and] get away with using fewer labels [to] train models.' The agency's also pursuing explainable AI (XAI), a field which aims to develop next-generation machine learning techniques that explain a given system's rationale. '[It] helps you to understand the bounds of the system, which can better inform the human user,' Pierce said.

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