Google buys up all scientists…
Google is slaving scientists who fought for an intelligent world. The scientists who worked all their lives for intelligent life, singularity are cashed by Google. The same scientists like Kurzweil and Norvig still claim they work to realize an intelligent life on the world. In reality, Google can can put the IBM Watson program on LarKC Large Knowledge Collider Platform and serve it to global internet users. So everybody can get superfast super intelligent answers on the internet. Watson won the jeopardy quiz show on tv against champions like Ken and Brad. It is so easy for Google, IBM, Facebook, and the like. They do not want to lose their profits and power position. They are all happy. Google and Kurzweil establish Singularity University. Google and Kurzweil are sponsoring Artificial Intelligence conferences to muzzle the scientific community. Mankind is losing with ignorance, wars, poverty, diseases, all evils. It is still possible to build a Watson program for internet users. I am seeking partners to realize this project. I am sure people interested in this project, would like to know about me. I am also looking for funding to make a documentary movie about my life. I fought against human rights abuses and persecution by military regime and Foreign Ministry of Turkey. There are so many documents, press news and television shows in Turkey. I want to make a documentary for human rights struggle and show it in the film festivals so people know that we must build a an internet Watson and be partner for this project. I put some info here. More info at: watson4president.wordpress.com
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100,000+ Sign Up For Stanford’s Open Class on Artificial Intelligence. Classes With 1 Million+ Next?
by Aaron Saenz August 18th, 2011 | Comments (12)
A groundbreaking change has struck academia, and its reverberations may be felt for years to come. One of Stanford’s first full courses to ever be openly made available online has gone viral. In a matter of weeks it has signed up more than 100,000 students from around the world! Even as I wrote this article, another 5000 joined! As news of the course continues to spread, the ultimate size of the class could reach greater epic proportions – we could easily see interest skyrocket to 200,000 or even 300,000 or more. Classes of 1 million or tens of millions may be in our future. If Stanford can succeed in teaching classes of 100k+ students at a time, what will it mean for education in general?
The secret to professors and teaching staff handling such an unheard of number of attendees lies in the subject of the class itself: artificial intelligence. This fall, Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun will offer their ever popular Introduction to AI for free on the internet. Norvig and Thrun, leaders in artificial intelligence, will be using automated systems to help them at every level of the massive endeavor, from deciding which questions to answer to grading final exams. Anyone can sign up, watch lectures, have their homework graded, and take the exams. Everyone who passes will receive a certificate verifying their completion of the course and marking how they ranked compared to others in the class, including the Stanford students who’ll be attending in person. Check out the videos from Norvig and Thrun below to see what the course will be all about.
Attracting 100,000+ students from all over the globe is no simple matter. It helps when the professors are some of the biggest names in the field. Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google, the former senior computer scientist at NASA and literally wrote the textbook on AI (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, with co-author Stuart Russell). Sebastian Thrun is one of the most brilliant minds in AI and robotics, heading the Stanford team that won the DARPA challenge in 2005, and is the leading force behind Google’s Automated Car, which recently drove more than 140,000 miles without human assistance. These two men are giants in their fields, and their Introduction to AI class at Stanford has rightfully attracted large crowds in the past – 200 students or so.
For their inaugural online edition of the course they want 200,000.
Here’s Thrun pitching the course in the first announcement video released mid-July. I’ve included a more recent update released four days ago when they had just 56,000 students enrolled! Yes, nearly 50,000 more students joined in less than a work week.
If Norvig and Thrun’s expertise makes signing up for this course enticing, it’s also the only thing that makes actually teaching the course possible. There’s simply no way two human beings (or even twenty if you gave them a large staff of assistants) could manage 100,000+ students. Instead, a company founded by Thrun, Know Labs, will help automate every stage of the class. Questions will be submitted and then ranked to see which will be answered in class. Exercises will be available to help teach concepts online. Homework will be submitted and likely graded via AI systems. So too, for the midterm and final exams. It’s a class that teaches artificial intelligence and then uses artificial intelligence to measure how well it is teaching. Recursively brilliant. Norvig describes the mechanics of the class in slightly greater detail in the following video:
The online launch of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence has garnered attention from major media sources like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and has lit the blogosphere afire with enthusiasm and anticipation. Yet, what’s often lost in the coverage is the precedent for this success. In 2008, Andrew Ng, the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab started offering videos for his Introduction to Machine Learning on YouTube, regularly garnering 200,000+ views. This outreach was part of a larger “Stanford Engineering Everywhere ” effort which has racked up more than a total 1 million viewers of its course materials online. Ng’s Introduction to Machine Learning will also be available as an online class this fall, along with Introduction to Databases, taught by Jennifer Widom (chair of Stanford’s Comp. Sci. Department). Catch Ng’s pitch for his class, featuring some excellent examples of robot applications for machine learning, in the video below:
A sample of Ng’s lectures can be found here on YouTube.
Introduction to Machine Learning and Introduction to Databases have attracted 20,000+ students on their own. While that’s not nearly the same crowd as Thrun and Norvig’s, these classes demonstrate that the Introduction to AI online course isn’t some isolated phenomenon. It’s a careful step towards a bigger goal – one that extends even beyond Stanford. As they explained to the New York Times, Thrun and Norvig were inspired by efforts like those of Salman Kahn, whose Khan Academy has expanded from a few rudimentary YouTube videos on math made for his cousins, to an extensive library of 2400+ videos, and 125+ exercises available free to everyone. The Khan Academy demonstrates how video lectures can revolutionize the classroom, inverting the way we teach. Students watch and learn at home, they practice at school. Now, a world class university is bringing the same level of innovation to higher education, showing us that online distribution and automated systems can bring college-level courses to anyone with a steady internet connection. A class of 100,000 or even 200,000 isn’t impossible – it’s inspiring.
If it’s as real as we think it is. The running total on the Intro to AI web page (which currently reads around 102k) is just for those students who sign up to register. It can’t predict how many students will decide to ultimately attend virtual classes and participate in homework. Even if everyone who signs up attends, one has to wonder about the attrition rates over the duration of the course. Even Stanford students regularly drop courses, will virtual students who hit the wall half way through the class have the drive (or community support) to tough it out? It could be that a large chunk of the 100,000+ attendees will leave or fail.
But what if they don’t? What happens then? What open enrollment courses like Introduction to AI are moving us towards isn’t exactly clear. Of the 100,000+ students who will take Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course, only Stanford students will receive college credit. Non Stanford students will receive a certificate which, while ranking their work and asserting their completion of the course, is unlikely to serve as a boost to their credentials. Or perhaps it will, if you were hiring someone, would you be more impressed with their degree from Podunk University in the middle of nowhere if they also had a certified success with luminaries like Thrun and Norvig? If so, Stanford University may be devaluing their product, so to speak. Or rather, changing it.
Highly selective universities like Stanford owe a large part of the eventual success of their students to how rigorously they were filtered before they ever even took a class their freshmen year. If hundreds of thousands of people apply, taking the top 5% virtually guarantees you’ll have some of the brightest minds available. On top of that great beginning, Stanford adds exemplary courses, first hand interactions with professors, and all the other benefits of attending a university in person.
World class education for the masses. It’s here, and it’s only going to get bigger.
Free online courses like Introduction to AI can’t compete with Stanford’s selectivity, but then again, they don’t want to. Open education simply attempts to bring the same exemplary courses, and the closest thing to first-hand interaction they can find, to everyone who wants it. Such a system will probably never replace the highest echelons of advanced education, but it may make a life-changing difference to those around the world who never had a chance of attending those upper echelons. Poverty, regionalism, and language – how many great minds are lost to these barriers every year? Cheap internet access is expanding to every corner of the globe through mobile devices. Text for all three of Stanford’s pioneering courses are being translated. So too are programs like the Khan Academy. It’s only a matter of time, I think, before online education conquers these great barriers and opens university course work (classes in artificial intelligence no less!) to the world.
In the near term, expect to see more universities joining this bandwagon. Many already place lectures online, and using AI to facilitate actual graded coursework seems like a logical next step. Private companies are likely to get in on the action, too. “Celebrity Lectures” or something of that kind would undoubtedly be very popular (does TED ring a bell?). This won’t be isolated to the US, organizations from all over the world have potential here. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Indian Institute of Technology has been offering an introductary AI course on YouTube since 2008. These types of classes are going to get bigger. If enrollment is allowed to continue, I’ve no doubt that Thrun and Norvig’s Intro to AI will keep rocketing towards 200,000 students (the count went up by 2000 just while I was writing this article). Powered by online videos and automated grading systems, there’s no reason why these kinds of classes couldn’t reach 1 Million or even 10 Million students at a time! This is a very exciting point in the development of digital education. Major educators at major institutions are seeing the potential in opening their doors. Success now can fuel this trend to keep growing until determination and time are the only barriers to education left.
[image credit: BigCats Lair via Wikicommons (modified), Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Stanford)]
[sources: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Stanford)]
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Singularity University About To Graduate Its Third Year of Summer Students
by Aaron Saenz August 22nd, 2011 | Comments (0)
Singularity University puts real world change in the hands of its students.
What would you get if you combined the Justice League with business school? Singularity University. The startup university, located at NASA Ames smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley, is now finishing its third Graduate Summer Program (GSP), with a new flock of students ready for launch. While many educators talk about their students changing the world, Singularity University takes the idea quite literally. They inform, train, and push their students to improve the lives of billions of people through the careful leverage of accelerating technology. Whether they end up with a for-profit enterprise or an NGO, Singularity University GSP attendees spend months learning how exponential trends are shaping our world, and then form groups around different tactics for harnessing those trends to benefit humanity. It’s an exciting school, and an exciting group of students, and I can’t wait to see their presentations and graduation at their upcoming closing ceremony on August 26th. Until then, here’s a video of the faculty and GSP class of 2011 discussing the power and importance of Singularity University. Oh SU, you work so hard to present yourselves well, but this clip doesn’t come close to doing your students justice. Not by a long shot.
Singularity University was founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, it has a stellar faculty including Dan Barry, Vint Cerf, and Ralph Merkle, and brings students on one of a kind site visits to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley: Google, Cisco, Autodesk, Kicklabs, Zynga, Willow Garage, etc. Yet for all the setup, it’s the students that really make SU so promising. Those young(ish) faces you see starting around 1:28 that don’t say much are members of GSP ’11. This year’s class is 80 students selected from 2200 applicants, representing 11+ nations and a huge range of demographics. They have advanced degrees, they’ve built businesses, they’ve survived wars, and they are looking to reshape the world. We’ve seen plenty of killer ideas come from the last two Graduate Studies Programs, and even a few killer companies. I’m sure that this year’s crop of students are going to keep up the proud tradition.
So take some unsolicited advice, Singularity University. Give your faculty a break, and let your students speak their minds. It’ll make for better videos, and it will give the world a taste of the change GSP ’11 hopes to serve.
[image and video credit: Singularity University]
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Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. Nevertheless, proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an “intelligence explosion”, wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes for the singularity. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and widely expected by proponents to occur in the early to mid twenty first century.
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2045 Deadline – inspired by Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge.
2045 is an excellent target to aim for.
► Progress in the year 2010 showed how the Singularity should happen by 2045 at the latest.
Our expectations shape the future therefore we must expect utopia by 2045. The Singularity could happen earlier than 2045. Setting a 2045 deadline avoids being disappointed with over-optimistic forecasts. Predictions are tricky because we can’t be sure what will happen until after the event, therefore 2045 is our deadline because it’s almost certain the Singularity will happen by 2045 at the latest. Focusing our attention on 2045 makes 2045 an extremely likely year for Singularity-completion but the future could easily change. Actions in the present change the future. Our awareness will ensure the Singularity happens no later than 2045. Increased awareness regarding the year 2045 guarantees intensified effort in Singularity-related-professions thereby bringing the date of the Singularity forward. Hopefully the Singularity will happen sooner than our 2045-deadline. Concentration of our awareness in the present guarantees the future we desire. 2045 is our deadline-target for the Singularity. We have the power to create utopia.
In 2008 Vernor Vinge predicted a 2030 deadline for the Singularity. Vernor’s early 2030-Singularity could be correct, but to avoid disappointment our target is 2045. Watch the video of Vernor’s prediction here: http://singinst.org/media/interviews/vernorvinge. The Singularity will not be a short-lived explosion. The explosion could easily last 30 years. If the Singularity begins in 2030 we should be at peak explosiveness by 2045. The explosion begins with Post-Scarcity and immortality. The explosion ends with infinite strangeness. 2045 could mark the beginning of the explosion or it could mark the midpoint in the explosion where the explosion is becoming extremely powerful. 2045 is a brilliant target regarding a time when the Singularity is happening. Previous overoptimistic predictions for futuristic breakthroughs motivate us to aim for a 2045 deadline, a very safe and sure date.
Vernor Vinge: “I’d personally be surprised if it hadn’t happened by 2030.”
In 1965 Irving John Good made premature speculations about the creation of the first ultra-intelligent machine. Irving John Good expected an “intelligence explosion” to occur in the 20th century but Good’s forecast was over-optimistic. Over-optimistic predictions can occur due to the forecaster’s bias therefore our deadline of 2045 avoids any anticlimax. Some forecasters want futuristic progress to happen sooner instead of later, therefore their desires skew their predictions. Data presented in Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near” offers strong evidence for the Singularity happening by 2045 at the latest. Ray’s book was a key inspiration for our 2045 deadline, but the evidence in Ray’s book is NOT essential for comprehending why 2045 is the most likely deadline for the Singularity. For example: Tiny 9 nanometer circuits for advanced microchips were created in 2010.
By looking at the accelerating world around us we can see the quick evolution of the internet, or we can imagine how smart-phones could evolve into human-level-AI, or we can look at stem-cell research. Many scientific marvels were already evident in the year 2010. In December 2010 E. coli bacteria were reprogrammed to create molecular-circuitry for tiny biological-computers; this research at University of California San Francisco created bacterial “logic gates” via bio-rewiring the communication between cells. See also DNA logic gates and yeast biocomputers. It is easy to imagine a technological utopia occurring by 2045 or earlier. In 2005 Kurzweil gave a marvellous forecast of super-intelligence occurring in 2045, one billion times more powerful than our entire human intelligence in 2005. Computing power will inevitably explode. The year 2045 is an excellent utopian target to aim for.
In November 2010 IBM announced plans to build supercomputers the size of sugar cubes by 2025 or earlier. In March 2011 IBM updated its sugar-cube-statement, IBM stated the sugar-cube-supercomputers would operate at minimum speeds of 1 quintillion (exa) FLOPS, and the expected completion year would be 2021. When powerful sugar cube supercomputers are combined with the latest version of Robot Adam or Watson we will then be starting to progress very rapidly.
Ray Kurzweil: “I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.” http://singularity.com/qanda.html
▼ The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence
Mountain View, California, USA – August 3-6 (Weds-Sat) 2011
Sponsors
We greatly appreciate our major sponsors:
Google Inc
Google’s search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day, and its targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world.
AAAI
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.
KurzweilAI
KurzweilAI.net, founded by Ray Kurzweil, is a website devoted towards showcasing news of scientific developments, publicizing the ideas of high-tech thinkers and critics alike, and promoting futurist-related discussion among the general population through the Mind-X forum.
The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence
Google Inc. 1300 Crittenden Ln. Mountain View, CA 94043
August 3-6 (Wed-Sat) 2011
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