How to Engineer Intelligence

From ACM TechNews:
How to Engineer Intelligence
University of Cambridge
(03/19/12)

University College London academic David Barber says the biological inspiration for computing can help humans interact with machines. Barber says the challenge is getting computers to process information in ways that would enable more natural interaction with humans. "There are already research programs that attempt to gauge the emotion in someone's voice or face but I'm more interested in a machine that could recognize the emotional significance of an event for a human," he says. Although these types of machines might never look like the robots seen in movies, Barber says the challenge is to build machines that are able to understand what people say in the pure semantic sense as well as in an emotional sense. Such a machine would need to grasp what it really means to be human, so a fundamental challenge would be to create a large database of information about humans and the human world. He says the initial step to reverse-engineer intelligence might be to understand the theoretical aspects of information processing in the brain, which could enable researchers to study how an artificial brain would be able to process or store information in the same way.

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http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-to-engineer-intelligence/