As seen on TV

Original post:  Oct 1, 2015

Star Trek first aired in the 1960s. It presented a futuristic view of life in the 23rd century. Humans are exploring the galaxy in starships. In the show, computers are almost alive. The interface is not a keyboard. It's speech!

The latest version of the iPhone now has a new, improved Siri. You can actually address your virtual assistant from a distance of about five feet. This review from the NY Times, explains the evolution:

As David Pierce wrote recently in Wired, voice recognition and artificial intelligence are getting so good so quickly that it isn’t really a stretch to imagine that talking to computers will soon become one of the signature ways we interact with them. The new Siri is paving the way to what you might call “ambient computing” — a future in which robotic assistants are always on hand to answer questions, take notes, take orders or otherwise function as auxiliary brains to whom you might offload many of your chores.

Picture the “Star Trek” computer, but instead of powering a starship, it’s turning off the basement lights, finding you a good movie on Netflix and, after listening in on a fight between you and your spouse, reminding you to buy flowers the next day. It will be slightly creepy and completely helpful — and it’s coming faster than you think.

All of these improvements are changing the way that we interface with our digital assistants:

The ubiquity of voice-controlled assistants changes the way we interact with them. When Siri and other voice systems were new, they seemed gimmicky. Nobody quite knew what to do with them, and interactions veered toward the awkward. But the more assistants there are, and the more you use them, the more natural they feel — and that means the more you’ll use them, feeding the cycle.

Ironically, the Star Trek computer is not just fantasy. It is actually becoming a design goal!

In fact, for years now, Google’s top search engineers have been describing the “Star Trek” computer as their vision of the future of search.

“The ‘Star Trek’ computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s search team, once told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build — the ideal version done realistically.”

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/technology/personaltech/iphone-6s-hands-free-siri-is-an-omen-of-the-future.html?_r=0

Have you talked to your computer lately?

Original post:  Sep 3, 2015

Many new smartphones come equipped with a digital assistant. My wife is constantly talking to Siri. I don't have an Android, but I believe there is something similar with Cortana. I am sure there are others on the horizon. Each new improvement makes it easier for us to locate information that once required laborious searches through labyrinths of card catalogs and dusty shelves.

This article in Wired talks about how computers might actually be changing the way we describe the world about us: 

How Computers Are Changing the Way We Explain the World | WIRED

The example they give is in language translation. The first attempts at programming computers to perform this complex task involved a simple substitution. They would replace nouns with nouns and verbs with verbs (and so on). In the 1980's, a team working on an early version of IBM's Watson (the famous computer that defeated humans at Jeopardy!) came up with a new approach. They decided to use a statistical model:

They did this in a clever way. They got hold of a copy of the transcripts of the Canadian parliament from a collection known as Hansard. By Canadian law, Hansard is available in both English and French. They then used a computer to compare corresponding English and French text and spot relationships.

For instance, the computer might notice that sentences containing the French word bonjour tend to contain the English wordhello in about the same position in the sentence. The computer didn’t know anything about either word—it started without a conventional grammar or dictionary. But it didn’t need those. Instead, it could use pure brute force to spot the correspondence between bonjour and hello.

By making such comparisons, the program built up a statistical model of how French and English sentences correspond. That model matched words and phrases in French to words and phrases in English. More precisely, the computer used Hansard to estimate the probability that an English word or phrase will be in a sentence, given that a particular French word or phrase is in the corresponding translation. It also used Hansard to estimate probabilities for the way words and phrases are shuffled around within translated sentences.

Using this statistical model, the computer could take a new French sentence—one it had never seen before—and figure out the most likely corresponding English sentence. And that would be the program’s translation.

Their model proved successful. Google Translate uses this very method to perform its magic!

Language is not the only area where computers are pioneering:

Related stories are playing out across science, not just in linguistics. In mathematics, for example, it is becoming more and more common for problems to be settled using computer-generated proofs. An early example occurred in 1976, when Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken proved the four-color theorem, the conjecture that every map can be colored using four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Their computer proof was greeted with controversy. It was too long for a human being to check, much less understand in detail. Some mathematicians objected that the theorem couldn’t be considered truly proved until there was a proof that human beings could understand.

As computers grow more and more powerful, it will be fascinating to watch how they literally begin to change the way we experience the world around us. I am sure that healthcare will be no different than the world at large!