AI Can (Sort of) Read Your Mind

One of the most intriguing AI applications we’ve seen in the past week is a new step toward mind-reading AI. Scientists are getting closer to visualizing more sophisticated human thought. In the past, researchers have been able to visualize basic images from recorded brain waves, like black-and-white letters. This new study, however, employs color and recreates more complex pictures. While showing subjects a picture (or simply having them remember a picture), scientists record brain waves and recreate colorful videos from them.

To be transparent, we still think this tech has a ways to go, but there’s no denying that scientists have made a solid step toward visualizing our thoughts. Watch it at work here:

Kitchen Appliances Now Talk to Each Other

LG has created a community of AI appliances that communicate with each other, hopefully making your life easier. The fridge can track food items and their expiration dates, offering you recipes that use those ingredients before they go to waste. Once you pick your recipe—which your appliances will walk you through step-by-step—your fridge will preheat your oven for you. And when the oven’s done cooking your meal, it’ll set your dishwasher to a wash cycle that can handle the foodstuffs coming its way. And let’s not overlook the mundane: these appliances monitor themselves for maintenance issues so you can fix potential problems before they become actual problems.

Watch one minute of this video to see some of what the fridge can do (while you also painfully watch the LG VP of Marketing squirm when his assistant CLOi won’t respond to him).

“Google Search” for Surveillance Video

Say you’re a law enforcement officer who is searching surveillance videos for a suspicious black car. You could watch hundreds of hours of surveillance video, or you could simply use a video search engine called Ella. Ella employs deep learning to easily detect objects and find you every frame that has a black car in it. The impressive thing here is that you can use normal search language, like you would in Google search, to find important footage quickly.

A Nod to CES

If you’re not in the know, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a huge annual trade show where lots of companies showcase their latest tech. We couldn’t send out this week’s newsletter without more of a nod to CES 2018, which is going on right now in Las Vegas. AI is all over this gathering, and here are some applications that caught our attention: