Talking Robots and Psychedelic Drugs

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher — tech — 15 June 2012 — New Scientist

I’m always glad to see more methods from research in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning getting coverage in the media and being explained with some level of detail. Take a look at these two articles on applications of Artificial Intellgience methods in the study of the learning language in infants and in the effects of psychedelic drugs diagnosis. They give a nice high level overview of two powerful approaches that are not quite standard in AI and Machine Learning. The language learning robot is doing supervised learning with reinforcement learning approach where the agent randomly explores a landscape and weights good experiences to improve it’s model. The drugs study is applying a classifier to text descriptions about psychedelic trips and trying to predict the drug that causes it.