Cognitive Computing refers to individual technologies that augment human intelligence to perform specific tasks. Rather than being explicitly programmed, these systems learn and reason from their interactions with human beings and their experiences with their environment. In this blog we are exploring technology that can sense and comprehend
Computer Vision
The Ai technology that is trained from images and video data to augment human vision. The goal would be to interpret, classify and understand the objects in an environment just like human sight can figure out objects apart, how far away they are, whether they are moving and whether there is something wrong in an image. With massive amount of data of visual information flowing from smartphones, security systems, traffic cameras and other visually instrumented devices this technology has matured to offer pre-build models that could be transformative if implemented with correct guidelines. Some examples would be as below
Classification of images - sees an image and can classify accurately that a given image belongs to a certain class. (cat or dog or person face). Some examples from day to day would be from automotive industry where this technology is embedded to detect / predict Lane tracking , vehicle detection and number plate recognition
Object detection can use image classification to identify a certain class of image and then detect. Example use case would be the use of smart cameras in a factory assembly line to perform quality visual inspection on the products manufactured.
Object tracking follows or tracks an object once it is detected. This task is often executed with images captured in sequence or real-time video feeds. Example would be to leverage the footfall of consumer in a store and to improve store layout and drive promotion by customer behavior analytics
In season 1 When Sheldon gets sick, Leonard, along with Howard and Raj , quickly escapes from his grasp, leaving Penny to take care of the very needy Sheldon. When Leonard realize that he need to pick his pair of specs from the apartment, Howard and Raj use a Bluetooth camera mounted on Leonard's head and a wireless headset in his ear to help blind Leonard navigate while sneaking into the apartment, as well as a detector to let them know if/when Sheldon appears with footsteps
Speech Synthesis / Text to Speech
This technology augments the speaking capacity that we humans have to express our thoughts. Speech Synthesis convert text into natural-sounding speech. The technology are used in a variety of ways, including as an assistive technology for people with learning difficulties, audiobooks, and much more.
In season 2, Sheldon goes to Penny's apartment to get some herbal tea and honey from Penny using a voice generating software as he is still convinced he shouldn't talk due to his pretend inflamed larynx
Speech to Text
This is just reverse of Text to Speech. The technology enables conversion of speech into text. Example would be Voice command or speech translation where the input to the technology is speech .
In season 6, While Sheldon and Leonard are playing giant Jenga, Alex stops by to pick up last night's tapes of his talking in his sleep|nighttime mumbling. Sheldon explains that he feels that what he says in his sleep might be as important to him as what he says in the daytime. So he asks his assistant Alex to go through recording and document the notes
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is aligning empathy / personal feeling to information we are observing also referred as Linguistic. In simple terms its practice of understanding how people organize their thinking, feeling, language and behavior. Natural language processing works by taking unstructured data and converting it into a structured data format by entity recognition, patterns / structure of the words. Natural language understanding (NLU), and natural language generation (NLG) are subset of NLP. NLU is a subset of natural language processing, which uses syntactic (grammatical structure) and semantic analysis (intended) of text and speech to determine the meaning of a sentence . NLG is the process of producing a human language text response based on some data input.
The most popular use case is Alexa or google assist or Siri where a user interact with a voice assistance to perform a task.
In season 10, Amy lies to Sheldon about her apartment repairs, he asks Leonard in Klingon _if he thinks Penny is aware of the situation and was lying. Amy then asks Penny in her secret language _Ubbi-Dubbi whether she thinks that Leonard knows the truth and has informed Sheldon as well. This is NLU and NLG as both group communicate in non-English speech.
Robotics
Robots are artificial agents acting in a real-world environment to produce results by taking accountable actions. They are good in performing specific tasks. Combining with the sensory capability that AI technology can provide, robotics augment physical work or execution of simple narrow tasks. Example would be Roomba autonomous vacuum that is used at home. It navigates around clutter and under furniture cleaning your floors, and returns to its charging dock when finished.
In season 4, Howard demonstrates how his 'recently borrowed' robotic arm from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could be programmed to unpack guys dinner
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