Andrew Ng,32

摘要

Housekeeping robots are still the stuffof science fiction, but not for want of hardware: there's almost no task too precise or delicate for a robot that knows in advance what it's supposed to do. The problem lies in teaching robots to deal with the unknown. That's precisely what Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, set out to do when he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project a few years ago. Previous robots have had some ability to improvise-many could locate familiar objects in unfamiliar environments, for example. But Ng has gone a step further: STAIR can deduce how to pick up an object it's never seen before. Using traditional machine-learning techniques, Ng trained STAIR on a database of pictures of objects such as wine glasses, coffee mugs, and pencils, as seen from different perspectives.