Simple, accurate, and efficient: Improving the way computers recognize hand gestures
In the 2002 science fiction blockbuster film Minority Report, Tom Cruise's character John Anderton uses his hands, sheathed in special gloves, to interface with his wall-sized transparent computer screen. The computer recognizes his gestures to enlarge, zoom in, and swipe away. Although this futuristic vision for computer-human interaction is now 20 years old, today's humans still interface with computers by using a mouse, keyboard, remote control, or small touch screen. However, much effort has been devoted by researchers to unlock more natural forms of communication without requiring contact between the user and the device. Voice commands are a prominent example that have found their way into modern smartphones and virtual assistants, letting us interact and control devices through speech
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Decades ago, when imagining the practical uses of artificial intelligence, science fiction writers imagined autonomous digital minds that could serve humanity. Sure, sometimes a HAL 9000 or WOPR would subvert expectations and go rogue, but that was very much unintentional, right?
And for many aspects of life, artificial intelligence is delivering on its promise. AI is, as we speak, looking for evidence of life on Mars. Scientists are using AI to try to develop more accurate and faster ways to predict the weather.
But when it comes to policing, the actuality of the situation is much less optimistic. Our HAL 9000 does not assert its own decisions on the world—instead, programs which claim to use AI for policing just reaffirm, justify, and legitimize the opinions and actions already being undertaken by police departments.
Read MoreMicrosoft is on a quest for AI at Scale with high ambition to enable the next generation of AI experiences. The Microsoft Translator ZCode team is working together with Microsoft Project Turing and Microsoft Research Asia to advance language and multilingual support at the core of this initiative. We continue to push frontiers with Multilingual models to support various language scenarios across Microsoft. Last summer, we announced our large scale Multi-Lingual Mixture of Expert model with DeepSpeed that can outperform individual large scale bi-lingual models. Recently, the latest Turing universal language representation model (T-ULRv5), a Microsoft-created model is once again the state of the art and at the top of the Google XTREME public leaderboard at that time. More recently, Microsoft announced the largest Megatron-Turing NLG 530B parameters model.
The annual Conference on Machine Translation (aka WMT 2021) concluded last week in beautiful Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
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