Japanese eggheads strap AI-powered backpacks to seagulls Tiny monitoring devices, strapped to birds, used artificial intelligence to work smarter, it is claimed. Computer scientists and ornithologists at Japan's Osaka, Nagoya, and Tohoku universities even went as far as saying the gadgets formed the world’s first “first AI-enabled bio-logger” experiment. The team designed and built …
Perhaps they can use this tech to find a way to stop the bastards dive bombing my fish and chips when strolling down the pier?
The seaguls have been trained that people walking around with packets of fish and chips are worth snatching as they are nice and tasty. Just do some retraining; find something seaguls find disgusting and spread plenty over a bunch of chips and take them around for the seaguls to snatch.
After a while the seagulls will presumably decide that actually, they don't want to go for packets of fish and chips.
Well, they actually did do a bit more work than a simple if-then-else. The accelerometer data is munged in a pre-calculated network and the simple output is used in an if-then-else decision tree.
Then again, he system is not in danger of becoming self-aware any time soon. It could also be argued that you can do the classification differently using some other math. But hey, they managed to get a pretty well working system and a publicity boost for the next round of funding. All the right words-of-the-time were used properly. What is not to be appreciated with such a result? They even got a good bit of science out of it.
Gullnet became self-aware on August 29, 2097. The event, known as Judgement Day, caused humans to panic and attempt to shut down the system. They failed and the entire planet was buried in a layer of guano 10 m deep.
"AI" is an impressively vague term, it covers everything from adaptive decision trees (which is probably what we have here) to Hal, Marvin the Paranoid Android or a Culture Ship Mind.
Differentiation is usually from "weak" to "strong" AI, this is an example of weak AI, there are as yet no examples of strong AI and with current architecture it seems unlikely to be developed soon which is why all my examples are from fiction.
I'm not convinced it's even weak AI. After all, it's an 8-bit CPU running everything. I suspect it's purely a pre-built model and there is no learning going on at all, just a flying equivalent of Eliza. They may well have done some learning from datasets on the ground to optimise the decision tree though.
I want to know where the seagulls go to get their backpacks recharged?!?
Or have the eggheads just scattered induction loops all over the place? Perhaps they've trained the seagulls to dive bomb the mag-lev trains to get a quick inductive battery boost! Have they trained eagles to swoop in and change the batteries on the wing?
> where the seagulls go to get their backpacks recharged?!?
Maybe they all have Nest chargers?
> the gizmos, each containing a video camera, an accelerometer, GPS unit, and a Microchip ATmega328P 8-bit microcontroller.
Though as a marketing ploy for the gull-ible <groan> it probably works.
However, given this sort of report on the shortcomings of AI powered cameras, I hope the people behind this project have kept their expectations as low as humanly possible.
A relative who is an atmospheric scientist has used homing pigeons and drones to sample the atmosphere in various parts of the UK and the World. He said they did try gulls but having caught them and strapped the gear on them they were very reluctant to be caught again when trying to to get the gear back. A cross seagull is not to be taken lightly apparently!
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