The Paul G. Allen Foundation announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $5.7 million in grants to five projects that aim to teach machines to understand what they see and read. That can be anything from a photograph to a chart, a diagram to an entire textbook.
A handful of new research projects from Google, IBM and the Allen Institute for AI highlight the ongoing quest to build computer systems capable of analyzing written language based on understanding concepts rather than just keywords.
Researchers from Allen Institute for AI have built a computer system capable of teaching itself many facets of broad concepts by scouring and analyzing search engines using natural language processing and computer vision techniques.
