FEATURE26 September 2016

Rise of the machines

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An artificial intelligence system is learning to predict behaviour based on information from first-person video footage. Bronwen Morgan reports

Pov

session at this year’s Market Research Society (MRS) Annual Conference explored the likelihood of the industry’s ‘curious minds’ being replaced by ‘curious computers’. In other words: what impact is artificial intelligence likely to have on market research? 

According to a show of hands, half of the session attendees didn’t believe that their job would eventually be taken by a computer, a third were unsure, but the remaining (about 18%) did think that there was a chance that they could become ‘professionally obsolete’. 

It would be interesting to know how many of those voting had heard of the EgoNet project, a predictive network model that has demonstrated the ability to predict which objects a person might be interested in, based on a database of annotated video footage. 

EgoNet is the brainchild of Gedas Bertasius, a PhD student in the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, US. In EgoNet’s initial development, two students at ...