An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning — the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI — or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action.

“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends — that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” Jordan should know the difference, after all. The IEEE Fellow is one of the world’s leading authorities on machine learning. In 2016 he was ranked as the most influential computer scientist by a program that analyzed research publications, Science reported. Jordan helped transform unsupervised machine learning, which can find structure in data without preexisting labels, from a collection of unrelated algorithms to an intellectually coherent field, the Engineering and Technology History Wiki explains. Unsupervised learning plays an important role in scientific applications where there is an absence of established theory that can provide labeled training data.

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Source: Slashdot – Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

Apple said Wednesday that it will build a battery-based renewable energy storage facility in Central California near a solar energy installation that already provides energy for all of its facilities in the state. From a report: Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. It is located next to the California Flats solar installation in southeastern Monterey County, about 100 miles southeast of Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters. The site sends 130-megawatts of electricity directly to Apple’s California facilities during daylight hours but does not provide power during dark hours. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, told Reuters in an interview the company intends to develop what it believes will be one of the largest battery-based storage systems in the United States.

“The challenge with clean energy — solar and wind — is that it’s by definition intermittent,” Jackson told Reuters. “If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It’s something that can be imitated or built upon by other companies.”

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Source: Slashdot – Apple To Build Battery-Based Solar Energy Storage Project in Monterey County