So what if my laptop can multiply 999999 with 999999, it still can’t recognize me with an eye patch on. Stupid computer thinks he’s so smart. Well, this and many more limitations of computers need to be corrected if the dreams of AI are to be realized in totality.
Some good fellas are looking to harness the specialized computing power in the human brain to enhance computer’s ability to perform varied tasks, like recognizing me with an eye patch on. This human ability is often subconscious and tapping it would make computers adept at doing never before achieved tasks.
Desney Tan (trusted researcher at Microsoft Research) and Pradeep Shenoy (graduate student at the University of Washington) are trying to use human mind for computer’s good (now that’s something you don’t hear often, usually its the other way around.) These two good people have developed a method to collect brain activity of people as they look at different pictures of human faces and other things like cars, animals, and sceneries. 
Human’s brain activity is collected by EEG caps (electro-encephalograph caps.)
Their Research
It has already been mentioned that brain’s ability to identify faces is specialized though subconscious more than often. The duo’s findings confirm this. The two have found that even if the subject’s aim isn’t to distinguish between a face and a non-face, still his brain subconsciously spots the same.
Having established this finding, the two then wrote specific programs to analyze EEG data and help a computer discriminate a face from a non-face. Using EEG data of a single person who had viewed a picture once, the system managed 72.5 per cent accuracy. As if that wasn’t a good result in itself, the accuracy jumped to a whopping 98 per cent, when data from eight people who had viewed an image twice was used.
Tan has acknowledged that their research is only an initial stepping-stone to search for ‘Human-aided computing’ applications in real life. One of these uses could be in scanning images from a surveillance cam, to generate frames that only contain faces and eliminate those that do not.
But...
As with any field of research, this one too is fraught with some ethical considerations. Desney tan states:
There are a bunch of ethical considerations before any of this can be taken to the mass market.
For one he states, wouldn’t it be distracting for a person to have images flash in his peripheral vision. Ethical issues aside, one would be inclined to think that this represents a major breakthrough and has some serious applications in store.
Humans’ brainpower being used for computers’ good; I guess, the wheel has come full circle. Either way, it is one-step closer to a Terminator-like scenario.
P.S.: Image on the top isn’t me.
