AI Agent to Aid in Search-and-Rescue.

• Position: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

An artificial intelligence agent has been taught by computer scientists at the University of Texas, Austin, how to do something that usually only humans can do--take a few quick glimpses around and infer its entire environment, a skill necessary for the development of search-and-rescue robots that one day can improve the effectiveness of dangerous missions.

Most AI agents--computer systems that could endow robots or other machines with intelligence--are trained for very specific tasks, such as to recognize an object or estimate its volume, in an environment they have experienced before, like a factory. However, this new agent is general purpose, gathering visual information that then can be used for a wide range of tasks.

"We want an agent that's generally equipped to enter environments and be ready for new perception tasks as they arise," says Kristen Grauman, professor of computer science. "It behaves in a way that's versatile and able to succeed at different tasks because it has learned useful patterns about the visual world."

The scientists used deep learning, a type of machine learning inspired by the brain's neural networks, to train their...