Common Sense - Project Alexandria

See my tag links below on our past looks at common sense based reasoning. Ultimately essential to get us to machine intelligence. 

Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense

Project Alexandria   By Cade Metz in The New York Times

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen on Wednesday announced he would pour another $125 million into the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to fund a project to teach computers common sense. He notes the additional funding should help to underwrite existing research as well as the common sense initiative, called Project Alexandria. Artificial intelligence (AI) "recognizes objects, but can't explain what it sees," says Allen Institute CEO Oren Etzioni. "It can't read a textbook and understand the questions in the back of the book." The Allen Institute wants to compile a database of fundamental knowledge that humans take for granted but which machines have always lacked, which will be fed into efforts such as Project Alexandria. "To make real progress in AI, we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense,” Allen contends. .... 

Common sense is the everyday knowledge   that virtually every person has but no machine does.

More on AI2:

AI2 was founded in 2014 with the singular focus of conducting high-impact research and engineering in the field of artificial intelligence, all for the common good. AI2 is the creation of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, and is led by Dr. Oren Etzioni, a world-renowned researcher and professor in the field of AI and computer science.

Situated on the shores of Lake Union, AI2 employs over 60 of the world’s best scientific talent in the field of AI, attracting individuals of varied interests and backgrounds from across the globe. AI2 prides itself on the diversity and collaboration of its team, and takes a results-oriented approach to complex challenges in AI.

AI2 has undertaken four main projects, Aristo, Semantic Scholar, Euclid and Plato to drive fundamental advances in science and medicine through AI. Meet our team, review our projects, and see our advisors and collaborators.

Based on these project efforts:

Alexandria,  Common Sense Knowledge and Reasoning
Aristo, Machine Reading and Reasoning
Semantic Scholar, AI-Based Search
Euclid, Natural Language Understanding
Plato, Computer Vision
AllenNLP,  Deep Semantic NLP Platform
Incubator,   Launching AI Powered Startups