Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Working in artificial intelligence for decades, Alexei Efros, a computer scientist at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, suddenly finds himself in a world where his once-niche field has become an increasingly pronounced part of everyday life for millions. The fruits of his breakthroughs in computer ‘vision’ can be found in smartphones, photo-editing technology, self-driving cars and more. In this documentary profile from Quanta Magazine, Efros gives a brief history of computer vision for AI from the 1960s to today, details how his poor eyesight proved advantageous in his work and explains why there’s much more to machine learning than building an algorithm. He also discusses how, in his lab, he and the next generation of researchers are working to address pressing problems in contemporary AI, such as human bias.
Video by Quanta Magazine
video
Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
video
Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
video
Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes
video
Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
video
Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
video
Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes
video
Politics and government
How it looked to Afghan women to see the Taliban return to power
33 minutes