Google Teaching Its AI How Humans Behave Using YouTube

Google is training its artificial intelligence machines to understand human behavior by using YouTube videos, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

The Mountain View company has pulled more than 57,000 publicly available clips to highlight about 80 human actions like walking, kicking, hugging, and shaking hands. Called AVA, or "atomic visual actions," the videos are three second clips curated from YouTube and sourced from a "variety of genres and countries of origin." Some hail from popular films.

"Despite exciting breakthroughs made over the past years in classifying and finding objects in images, recognizing human actions still remains a big challenge," Alphabet-owned Google wrote in an Oct. 19 blog post. "This is due to the fact that actions are, by nature, less well-defined than objects in videos."

AI is driving huge changes at Google and CEO Sundar Pichai has put artificial intelligence at the forefront of nearly everything the company is doing. Google's new Pixel smartphones draws on Intel technology, and Rolls Royce recently announced a partnership with the site to create smarter, autonomous ships based on AI and machine learning and is the first agreement ever in the marine sector.

Google is also working on creating self-driving cars to language recognition software.

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