New AI programming language goes beyond deep learning

In a paper presented at the Programming Language Design and Implementation conference this week, the researchers describe a novel probabilistic-programming system named “Gen.” Users write models and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied — such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics — without having to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code. In their paper, for instance, the researchers demonstrate that a short Gen program can infer 3-D body poses, a difficult computer-vision inference task that has applications in autonomous systems, human-machine interactions, and augmented reality. “Gen is the first system that’s flexible, automated, and efficient enough to cover those very different types of examples in computer vision and data science and give state of-the-art performance,” says Vikash K. Mansinghka ’05, MEng ’09, PhD ’09, a researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences who runs the Probabilistic Computing Project.

Source: news.mit.edu