VMX PROJECT: VISUAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR THE MASSES

Imagine going into the kitchen at six in the morning, on a bleary Monday, and plodding heavy steps over to your trusty coffeemaker and having the Keurig see you enter its line of sight, recognize you, and ask, “Would you like coffee, Dave?”

“Yes, damn it, I’m standing in front of you because I want coffee,” says Dave.

And then the machine-turned-robot (via its software) acts and pours you a cup of caffeinated deliciousness.

This is not science fiction, folks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming to the masses.

You can now turn yourself into a roboticist with a revolutionary web-based program, the VMX Project, that allows practically anyone to access and utilize a way to teach your own computer and programs to see, recognize, and act (with the help of VMX AI).

The goal: anyone that is online with a computer, webcam, and an Internet browser can train and use their VMX Computer Vision API to get their programs to learn how to recognize, think and make use of objects that they see through a camera.

VMX has been over ten years in the making, and with a month left on the Kickstarter campaign, nearly a quarter of the $100K in funds have been acquired to launch the innovative project.

The founders of VMX and Vision.ai, Lead Developer Geoff Golder and Computer Vision Scientist Dr. Tomasz Malisiewicz, want to take the intuitive tools that they have created and give them to the masses (as opposed to selling them to Skynet and awaiting Judgment Day, Terminator-style).

Let the people – not just the wealthy or the science communities of CMU, MIT, and Google – have the ability to tinker with robots, programs, and AI/vision.

Dr. Malisiewicz spoke with Gadizmo and said that having his project nearing fruition was “truly exciting for [him] . . . because it will let people experience [this technology] in their lives.”

Up until this point, adding AI ability to everyone’s laptops would require tremendous amounts of programming and AI/robotics/algorithm experience. Now with the simple VMX Computer Vision API, anyone with small amounts of programming insight can draw the boxes over objects and teach their own computers and applications how to recognize and act off of visual object detectors.

The possibilities of what you, the people, can do with these tools are infinite.

Watch Tom and Geoff play a new form of Pong and read the rest of the R.J. Huneke article here on Gadizmo.com

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