December 2019
I delivered my second commission for the Allen Institute for AI : an abstract titled ‘Neural Owl’. The piece represents the AI we are building- the Aristo system. Aristo is a Science question-answering AI system originally conceived of as the ‘digital Aristotle’. Since Aristotle was said to “know it all”- the idea is to build a system that knows all of (or a lot of) Science. This is Neural Owl- owl with an overlay of a neural network, taking knowledge as input from a textbook. Output layer of the neural network is the crown of the owl. I chose an owl because of the Owl of Athena considered a symbol of knowledge and erudition in Greek mythology. Since Aristotle was Greek, it was befitting to choose it. There are AND and OR gates in the tree branches to represent logic. The atom, the flask and the DNA symbolize Science and the tree and the rock represent the natural world (a topic for many Science questions).
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