Computers have a big advantage over humans when it comes to processing large amounts of data accurately and quickly, according to defence giant Lockheed Martin.
Unlike humans, however, computers lack the intellectual wherewithal to deduce and predict from that data an object's behaviour and patterns.
Now, engineers at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) are using brain-inspired computing techniques to enable machines to think like humans.
My favourite?
Brain-Inspired Attentional Search or mind reading that works as it is otherwise being called.
This is Lockheed Martin's take on it: to search an image database, a human uses a keyword to find a particular photograph, assuming that someone earlier correctly annotated the images for them to be found.
At the rate that visual data pours into command centres, annotating every image is nearly impossible.
So ATL engineers are developing a Brain-Inspired Attentional Search technology that will in effect read a person's mind for the image being searched as related images flash by.
Sensors monitor the brain's electrical activity and chart a spike when the analyst sees the desired image, even if the analyst didn't consciously "see" it. Moving at a rate of 10 images per second, an analyst could search 600 photos a minute.
