On Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West,” the head of Microsoft Research Peter Lee showed how the company’s work on a “smart elevator” using artificial intelligence can figure out what floor a person wants to go to, based on their history and other factors.
Artificial intelligence is “our largest investment area in the labs right now,” Lee told Bloomberg in the video above. “We’ve really been very focused on it.”
The smart elevator study is an expression of the idea that most of us sit down in front of a computer and operate it, but “we think in the future, you won’t be operating computers, but computers will be working on your behalf,” he said.
“In the future, sensors that you wear can understand your physicality, routines, even what your plans are,” Lee said.
“That kind of ability to predict people’s intentions and what might happen next, in the same way that people do, those are things that we think will get built in, really deeply embedded in the environment all-around us.”
In the case of an elevator using AI, for example, Lee said, “if your environment knows that it’s your lunch time and that you had spoken yesterday of having lunch with a colleague on the second floor,” and that you’re now leaving your office to go to the elevator, the elevator can be “smart enough to take you, without your need to operate anything, to your colleague.”
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Suzanne Choney
Microsoft News Center Staff