Human-Aided Computing

Despite all the power of computers, they are still lousy at certain simple tasks, such as recognizing faces and knowing the difference between a table and a cow. Now researchers at Microsoft are trying to tap into some of the specialized -- and often subconscious -- computing power in the human brain, and use it to solve problems that have so far been intractable for machines.

Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and Pradeep Shenoy, a graduate student at the University of Washington, have devised a scheme that uses electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps to collect the brain activity of people looking at pictures of faces and nonfaces, such as horses, cars, and landscapes. The pair found that even when the subjects' objective wasn't to distinguish the faces from the nonfaces, their brain activity indicated that they subconsciously identified the difference.

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