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Category Archives: Ai

Wearable AI is the next hot tech trend – VentureBeat

Posted: July 1, 2017 at 9:17 am

It wasnt long ago that personal computers were the height of technology. While significantly smaller than the industrial-sized mainframes of the past, modern desktop PCs are still bulky objects that take up a lot of space. Laptops and notebooks are considerably more portable, but even these are becoming a hassle for the on-the-go minimalist.

If youre in that crowd, you might want to take a look at some of the latest in wearable technology.

Smartwatches are quickly becoming the preferred option for those who want to enjoy the latest in IT without having to lug around a laptop computer. Industry analysts are predicting 18 percent growth in the smartwatch market by 2021. This amount of growth, according to the experts, is a result of increasing smartwatch functionality as well as lower prices across the board.

App developers are even starting to turn away from traditional smartphones in favor of smartwatches. Researchers with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT recently engineered a Samsung smartwatch with next-gen AI, effectively giving it the ability to provide social coaching to those who suffer from severe anxiety or Asperger syndrome.

Although the utility is currently limited to a very specific model of watch, the MIT team hopes to make the app available on other popular market options.

Kiwi, a new tech startup that specializes in AI, recently developed an app known as Cue. Designed to help users quit smoking, the tool provides a program that works over the course of time. By sensing exactly when and where you engage in the habit, Cue makes it possible to set your own goals and keep track of your progress toward quitting smoking for good.

Although the number of cigarette smokers in the U.S. is at an all-time low, the marriage of wearable tech and highly useful apps can help reduce these figures even further.

And smartwatch apps arent just for consumers. The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport launched a trial to explore the usefulness of smartwatches within their day-to-day operations. Theyve outfitted their entire janitorial team with wearable tech that gives them instant alerts when an area needs cleaning or servicing.

The app being used, called TaskWatch, is coupled with Bluetooth sensors in the restrooms that count the overall number of guests. An automated alert is sent to the janitorial team after 150 customers have passed through. Janitors who respond to the alert will earn points that can supplement their income. The airport hopes for an official rollout of the technology in 2018.

Enterprises across the globe are forecasted to spend over $140 billion on cloud services by 2019. Representing a massive increase from the $70 billion spent in 2015, the top cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are set to see substantial profits in the next few years.

As smartwatches and many other tech devices support cloud connectivity, were even seeing companies that are interested in moving entire data centers to the cloud. Not only would this make it easier for consumers to integrate wearable tech data into infrastructure like the cloud and the Internet of Things, but cloud-based data centers would also make it easier to automatically collect, track, and collate enterprise data. The collected data could be used to ensure the performance of individual staff members or entire teams, forecast timelines for future projects, and reward achievements to top-performing employees.

But there are some considerations to make before investing in the cloud, either as a business or an individual. With three different cloud platforms to choose from, including private, public, and shared options, its not always easy to find the one that best meets your needs.

Private cloud frameworks are often best suited for large-scale corporations and global enterprises. As the name implies, the files stored within the cloud are viewable only by you. The public cloud lives up to its label by making all of your files available to anybody on the cloud. Shared cloud servers let you control who has access to your data.

Youll also need to pick a cloud service provider. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud are among the most popular options for enterprises and corporations. Services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Mega are included among the most popular providers for personal cloud storage.

Nobody can deny the progress that mobile technology has made, and its done so in a remarkably short amount of time. With smartwatches among the most popular options in wearable tech, other devices, including smart eyeglasses, are just on the horizon. Exactly what well see next in the form of wearable IT is anybodys guess, but the innovation is certainly here to stay.

Kayla Matthews is a technology and energy IT writer whose work has appeared on Motherboard, MakeUseOf and Triple Pundit.

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Wearable AI is the next hot tech trend - VentureBeat

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AI Creates Art That Critics Can’t Distinguish From Human-Created Work – IFLScience

Posted: at 9:17 am

The greatest artists of our time are considered unique, but what if artificial intelligence can be taught to create art? And what if it turns out us humans actually prefer it?

Researchers from Rutgers University, College of Charleston, and Facebooks AI Research Lab have created an algorithm that allows AI to create art that is so convincing, human experts could not distinguish the difference between AI or human-made artworks.

The researchers proposed, in a study published on arXiv,that they could expand on an already existing algorithm to generate art that creatively deviates from established styles.

If we teach the machine about art and art styles and force it to generate novel images that do not follow established styles, what would it generate? lead authorDr Ahmed Elgammal of the Art andArtificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers wrote in a blog post. Would it generate something that is aesthetically appealing to humans? Would that be considered art?

The system they used builds on a previous technique where AIs are fed thousands of images of art and taught to recognize the different styles. Through observation, they then generate their own images.This uses two networks, a generator to create images and a discriminator to differentiate between what we would call art and what we wouldnt.

The researchers, however, madea Creative Adversarial Network (CAN) where the AI creates images that the discriminator recognizes as art, but cannot categorize into an established style, meaning the AI has managed tocreate original pieces of artwork from scratch.

The researchers fed this new network 81,449 paintings from over 1,000 artists spanning the 15th-20th centuries and covering a wide range of styles. They then got experts and members of the public to evaluate the art in anonline survey where the AIs art was placed alongside those of contemporary human artists. They chose artworks from the Abstract Expressionism era and from the Art Basel 2016 contemporary art show.

The critics had to answer questions about each image, whether it was complex or novel, whether it inspired them, and how it made them feel. The results surprised them. Not only could the human evaluators not tell which images were AI-created, in many cases they rated the AIs artwork higher than the humans.

"Human subjects thought that the generated images were art made by an artist 75 percent of the time, compared to 85 percent of the time for the Abstract Expressionist collection, and 48 percent of the time for Art Basel collection," DrElgammal wrote.

Ever since AI was created, scientists have been exploring itsability to think creatively like humans, producing poems, stories, music etc although it doesnt always go to plan (if you havent tried out the hilarious AI inspirational posters botyet, do it now).

Have we finally succeeded?

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Microsoft made its AI work on a $10 Raspberry Pi – Engadget

Posted: June 30, 2017 at 5:17 pm

The idea came about from Microsoft Labs teams in Redmond and Bangalore, India. Ofer Dekel, who manages an AI optimization group at the Redmond Lab, was trying to figure out a way to stop squirrels from eating flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. As one does, he trained a computer vision system to spot squirrels, and installed the code on a $35 Raspberry Pi 3. Now, it triggers the sprinkler system whenever the rodents pop up, chasing them away.

"Every hobbyist who owns a Raspberry Pi should be able to do that," Dekel said in Microsoft's blog. "Today, very few of them can." The problems is that it's too expensive and impractical to install high-powered chips or connected cloud-computing devices on things like squirrel sensors. However, it's feasible to equip sensors and other devices with a $10 Raspberry Zero or the pepper-flake-sized Cortex M0 chip pictured above.

To make it work on systems that often have just a few kilobytes of RAM, the team compressed neural network parameters down to just a few bits instead of the usual 32. Another technique is "sparsification" of algorithms, a way of pruning them down to remove redundancies. By doing that, they were able to make an image detection system run about 20 times faster on a Raspberry Pi 3 without any loss of accuracy.

However, taking it to the next level won't be quite as easy. "There is just no way to take a deep neural network, have it stay as accurate as it is today, and consume 10,000 times less resources. You can't do it," said Dekel. For that, they'll need to invent new types of AI tech tailored for low-powered devices, and that's tricky, considering researchers still don't know exactly how deep learning tools work.

Microsoft's researchers are working on a few projects for folks with impairments, like a walking stick that can detect falls and issue a call for help, and "smart gloves" that can interpret sign language. To get some new ideas and help, they've made some of their early training tools and algorithms available to Raspberry Pi hobbyists and other researchers on Github. "Giving these powerful machine-learning tools to everyday people is the democratization of AI," says researcher Saleema Amershi.

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Microsoft made its AI work on a $10 Raspberry Pi - Engadget

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Banks bet on AI for a ‘self-driving’ banking experience – CNBC

Posted: at 5:17 pm

Major banks are betting on artificial intelligence (AI) to act like a digital personal assistant to customers, helping to automate money-making decisions, top CEOs in the sector told CNBC, amid the continued threat from new, more nimble entrants into the market.

"Really people don't like banking , it's boring, it takes time, causes them stress, and people have bad financial habits," Carlos Torres Vila, CEO of Spain's BBVA, told CNBC in an interview at the Money 20/20 conference in Copenhagen earlier this week.

"What we can do is leverage data and AI to provide people with peace of mind, really having an almost magical experience that things in their financial life turn out the way they want it. It's almost like a self-driving bank experience."

BBVA is one of the big banks investing heavily in moves to digitize its operations, as customers come to expect more from mobile apps and the way they interact with lenders.

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Banks bet on AI for a 'self-driving' banking experience - CNBC

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Interview: Meet the exciting AI company helping machines ‘see’ like humans – BGR

Posted: at 5:17 pm

Theres a good chance the next big step forward in artificial intelligence innovation is going to come out of Israel. And when it does, the Tel Aviv-based AI startup Cortica may well be the source of that breakthrough. Indeed, the company is already well on its way. The company plans to ramp up its hiring, co-founder and CEO Igal Raichelgauz tells BGR, in addition to building an AI product solution that can be extended to several industry verticals.

The companys ambitions belie its size. What Raichelgauz and his team are working to perfect is an unsupervised learning system with a human-level understanding of images. Its even why the founders chose the name they did for the company. Basically, they want to give machines the ability to see like we do thanks to our visual cortex, that part of the brain that helps us process what we see. And to mimic the way our cortex works by instantly seeing and helping us make sense instantly of the world around us many times a second.

The main approach and paradigm today in the AI space is supervised learning, Raichelgauz said.

In Corticas case, we believe weve solved and have an extra step of enabling the AI to learn in a different way to learn in an unsupervised way. Essentially, learning bottom up instead of top down. So instead of a supervisor that leads the AI through a certain task, we let the AI discover relationships and patterns within big data signals and form its own discoveries of patterns, concepts and relationships that are later used for recognition and other tasks.

Cortica has dozens of leading AI researchers working at its headquarters and R&D center in Israel, in addition to employing veterans of elite Israeli military intelligence units. Its almost raised almost $40 million in funding.

Corticas vision is to establish a universal visual index of the world and to embed its capabilities in all next-generation platforms where understanding images is a critical task. That means the company is eyeing the application of its AI system into things like security cameras, autonomous vehicles and medical diagnostic technology.

This is all of course happening at a time when major tech giants like Apple and Microsoft are reorienting themselves to varying degrees around AI. Part of that involves snapping up AI startups and technology. Corticas way of thinking about all this, it should be noted, is in line with how researchers generally think the next big breakthrough will arrive. According to an article recently published in the AI trade publication Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, technologists on the cutting edge of the field want to enable systems to understand and react to the world the way humans do.

These technologies include algorithms that model human intuition and make predictions in the face of incomplete knowledge, systems that learn without being pre-trained with labeled data, systems that transfer knowledge gained in one domain to another, hybrid systems that combine two or more approaches, and more powerful and energy-efficient hardware specialized for AI, according to the publication.

The research goes on to quote Facebooks director of AI research Yann LeCun, who explains how unsupervised, predictive learning the kind Cortica is hard at work on is the main way humans and animals learn. Observation is the catalyst. Babies, LeCun notes, easily learn that when you move one object in front of another, the hidden one is still there an understanding the baby picks up without having to have it first explained to them.

This isnt yet replicable to the same degree in machines. And until researchers learn how, LeCun says, we will not go to the next level in AI.

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Interview: Meet the exciting AI company helping machines 'see' like humans - BGR

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AI to Ensure Fewer UFOs – IEEE Spectrum

Posted: at 5:17 pm

Photo: Black Sage Technologies Searching the Skies: Black Sage Technologies artificial-intelligence system spots flying objects and determines whether theyre a threat.

Is it a bird? A plane? Or is it a remotely operated quadrotor conducting surveillance or preparing to drop a deadly payload? Human observers wont have to guessor keep their eyes glued to computer monitorsnow that theres superhuman artificial intelligence capable of distinguishing drones from those other flying objects. Automated watchfulness, thanks to machine learning, has given police and other agencies tasked with maintaining security an important countermeasure to help them keep pace with swarms of new drones taking to the skies.

The security challenge has only grown over the past few years: Millions of people have bought consumer drones and sometimes flown them into offlimits areas where they pose a hazard to crowds on the ground or larger aircraft in the sky. Off-the-shelf drones have also become affordable and dangerous weapons for the Islamic State and other militant groups in war-torn regions such as Iraq and Syria.

The need to track and possibly take down these flying intruders has spawned an antidrone market projected to be worth close to US $2 billion by the mid-2020s. The lions share of that haul will likely go to companies that can best leverage the power of machine-learning AI based on neural networks.

But much of the antidrone industry still lags behind the rest of the tech sector in making effective use of machine learning AI, says David Romero, founder and managing partner of Black Sage Technologies, based in Boise, Idaho. With machine learning, 90 percent of the work is figuring out how to make it so simple so that the customer doesnt have to know how machine learning works, says Romero. Many companies do that well, but not in the defense community.

He and Ross Lam, his Black Sage cofounder, are poised to take advantage of this opening for the upstarts looking to take on the defense industrys giants. They initially collaborated on a project that trained machine-learning algorithms to automatically detect deer on highways based on radar and infrared camera data. Eventually, they realized that the same approach could help spot drones and other unidentified flying objects.

Since the self-funded startups launch in 2015, it has won multiple contracts from the United States governmentincluding for U.S. military forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistanand from U.S. allies.

Romero says its fairly straightforward to apply machine learning to the task of automatically detecting and classifying flying objects. But because the stakes are highmistakenly shooting down a small passenger plane or failing to take out an explosives-laden drone intruder could be equally disastrousBlack Sage puts its system through a rigorous training phase when its installed at a new site. The systems radar and infrared cameras capture information about each unidentified flying objects velocity, size, altitude, and so forth. Then a human operator helps train the machine-learning algorithms by positively identifying certain classes of drones (rotor or fixed-wing) as well as other objects such as birds or manned aircraft. For proof that it has learned its lessons well, the AI is tested against 20 percent of the positively identified data setthe part reserved specifically for cross validation.

Another company called Dedroneoriginally based in Kassel, Germany, but currently headquartered in San Franciscois taking a similar approach. When a Dedrone system is being installed at a new site, humans label unfamiliar objects as part of the training process, which also updates the companys proprietary DroneDNA library. Since its launch in 2014, Dedrones machine-learning software has helped safeguard events and locations such as a Clinton-Trump presidential debate, the World Economic Forum, and CitiField, home of the New York Mets baseball team.

Each time we update DroneDNA, we process over 250 million different images of drones, aircraft, birds, and other objects, says Michael Dyballa, Dedrones director of engineering. In the past eight months, weve annotated 3 million drone images.

Though Black Sages and Dedrones automated detection systems are said to be capable of running without human assistance after their respective training phases, the companies clients may choose to put humans in the loop for engaging active defenses, such as jammers or lasers, to take down flying intruders. Such caution is critical at sites like airports, where drone detection accuracy greater than 90 percent still means the occasional false alarm or case of mistaken identity. Even so, a humans interpretive ability can only supplement the ceaseless vigilance that AI systems will need to provide as the number of drones continues to rise.

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AI to Ensure Fewer UFOs - IEEE Spectrum

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Team accelerates rendering with AI – Phys.Org

Posted: at 5:17 pm

June 30, 2017

Modern films and TV shows are filled with spectacular, computer-generated sequences which are computed by rendering systems that simulate the flow of light in a 3D scene. However, computing many light rays is an immensely labor-intensive and time-consuming process. The alternative is to render the images using only a few light rays, but this shortcut results in inaccuracies that show up as objectionable noise in the final image.

Researchers from Disney Research, Pixar Animation Studios, and the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a new technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning that eliminates this noise and thereby enables production-quality rendering at much faster speeds.

Specifically, the team used millions of examples from the Pixar film Finding Dory to train a deep learning model known as a Convolutional Neural Network. Through this process, the system learned to transform the noisy images into noise-free images that resemble those computed with significantly more light rays. Once trained, the system was successfully able to remove the noise on test images from entirely different films, such as Pixar's latest release, "Cars 3,"and their upcoming feature"Coco," even though they had completely different styles and color palettes

"Noise is a really big problem for production rendering," said Tony DeRose, head of research at Pixar. "This new technology allows us to automatically remove the noise while preserving the detail in our scenes."

The work presents a significant step forward over previous, state-of-the-art denoising methods which often left artifacts or residual noise that required artists to either render more light rays or to tweak the denoising filter to improve the quality of a specific image. Disney and Pixar plan to incorporate the technology in their production pipelines to accelerate the movie-making process.

"Other approaches for removing image noise have grown increasingly complex, with diminishing returns," said Markus Gross, vice president for research at Disney Research. "By leveraging deep learning, this work presents an important step forward for removing undesirable artifacts from animated films."

The work will be presented in July at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 conference, the premier venue for technical research in computer graphics. To facilitate further exploration of this exciting area, the team will make their code and trained weights available to the research community.

Explore further: Team rendering method preserves detail in film quality production graphics

Disney Research has developed a new method of rendering high-quality graphics for animated features that efficiently corrects for erroneous pixels while preserving the crisp detail in images, significantly increasing the ...

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China plans to launch national AI plan- China Daily – Reuters

Posted: at 12:17 am

SHANGHAI China will launch a series of artificial intelligence (AI) projects and increase efforts to cultivate tech talent as part of a soon to announced national AI plan, the China Daily said on Friday, citing a senior official.

The country is focusing on AI as it is seen as a tool to boost productivity and empower employees, the paper said.

China will roll out a slew of AI research and development projects, allocate more resources to nurturing talent and increase the use of AI in education, healthcare and security among other things, said Wan Gang, the minister of science and technology at a conference in Tianjin.

The plan will soon be released to the public, said Wan.

China will build cooperation with international AI organizations and encourage foreign AI firms to set up R&D centers in the country, he added.

(Reporting By Engen Tham; Editing by Michael Perry)

SAN FRANCISCO Peer at the instrument panel on your new car and you may find sleek digital gauges and multicolored screens. But a glimpse behind the dashboard could reveal what U.S. auto supplier Visteon Corp found: a mess.

SEOUL Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it will open its first U.S. appliances plant in more than three decades, a politically pleasing investment ahead of South Korean leader Moon Jae-in's two-day summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

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Scientists made an AI that can read minds – Engadget

Posted: June 29, 2017 at 11:16 am

By reverse-engineering signals sent by the brain, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been working on an AI that can read complex thoughts simply by looking at brain scans. Using data collected from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the CMU scientists feed that data into their machine learning algorithms, which then locate the building blocks that the brain uses to create complex thoughts.

Impressively, the study showed that the team were able to demonstrate where and how the brain was being triggered while processing 240 complex events, covering everything from individuals to places and even various physical actions or aspects of social interaction. It's by understanding these triggers that the algorithm can use the brain scans to predict what is being thought about at the time, connecting these thoughts into a coherent sentence.

Selecting 239 of these complex sentences and feeding the AI the corresponding brain scans, the algorithm managed to successfully predict the correct thoughts with an astounding 87 percent accuracy. It could also do the reverse, receiving a sentence and then outputting an accurate image of how it predicted that thought would be mapped inside a human brain.

The astonishing research shows just how far deep learning has come. If you weren't worried about the rise of super powered machines before, now that they can read minds, it's probably time to start preparing for the inevitable robot apocalypse.

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Scientists made an AI that can read minds - Engadget

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Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s new exhibit puts a spotlight on free speech advocates – CBS News

Posted: at 11:16 am

Chinese activist Ai Weiwei is one of the world's most famous artists, known for sticking his finger in the eye of the Chinese government and symbols of state power.

One of Ai's latest American exhibits--which features the portraits nearly 200 activists, prisoners and free speech advocates--has just made its East Coast debut in Washington's Hirshhorn Museum.

This exhibit is Ai's second in Washington, but the first he will be able to attend. During his first debut there, the Chinese government kept him from leaving China, reports CBS News' Errol Barnett.

That experience drove him to create works celebrating other activists and to bring awareness to major human rights issues.

"This is first time I've seen my work here," Ai said.

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Ai Weiwei's provocative art has gotten him harassed by police, thrown in detention and driven out of China. But in order to be relevant, he says ...

Assembled by hand with thousands of plastic Lego bricks, 176 portraits cover 700 feet around the ring-shaped museum. Some names are familiar to Americans: from controversial whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning to civil rights giants like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. Others are lesser known but include freedom fighters imprisoned for life. "I have so many friends who never get released," Ai said. On the day we met with Ai, longtime friend Liu Xiaobo was said to have been moved from prison and held on medical parole because of his deteriorating health.

Edward Snowden's portrait at Ai Weiwei's Hirshhorn Museum exhibit.

CBS News

"He believes China should become a democratic society. That's all he did," Ai said of his friend. In 2010 Liu and Ai were both stopped from traveling abroad after Liu became the first Chinese citizen awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he never received in person.

But Ai says the entire installation is a portrait of activism. "Those are real people, real story. It represents the most bright ideas fighting for freedom," Ai said of his work.

But the Lego-made face of one notable Chinese activist is missing - his own.

21 Photos

The dissident artist is one of the foremost figures to emerge from China's contemporary art scene

A 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed at least 70,000 people, including more than 5,000 children. Enraged, Ai lead a "citizens" investigation, discovering low-quality building materials contributed to student deaths. He also gathered and published the names of all the youngest victims. Ai was beaten by police, resulting in a cerebral hemorrhage, which he also documented.

In 2011, authorities put a bag over Ai's head while he waited for a flight, detaining him for 81 days. Ai used that experience as inspiration for a music video and dioramas with guards watching his every move.

Asked whether he feels he's created change, Ai said, "It's very hard to measure. I would not say in the larger scale because I still think the structure is quite fragile."

Ai Weiwei's exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum.

CBS News

He continued, "In the way they have to censor someone like me. They're never sure if they can be really winning if there's a freedom of speech." On Instagram, Ai documents just about everything he does and everyone he meets. He also posts images without clothes on. It too is a response to censorship. "My name cannot appear on Chinese social media," Ai said.

"Yeah, it's illegal words. Nobody can put my name on social media and sometimes even they see a photo of my backside, they can recognize, that's him. They will delete the whole article," Ai said.

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60 Minutes correspondent Holly Williams and producer Michael Gavshon talk about the provocative Chinese artist and the criticism of his work

Speaking just a few miles from the White House, Ai told Barnett he's delighted by the social media habits of its powerful resident. "I was amazed or charmed to see a president wake up at midnight and tweets. Normally we think a president holds all the secrets will never tell you what he thinks about," Ai said. "It can be controversy or can be unpredictable."

Ai finds it to be authentic.

"When he touches that sending key, he believes it's a good idea to share it," he said.

Ai left China in 2015, four years after the Chinese government confiscated his passport, preventing him from leaving the country.

After Ai was detained he still had to wait four years for the Chinese government to return his passport.

He now has a studio in Berlin and travels the world with his young son, who was part of his inspiration to use a children's toy as part of his work.

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