The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the trick of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by shop owners to spot past thieves. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental (增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems only to encode(编码) them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with (干预) something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about great changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.

The face is not just a name-tag. It shows a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses(诊断) of rare genetic diseases, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的) people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.

An artificial intelligence that navigates(导航) its environment much like mammals could help solve a mystery about our own internal GPS.

Equipped with virtual versions of specialized brain nerve cells called grid cells, the AI could easily solve and plan new routes through virtual mazes. That performance, described online May 9 in Nature, suggests the grid cells in animal brains play a critical role in path planning.

“This is a big step forward in understanding our own navigational neural circuitry(电路),” says Ingmar Kanitscheider, a computational neuroscientist at. The University of Texas at Austin not involved in the work. The discovery that rats track their location with the help of grid cells earned a Norwegian research team the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology to medicine. Neuroscientists suspected these cells, which have also been found in humans, might help not only give mammals an internal. coordinate(协同) system, but also plan direct paths between points.

To test that idea, neuroscientist Caswell Barry at University College London, along with colleagues at Google DeepMind, created an AI that contained virtual nerve cells, or neurons, whose activity resembled that of real grid cells. The researchers trained this AI to navigate virtual mazes by giving the system reward signals when it reached its destination.

The AI bested a human expert player at solving the virtual mazes, and proved savvier than other artificial neural networks in planning ways through mazes larger than those traversed during its training. When a door opened to provide a shortcut through the maze, the new AI took the more direct route. By contrast, AI systems without artificial grid cells ignored the open door and took long the way around.

These findings support the idea that grid cells do more than help mammals orient themselves in time and space; they also help animals plan the most straightforward direction to destinations. AI also appears to be “a very powerful tool" for testing other neuroscience theories, Barry says. He and his colleagues suggest that virtual experiments on artificial neural networks that imitate different regions of the brain may eventually replace some animal testing.

But there are limitations to using AI to study the brain. Because the system is meant to learn on its own, researchers can't tell why the system made a specific decision, says neuroscientist Francesco Savelli at Johns Hopkings University, whose commentary also appears online May 9 in Nature.

On the evening of April 8, Dunhuang Academy and Huawei jointly launched a brand-new technology-driven tour experience at the Mogao Grottoes. Using Huawei's newly-released Hetu artificial intelligence platform, coupled with the output of the Digital Dunhuang project, visitors to the Mogao Grottoes can enjoy a fantasy experience prior to entering the attraction.

Zhao Shengliang, director of the Dunhuang Academy, said that it has been cooperating with Huawei since March 2019. Using Huawei's latest Hetu technology, visitors are able to see the detailed contents of the Dunhuang Art Murals(壁画) outside the caves, through their Huawei mobile phones. This will reduce the time tourists spend inside the cave, aiding the protection of the cultural relics, while at the same time helping to increase the amount of information visitors can obtain. It is also considered to be a new way of promoting Dunhuang Art.

The Dunhuang Academy has used digital technology to preserve the research and exploration of Dunhuang Grottoes since the early 1990s. It has collected a wealth of data and has realized the goal of sharing of digital Dunhuang globally. It has played an important role in the protection and research of cultural site, as well as promoting the development and progress of related work.

The Huawei Hetu platform unites Dunhuang's study findings, high—resolution images of the site's murals and virtual, three-dimensional models with the real Mogao Grottoes. It has not only re-created the real tour of the scenic spot, but also developed a new way of digitally experiencing the grottoes. When people visit the site, they not only have the experience of seeing the real grottoes, but they can appreciate the admirable artworks more clearly and in greater detail.

In the future, Dunhuang Academy will continue to cooperate with Huawei to create more colorful virtual content to enrich the experience of Mogao Art on the platform, helping people around the world get to know Dunhuang Art better.