New programming system developed for AI applications

Researchers have developed a novel system named “Gen” that can be used for Artificial Intelligence applications such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics without having to deal with equations or manually writing high-performance codes.

“Gen” includes a number of novel language constructs such as a generative function interface to encapsulate probabilistic models, combinators to create new generative functions from existing ones and an inference library providing high-level inference algorithms. In study published in journal PLDI 2019, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated the probabilistic programming system that aims to be both expressive at the modelling level and efficient at the algorithmic level.