Microsoft “smart elevator” predicts the floor you’re going to

Imagine you enter an elevator, and it automatically knew which floor you are heading to. That’s what the engineers at Redmond are working on these days. Wearables are nice, but making use of artificial intelligence to predict our next moves and employing them to make our lives a bit more convenient is closer to Microsoft’s vision of future computing. 

Microsoft Research is pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence to a whole new level. Imagine a smart elevator that can figure out what floor a person wants to go to, based on their history and other factors. Okay, now you don’t have to imagine it anymore. In an interview with Bloomberg, Head of Microsoft Research Peter Lee explains that AI is the company’s biggest focus right now. Lee elaborates how a Microsoft Research team set up a bunch of sensors in front of the elevators. These in turn watched what people did, without any additional programming, for about three months.