The ability to distil images to their most essential components and anticipate new scenes is what could drive computer vision and robotics forward.

Half a century ago, we expected the future to hold sophisticated computers and robot helpers to slash the time we spend on work and household chores.

Yet, while we now have nearly unlimited knowledge at our fingertips, the level of automation that some predicted still hasn’t come to be. What happened?

It turns out that things are a little more complicated than we expected.

‘It’s taken us a surprisingly long time to come to terms with how complex the world is,’ says Jaakko Lehtinen, an associate professor of computer science at Aalto University and distinguished research scientist at computer graphics firm NVIDIA.

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