But to makes things simpler and enable incorporation in everyday programming, the research powerhouse that is MIT has developed a probabilistic programming language called “Picture” – and extension of Julia, another programming language developed at MIT. In fact, Picture is such a powerful language that researchers at MIT have been able to accomplish computer vision tasks in less than 50 lines of code which are competitive with conventional system containing thousands of lines of code.



“This is the first time that we’re introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area,” says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. “The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.”



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