Artificial intelligence (AI)
Definition - What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean?Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include speech recognition, learning, planning and problem solving.
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines. It has become an essential part of the technology industry.
Research associated with artificial intelligence is highly technical and specialized. The core problems of artificial intelligence include programming computers for certain traits such as:
• Knowledge
• Reasoning
• Problem solving
• Perception
• Learning
• Planning
Knowledge engineering is a core part of AI research. Machines can often act and react like humans only if they have abundant information relating to the world. Artificial intelligence must have access to objects, categories, properties and relations between all of them to implement knowledge engineering. Initiating common sense, reasoning and problem-solving power in machines is a difficult and tedious approach.
Machine learning is another core part of AI. Learning without any kind of supervision requires an ability to identify patterns in streams of inputs, whereas learning with adequate supervision involves classification and numerical regressions. Classification determines the category an object belongs to and regression deals with obtaining a set of numerical input or output examples, thereby discovering functions enabling the generation of suitable outputs from respective inputs. Mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a well-defined branch of theoretical computer science often referred to as computational learning theory.
Machine perception deals with the capability to use sensory inputs to deduce the different aspects of the world, while computer vision is the power to analyze visual inputs with few sub-problems such as facial, object and speech recognition.
Robotics is also a major field related to AI. Robots require intelligence to handle tasks such as object manipulation and navigation along with sub-problems of localization, motion planning and mapping.
Applications of artificial intelligence
Finance
Banks use artificial intelligence systems to organize operations, invest in stocks, and manage properties. In August 2001, robots beat humans in a simulated financial trading competition.Financial institutions have long used artificial neural network systems to detect charges or claims outside of the norm, flagging these for human investigation.
Medicine
A medical clinic can use artificial intelligence systems to organize bed schedules, make a staff rotation, and provide medical information.Artificial neural networks are used as clinical decision support systems for medical diagnosis, such as in Concept Processing technology in EMR software.
Heavy industry
Robots have become common in many industries. They are often given jobs that are considered dangerous to humans. Robots have proven effective in jobs that are very repetitive which may lead to mistakes or accidents due to a lapse in concentration and other jobs which humans may find degrading. Japan is the leader in using and producing robots in the world. In 1999, 1,700,000 robots were in use worldwide. For more information, see survey about artificial intelligence in business.
Telecommunications
Many telecommunications companies make use of heuristic search in the management of their workforces, for example BT Group has deployed heuristic search in a scheduling application that provides the work schedules of 20,000 engineers.
Toys and games
The 1990s saw some of the first attempts to mass-produce domestically aimed types of basic Artificial Intelligence for education, or leisure. This prospered greatly with the Digital Revolution, and helped introduce people, especially children, to a life of dealing with various types of AI, specifically in the form of Tamagotchis and Giga Pets, the Internet (example: basic search engine interfaces are one simple form), and the first widely released robot, Furby. A mere year later an improved type of domestic robot was released in the form of Aibo, a robotic dog with intelligent features and autonomy. AI has also been applied to video games.
Music
The evolution of music has always been affected by technology. With AI, scientists are trying to make the computer emulate the activities of the skillful musician. Composition, performance, music theory, sound processing are some of the major areas on which research in Music and Artificial Intelligence are focusing.
Aviation
The Air Operations Division AOD, uses AI for the rule based expert systems. The AOD has use for artificial intelligence for surrogate operators for combat and training simulators, mission management aids, support systems for tactical decision making, and post processing of the simulator data into symbolic summaries.
The use of artificial intelligence in simulators is proving to be very useful for the AOD. Airplane simulators are using artificial intelligence in order to process the data taken from simulated flights. Other than simulated flying, there is also simulated aircraft warfare. The computers are able to come up with the best success scenarios in these situations. The computers can also create strategies based on the placement, size, speed, and strength of the forces and counter forces. Pilots may be given assistance in the air during combat by computers. The artificial intelligent programs can sort the information and provide the pilot with the best possible maneuvers, not to mention getting rid of certain maneuvers that would be impossible for a sentient being to perform. Multiple aircraft are needed to get good approximations for some calculations so computer simulated pilots are used to gather data. These computer simulated pilots are also used to train future air traffic controllers.
The Integrated Vehicle Health Management system, also used by NASA, on board an aircraft must process and interpret data taken from the various sensors on the aircraft. The system needs to be able to determine the structural integrity of the aircraft. The system also needs to implement protocols in case of any damage taken the vehicle.
News and publishing
The company Narrative Science makes computer generated news and reports commercially available, including summarizing team sporting events based on statistical data from the game. It also creates financial reports and real estate analyses.
Other
Various tools of artificial intelligence are also being widely deployed in homeland security, speech and text recognition, data mining, and e-mail spam filtering. Applications are also being developed for gesture recognition (understanding of sign language by machines), individual voice recognition, global voice recognition (from a variety of people in a noisy room), facial expression recognition for interpretation of emotion and non verbal queues. Other applications are robot navigation, obstacle avoidance, and object recognition.
