What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

“Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things which, at the moment, people can do better.” Artificial Intelligence is the study of human intelligence such that it can be replicated artificially.

or “A branch of a computer science which studies the development of software and hardware which simulates human intelligence”.

But the question is how much intelligent? How can one judge the intelligence? as intelligent as humans. If the computers can, somehow, solve real-world problems, by improving on their own from the past experiences, they would be called “intelligent”. Thus, the AI systems are more generic(rather than specific), have the ability to “think” and are more flexible.

Thus, the AI systems are more generic(rather than specific), have the ability to “think” and are more flexible. Intelligence, as we know, is the ability to acquire and apply the knowledge. Knowledge is the information acquired through experience. Experience is the knowledge gained through exposure(training). Summing the terms up, we get artificial intelligence as the “copy of something natural(i.e., human beings) ‘WHO’ is capable of acquiring and applying the information it has gained through exposure.”

Intelligence is composed of:

• Understanding
• communication
• Reasoning
• Problem Solving
• Listening
• Thinking
• Remembering
• Working

History Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• 1941 first electric computer was developed
• 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
• 1949 first “stored program” computer was introduced
• 1950 During the early 1950s, an English Mathematician wrote a paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that gave birth to the research of Artificial Intelligence and put pressure on the humans to think that whether machines can actually have the ability to think like humans
• 1955 early chess playing programs demonstrated
• 1956 in Dartmouth conference birth was given to: “Artificial Intelligence”. The actual Artificial Intelligence research field was founded in theyear 1956 during the summer workshop at Dartmouth College by JohnMcCarthy (DeLooper, 2015)
• 1957 LISP language by John McCarthy at MIT
• 1965 expert system DENDRAL started at Stanford
• 1965 Robinson’s complete algorithm for logical reasoning
• 1966 expert system MACSYMA started at MIT
• 1969—79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
• 1970 implementation of the Prolog language
• 1972 expert system MYCIN developed at Stanford
• 1972 SHRDLU natural language robot demonstrated at MIT
• 1980 AI becomes an industry
• 1981 Commercial NLP system “Intellect” available from NLP group
• 1986 Neural networks return to popularity
• 1987 AI becomes a science
• 1995 The emergence of intelligent agents
• 1995-2007 HLAI (Human Level AI): AI should return to its roots of striving “machines that think, that learn”
• Hays and Efros (2007): discuss the problem of filling in holes in a photograph
• 2008 Artificial General Intelligence or AGI: AGI looks for a universal algorithm for learning and acting in any environment
• Halevy et al_ 2009: learning algorithm
• 2010: Image Net launched the Image Net Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), their annual AI object recognition competition.
• 2010: Microsoft launched Kinect for Xbox 360, the first gaming device that tracked human body movement using a 3D camera and infrared detection.
• 2011: Watson, a natural language question answering computer created by IBM, defeated two former Jeopardy! Champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televise game.
• 2011:  Apple released Siri, a virtual assistant on Apple iOS operating systems.  Siri uses a natural-language user interface to infer, observe, answer, and recommend things to its human user. It adapts to voice commands and projects an “individualized experience” per user.
• 2012: Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng (Google researchers) trained a large neural network of 16,000 processors to recognize images of cats (despite giving no background information) by showing it 10 million unlabeled images from YouTube videos.
• 2014: Microsoft released Cortana, their version of a virtual assistant similar to Siri on iOS.
• 2014: Amazon created Amazon Alexa, a home assistant that developed into smart speakers that function as personal assistants.
• 2015: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak among 3,000 others signed an open letter banning the development and use of autonomous weapons (for purposes of war.)
• 2015-2017: Google Deep Mind’s AlphaGo, a computer program that plays the board game Go, defeated various (human) champions.
• 2016: A humanoid robot named Sophia is created by Hanson Robotics. She is known as the first “robot citizen.” What distinguishes Sophia from previous humanoids is her likeness to an actual human being, with her ability to see (image recognition), make facial expressions, and communicate through AI.
• 2016: Google released Google Home, a smart speaker that uses AI to act as a “personal assistant” to help users remember tasks, create appointments, and search for information by voice.
• 2017: The Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab trained two “dialog agents” (chatbots) to communicate with each other in order to learn how to negotiate. However, as the chatbots conversed, they diverged from human language (programmed in English) and invented their own language to communicate with one another – exhibiting artificial intelligence to a great degree.
• 2018: Alibaba (Chinese tech group) language processing AI outscored human intellect at a Stanford reading and comprehension test. The Alibaba language processing scored “82.44 against 82.30 on a set of 100,000 questions” – a narrow defeat, but a defeat nonetheless.
• 2018: Google developed BERT, the first “bidirectional, unsupervised language representation that can be used on a variety of natural language tasks using transfer learning.”
• 2018: Samsung introduced Bixby, a virtual assistant. Bixby’s functions include Voice, where the user can speak to and ask questions, recommendations, and suggestions; Vision, where Bixby’s “seeing” ability is built into the camera app and can see what the user sees (i.e. object identification, search, purchase, translation, landmark recognition); and Home, where Bixby uses app-based information to help utilize and interact with the user (e.g. weather and fitness applications.)