Artificial Intelligence

AI is the science and engineering of making machines intelligent. It is the ability of a machine to perform cognitive functions (we associate with human minds), such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with the environment, problem solving, speech recognition, decision making, language translation and even exercising creativity.

Artificial Intelligence entails that the machines can carry out so called “smart tasks” and to make independent decisions, whereas Machine Learning enables machines to improve themselves as time goes by and as algorithms become more and more sophisticated.

AI system is only as good as the data it receives. It can interpret them only within the narrow confines of the supplied context. It does not “understand” what it has analysed — so it is unable to apply its analysis to other scenarios. And it cannot distinguish causation from correlation.

AI shines in performing tasks that match patterns to obtain objective outcomes. Examples of what it does well include playing chess, driving a car on a street, and identifying a cancer lesion in a mammogram.

AI is currently being applied to a range of functions both in the lab and in commercial/consumer settings:

• Speech Recognition: Allows intelligent systems to convert human speech into text or code.
• Natural Language Processing: A subset of speech recognition enables conversational interaction between humans and computers.
• Computer Vision: Allows a machine to scan an image and identify it using comparative analysis.