What is arti cial intelligence

(AI)?

Arti cial intelligence (AI) is, at its core, the science of

simulating human intelligence by machines. One
de nition is the branch of computer science that deals
with the recreation of the human thought process. The
focus is on making computers human-like, not making
computers human. The goals of arti cial intelligence
usually fall under one of three categories: to build
systems that think the same way that humans do; to
complete a job successfully but not necessarily recreate
human thought; or, using human reasoning as a model
but not as the ultimate goal.

With the advent of the internet of things (IoT), the

interconnection via the Internet of computing devices in
everyday objects, AI is poised to play a large role. Arti cial
intelligence plays a growing role in IoT, with some IoT
platform software o ering integrated AI capabilities.

There are several sub-specialities that comprise the

whole. Although many of these subsections are used
 interchangeably with arti cial intelligence, each of them
has unique properties that contribute to the topic.

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S HA RES
Machine Learning vs. AI
Arti cial intelligence and machine learning (ML) are terms
that are often used interchangeably in data science,
though they aren’t the exact same thing. ML is a subset of
arti cial intelligence that believes that data scientists
should give machines data and allow them to learn on
their own. ML uses neural networks, a computer system
modeled after how the human brain processes
information. It is an algorithm designed to recognize
patterns, calculate the probability of a certain outcome
occurring, and “learn” through error and successes using
a feedback loop. Neural networks are a valuable tool,
especially for neuroscience research. Deep learning,
another term for neural networks, can establish
correlations between two things and learn to associate
them with each other. Given enough data to work with, it
can predict what will happen next.

There are two frameworks of ML: supervised learning and

unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, the
learning algorithm starts with a set of training examples
that have already been correctly labeled. The algorithm
learns the correct relationships from these examples and
applies these learned associations to new, unlabeled data
it is exposed to. In unsupervised learning, the algorithm
starts with unlabeled data. It is only concerned with
inputs, not outputs. You can use unsupervised learning to
see group similar data points into clusters and learn
which data points have similarities. In unsupervised
learning, the computer teaches itself, wherein supervised
learning, the computer is taught by the data. With the
introduction of Big Data, neural networks are more
important and useful than ever to be able to learn from
these large datasets. Deep learning is usually linked to
arti cial neural networks (ANN), variations that stack
multiple neural networks to achieve a higher level of
perception. Deep learning is being used in the medical
eld to accurately diagnoses of more than 50 eye
diseases.

Predictive analytics is composed of several statistical

techniques, including ML, to estimate future outcomes. It
helps to analyze future events based on what outcomes
from similar events in the past. Predictive analytics and
ML go hand in hand because the predictive models used
often include an ML algorithm. Neural networks are one
of the most widely used predictive models.

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) began as a
combination of arti cial intelligence and linguistics. It is a
eld that focuses on “computer understanding and
manipulation of human language.” NLP is a way for
computers to analyze and extract meaning from human
language so that they can perform tasks like translation,
sentiment analysis, and speech recognition, among
others. Each of these topics deals with textual data in a
di erent way. One such task is machine translation, where
a computer automatically converts one natural language
into another while preserving the meaning. It is di cult
even by arti cial intelligence standards, as it requires
knowledge of word order, sense, pronouns, tense, and
idioms, which vary widely across languages. In machine
translation, the computer scans words that are already
translated by humans to look for patterns. Like machine
learning, NLP has progressed leaps and bounds by using
neural network models that allow it to learn pattern
recognition. Services like Google Translate use statistical
machine translation techniques. There is still a long way
to go until a computer can be considered completely
uent in a given language, though.

Classi cation and clustering are two di erent ways that

ML creates pattern recognition. Classi cation is assigning
things to a speci c label, while clustering is grouping
similar things together. You can apply either of these
approaches to NLP. Text classi cation aims to assign a
document or fragment of text to one or more categories
to make it easier to sort through. Text classi cation is a
technique used in spam detection and sentiment
analysis, where e ect is assigned to a given set of text
being analyzed. Successful text classi cation, or
document classi cation, occurs when an algorithm takes
text input and reliably predicts what custom category that
text falls into. Document clustering is a technique that
clusters, or groups, similar documents into categories to
allow structure within a collection of documents. The
algorithm can do this even without understanding or
being uent in the language of the text input because it
learns statistical associations between inputs and the
categories. It is able to perform information extraction
from a chunk of text.

Question answering works in a similar way. A question

answering system answers questions posed on natural
language. This practice is often used in customer service
chatbots that can answer the most frequent or basic
questions before escalating the query to a real human, if
needed. These are di erent than bots, which are
automated programs that crawl the internet looking for a
speci c type of information. The highest form of a
question answering algorithm would pass the Turing test,
a test to see if a machine’s text-based chat capabilities
can fool a human into thinking they are talking to another
human. A machine using text generation could arguably
pass the Turing test. Text generation is the ability of a
machine to generate coherent, human-like dialogue.
Ethical concerns exist for AI text generation because they
are so similar to human text.
Speech
A major area of speech in AI is speech to text, which is the
process of converting audio and voice into written text. It
can assist users who are visually or physically impaired
and can promote safety with hands-free operation.
Speech to text tasks use machine learning algorithms
that learn from large data sets of human voice samples.
Data sets train speech to text systems to meet
production-quality standards. Speech to text has value for
businesses because can aid in video or phone call
transcription. Text to speech converts written text into
audio that sounds like natural speech. These
technologies can be used to assist individuals who have
speech disabilities. Amazon’s Polly is an example of a
technology that uses deep learning to synthesize speech
that sounds human for e-learning, telephony and content
creation applications.

Speech recognition is a task where speech is received by

a system through a microphone and checked against a
vocabulary bank for pattern recognition. When a word or
phrase is recognized, it will respond with the associated
verbal response or a speci c task. You can see examples
of speech recognition from Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa,
Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Google Assistant. These
products need to be able to recognize the speech input
from a user and assign the correct speech output or
action. Even more advanced are attempts to create
speech from brainwaves for those who lack or have lost
the ability to speak.
Expert Systems
An expert system uses a knowledge base about its
application domain and an inference engine to solve
problems that would normally require human
intelligence. Examples of expert systems include nancial
management, corporate planning, credit authorization,
computer installation design and airline scheduling.
Expert systems have potential value in IoT applications.
For example, an expert system in tra c management can
aid with the design of smart cities by acting as a “human
operator” for relaying tra c feedback to the appropriate
routes.

A limitation of expert systems is that they lack the

common sense that humans have, such as the limits of
their skills and how recommendations they make t into
the larger picture. They lack the self-awareness that
humans have. Expert systems are not substitutes for
decision makers because they do not have human
capabilities, but they can drastically reduce the human
work required to solve a problem.

Planning, scheduling and

optimization
AI planning is the task of determining the course of action
for a system to reach its goals in the most optimal way
possible. It is choosing a sequence of actions that have a
high likelihood of transforming the state of the world in a
step-wise fashion to achieve its goal. When this task is
successful, it allows for task automation. These solutions
are often complex. In dynamic environments with
constant change, they require frequent trial and error
iteration to ne tune. Scheduling is the creation of
schedules, or temporal assignments of activities to
resources while taking into account the goals and
constraints are necessary.

Where planning is determining an algorithm, scheduling

is determining the order and timing of actions generated
by the algorithm. These are typically executed by
intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned
vehicles. When they are done successfully, they can
solve planning and scheduling problems for organizations
in a cost-e cient manner compared to hiring more sta
which increases overhead costs. Optimization can be
achieved by using one of the most popular ML and deep
learning optimization strategies: gradient descent. It is
used to train a machine learning model by changing its
parameters in an iterative fashion to minimize a given
function to its local minimum.

Robotics
Arti cial intelligence is at one end of the spectrum of
intelligent automation, while robotic process automation
(RPA), the science of software robots that mimic human
actions, is at the other. One is concerned with replicating
how humans think and learn, while the other is
concerned with replicating how humans do things.
Robotics develops complex sensorimotor functions that
give machines the ability to adapt to their environment.
Robots can sense the environment using computer
vision.

Robotics are used in the global manufacturing sector in

assembly, packaging, customer service and sold as open
source robotics where users can teach robots custom
tasks. Collaborative robots—or cobots—are robots that are
designed to physically interact with humans in a shared
workspace. They can be valuable to organizations who
wish to eliminate human participation in dirty, dull and/or
dangerous tasks.

The main idea of robotics is to make robots as

autonomous as possible through learning. Despite not
achieving human-like intelligence, there are still many
successful examples of robots executing autonomous
tasks, such as swimming, carrying boxes, picking up
objects and putting them down. Some robots can learn
decision making by making an association between an
action and a desired result. Kismet, a robot at M.I.T.’s
Arti cial Intelligence Lab, is learning to recognize both
body language and voice and how to respond
appropriately.

Computer vision
Computer vision is de ned as computers obtaining a
high-level understanding from digital image or videos—
on other words, image recognition. It is a fundamental
component of many IoT applications, including household
monitoring systems, drones, and car cameras and
sensors. When computer vision is coupled with deep
learning, it combines the best of both worlds: optimized
performance paired with accuracy and versatility. Deep
learning allows IoT developers greater accuracy in object
classi cation.

Machine vision takes computer vision one step further by

combining computer vision algorithms with image
capture systems to better guide robot reasoning. An
example of computer vision is a computer being able to
“see” a unique set of stripes on a UPC and scan and
recognize it as a unique identi er. Optical character