What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition. Artificial Intelligence, often abbreviated as “AI”, may connote robotics or futuristic scenes, AI goes well beyond the automatons of science fiction, into the non-fiction of modern day advanced computer science. Professor Pedro Domingos, a prominent researcher in this field, describes “five tribes” of machine learning, comprised of symbolists, with origins in logic and philosophy; connectionists, stemming from neuroscience; evolutionaries, relating to evolutionary biology; Bayesians, engaged with statistics and probability; and analogizers with origins in psychology.

Recently, advances in the efficiency of statistical computation have led to Bayesians being successful at furthering the field in a number of areas, under the name “machine learning”. Similarly, advances in network computation have led to connectionists furthering a subfield under the name “deep learning”. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are both computer science fields derived from the discipline of Artificial Intelligence.

Broadly, these techniques are separated into “supervised” and “unsupervised” learning techniques, where “supervised” uses training data that includes the desired output, and “unsupervised” uses training data without the desired output.

AI becomes “smarter” and learns faster with more data, and every day, businesses are generating this fuel for running machine learning and deep learning solutions, whether collected and extracted from a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift, ground-truthed through the power of “the crowd” with Mechanical Turk, or dynamically mined through Kinesis Streams. Further, with the advent of IoT, sensor technology exponentially adds to the amount of data to be analyzed — data from sources and places and objects and events that have previously been nearly untouched.

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