What exactly is AI?
It
is term coined by John McCarthy for the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, who
defined it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines".
The term is catchy and has caught the public imagination ever since. What people have not realized that it is not just in our talks any
more instead it has been incorporated in our day to day lives. When we hear the
word Artificial Intelligence, the first thought that passes us is Robots and
the basic functionalities which they are capable of performing these days. Will
they take over the world, as predicted in the movies long back? Terminator,
C3PO from Star Wars and Ava from Ex-Machina just proves the fact that these
Robots tend to be either faultlessly loyal Victorian butlers or duplicitous
psycho-pathological killers. That is another topic to discuss about. AI is not
the Artificial Intelligence that hollywood would have us imagine to be. The one
just mentioned above is one of the components of AI i.e. Machine Learning (and
within it Deep Learning).The pioneering technology within this field is the
neural network (NN), which mimics (to a very rudimentary level) the pattern
recognition abilities of the human brain by processing thousands or even
millions of data points.
Here are some applications of AI
Spinning the wheel without a touch
A long time back it was predicted that we
will have self automated cars, which on their own will decide how to move
forward. Though it hasn't been fully incorporated yet, this year BMW introduced
its 750i xDrive Model, the first car that enables self parking. All you need to
do is press a button and it parks itself in a tight parking spot. Another
example is of the 2015 Mercedes-Benz S65 which self automates the brake when it
comes too close to the car in it's front.
The Homemaker
There are quite a number of instances where
these "Homemaker Robots" are been used. The one which particularly
intrigued me was the one used for folding clothes. The time was reduced by
tenfold of times. The only difficulty that particular Robot has is in finding
where the corners are placed but once all that is figured out it instantly
folds the clothes taking less than a second and stacks them according to their
size.
Entertainment Intelligence
When people like us who like listening to
music all day long cannot decide what to really play, applications such as
Pandora, Netflix come into picture. What do they basically do? These streaming
services use Deep Learning technology based on out past selections of movies
and music to currently play something new. Deep Learning is a new type of
AI-old AI with a twist. Again that's another topic to discuss about but to put
it in sentence "Instead of teaching the machine everything, let it teach
itself".
What next?
Just like the way it's shown in the movies
,let's take an example of a terminator. When Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into a bar, we can see that every object that
he looks at, that point of time gives it the entire information about that
particular object. For instance there are bikes parked outside the bar and on
his screen we can see it getting the information about the bike like the model
number,the owner of the bike and his history,the mileage etc . Until a decade
back this was hardly possible but now there are machines that can easily
distinguish between almost all cats and dogs. This used the Deep Learning Mechanism as initially the differences
between the two were fed and every time the machine made a mistake it was
corrected by humans until it figured out why it was wrong. Now this machine works with an accuracy of 99%.
As for the future, the intelligent machines
will be able to pick up subtle cues to recognize a person's needs. It will be
able to distinguish between a happy and a sad face which at the times is
difficult even for a human to infer.
