AI All Around Us

                                                                   

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.