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Natural language

– Programming computers to understand

natural human languages

Neural networks

– Systems that simulate intelligence by attempt-

ing to reproduce the types of physical connections that occur in

animal brains

Robotics

– Programming computers to see and hear and react to

other sensory stimuli

Games playing

– Programming computers to play games such as

chess and checkers

AI has two objectives:

• To study the mechanisms of intelligence

• To build programs able to respond to intelligent activities.

History of artificial intelligence

In 1956 John MacCarthy, regarded as the father of AI, organized

a conference to draw the talent and expertise of others interested

in machine intelligence for a month of brainstorming. He invited

them for “the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial

intelligence.” From that point on, because of MacCarthy, the field

would be known as Artificial intelligence. The Dartmouth confer-

ence did bring together the founders in AI, and served to lay the

groundwork for the future of AI research. For that purpose, he

joined Minsky, Newell, Simon and Shannon.

The 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were marked by the

realization of many expert systems. The seventies were also the

years of the first experiments with mobile robots (for example,

Shakey the Robot of the SRI at Menlo Park, California). AI first

developed in USA, before interesting researchers in Europe and

Asia in the mid s1970s.

Different models of artificial intelligence

Today, three big models are used by researchers and engineers in

artificial intelligence:

• Symbolic models (Symbolic AI)

• Neuromimetic symbols (Connectionist AI)

• Statistics models (AI Statistics).

Fields of artificial intelligence

Robotics

– Robotics is the field of computer science and engineering

concerned with creating robots, devices that can move and react to

sensory input. Robotics is one branch of artificial intelligence. Robots

are now widely used in factories to perform high-precision jobs. They

are also used in special situations that would be dangerous for

humans – for example, in cleaning toxic wastes or defusing bombs.

Although great advances have been made in the field of robotics

during the last decade, robots are still not very useful in everyday life.

Aware of the numerous challenges arising from robotics (cost

and heavy weight), the scientists of IMSI (Institute of Materials

and Intelligent Systems) are trying to find more practical and

affordable ways.

Learning

– The domain of learning in AI is merely an attempt to

simulate with a machine the remarkable aptitude that man has

to learn. Hence the importance of theoretical researches which

try to provide a formal environment to machine-based learning.

Speech Recognition

– Many psychological studies based on the

child’s simultaneous development of language and intelligence

and on the comparison between man and the chimpanzee

revealed the importance of language in the development of intel-

ligence. In speech recognition, we can distinguish two methods:

• The systems of speech recognition which have the objective of

decoding the pronounced sentence word by word

• The systems of speech understanding which have the objective

of understanding the pronounced sentence.

Understanding natural languages

– Progress on building computer

systems that process natural language in any meaningful sense

requires considering language as part of a larger communicative

situation. Natural-language processing offers the greatest potential

rewards because it would allow people to interact with computers

without needing any specialized knowledge. You could simply walk

up to a computer and talk to it. In fact, two essential dimensions

are significant: understanding texts and automatic translation.

There are also voice recognition systems that can convert

spoken sounds into written words.

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Kindergarten children using computers to learn