Demystifying the Mystical: My Foray into the World of AI

How much do you know about AI?

“We can build a much brighter future where humans are relieved of menial work using AI capabilities”

- Andrew Ng

The original Homo Sapiens(as proposed by Darwin) that lived the stone age couldn’t have imagined such a treasure trove of sophistication that abounds today and the mystery that continues to unfold in the world of economics, medicine, and science(did they even know all these). If someone had told my grandfather that computers will soon speak a refined language and behave almost like him, he would reject vehemently and almost shoot the person. He never lived to see it!

Just recently I decided to move past the complacent pool laid by my forefathers and step into the world of “pure mechanical manipulation of symbols and mathematics” ( not mathematics actually) and I wrote on how I met the Anaconda and Python that doesn’t speak Parsel https://medium.com/ai6-ilorin/demystifying-the-mystical-my-foray-into-the-world-of-ai-917241ccae42. But much to your eternal chagrin, I never said anything about Artificial Intelligence and AI Saturdays Ilorin. Okay! Come, let me quickly take you through AI corridors, luckily, we might find it relaxing on a sofa, who knows?!

Artificial intelligence has been around since antiquity, you have heard of myths and stories of artificial beings behaving like a human, espousing consciousness and a certain degree of intelligence. Also, its seed was planted and groomed by philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who worked day and night to break barriers and produce bloodless beings endowed with an abstract essence of mathematical reasoning; an electric brain that can mimic your intelligence and possess a constellation of facts as much as you do.

But the advent of modern AI can be traced to a workshop held in Dortmouth college in 1956 organized by Marvin Minsky and others. Since then, there have been many going on; there have been theories and criticisms, failure and success stories, but the 21st century brought such a boom into the Industry and machine learning became so prominent( just lately, John gave the world Sophia).

In that quest to produce thinking machines and computers that can converse in human tongue, there have been a number of contributors whose works have been enshrined forever in the world of AI, notable among them are Alan Turing( you have heard of Turing machine right? ); Ross Quillian( he created the semantic web — a necessary map of relational understanding to computers); and Marvin Minksy. Just last year, according to the washingtonpost.com, the trio of Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun won the Turing award as a result of their tremendous commitment and contribution to AI.

The effort of the aforementioned people and other players in AI is not fruitless in the least and AI has ceased to be a facade and lip service( if it was), rather, it has cemented its place as the catalyst to transformation all over the world. Also, the breadth of its applications is increasing rapidly, because AI has it turns out is relevant to any intellectual task, consider Deep Blue ( an AI system designed specifically for Chess by IBM), it defeated the world-renowned chess master Garry Kasparov in a game of Chess in 1996. And today, AI is being applied in healthcare and automotive (automotive industry now creates self-driving vehicles which are endowed with the ability to map and find their way. Prevention collision, braking among others are also embedded in their systems).

And if you have been around in Mother Earth and not traveled to Mars — mind you, the machines that hover on the surface of Mars also utilize AI — you should have heard about Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, all of these are virtual assistants that are capable of voice interaction, making to-do lists, and navigate the web on your behalf. They are all outputs of AI!

Wait! Is AI not a mystery? Isn’t it an afflatus? Can you learn it and build the next AleSiCor? Read on, I have a piece of delightful news for you.

Do you think AI has a degree of complexity and is all about elaborate and mathematics pieces that cannot be understood except by the likes of Gottfried Leibniz, Alan Turing, Marvin Minksy, and Hinton? You are wrong!

Perhaps you have never been to AI Saturdays. Yes AI Saturdays is your lair where the mysteries of AI are being broken into pieces. As I have said in my earlier post, the intention of AI Saturdays is straight and clear: to demystify AI for you so that you can be the next Alan Turing.

AI Saturdays as the name indicates is overwhelmingly engaged in breaking barriers for young programmers and taking them through the mazes of Machine Learning through coding practical exercises and building amazing AI prototypes that do not sleep but work. And there is no need for your heart to beat in tremolo over the amount required to become a pro. AI Saturdays — AI6- is a non-profit movement across the universe(I mean the globe), bringing quality AI education to your door with the whopping amount of 0 USD. The Saturday in the appellation signifies that classes are held every Saturday consecutively for 14 fourteen weeks. In less than six months, you are expected to speak in Parsel and tell computers to “keep calm while you direct the course”. Welcome to the AI Community!

AI Saturdays Ilorin?

AI Ilorin is like any other AI community; an active learning community that hopes to promote Artificial Intelligence in Ilorin and its environ. AI Ilorin is not all about coding and demystifying AI concepts, it’s also about teaching the programmers how to dominate and be at the forefront of the African AI Community.

Who is the brain behind the AI6 Ilorin? No one but a shon of the shoil (son of the soil), the very African soil. He is Adnan — a prominent member of AI6 Lagos and an AI enthusiast who wishes to rewrite the narrative of Africa and the world at large.

Oh! Did I just forget to tell you the meaning of AI despite all these jargon? Okay, don’t crucify me. Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the task to give computers the ability to recognize patterns, . . . and you can always turn to your Alexa, Siri, or Cortana to learn more. Don’t speak Parsel, speak your language!

Don’t be caught up in a web of increasing exaggeration and overwhelming fear for AI, but keep in mind that AI is a piece of geometry we can all solve together.

Come! Let’s sprint across new grounds.