Let’s get AI, shall we?

From A to Z of an artificial mind

We’ve all heard of Victor Frankenstein’s famous scientific creation, Machine Men and other types of cyborg assassin killing machines. No matter whether they’re defenders or potential dangers to the human kind, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been on our minds.

Since the 19th century, if not earlier, the idea of combining intelligence and machines has been present in real life and fiction. The reason behind it has always been different. Today the “Artificial Intelligence” topic is more trendy than ever.

Google Trends shows a rise in the popularity of the topic in the last two years. Robots, machine learning, Elon Musk, Watson and Blockchain are some popular subtopics that come along with AI. Seeing that it has always been on our minds, why is it only such a popular topic now?

After many years of research and development, the advances of technology have come to a point where AI is closer than ever before. The presence of this technology implies positive developments, huge debates, and a lot of confusion.

From simple algorithms empowering content creation on your website to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence is here to turn our lives upside-down. We can see it in the form of tools like search and optimization, problem-solving, knowledge representation, probabilistic and statistical methods, neural networks, and many more. In other words, we can see it in autonomous cars, Netflix, Waze or Google’s reCAPTCHA, just to mention a few.

So, what is artificial intelligence? To fully understand it and get immersed into it, The Green Route presents an easy guide to the components of Artificial Intelligence.

Computer Science

Computer Science is the study of the theory, experimentation, and engineering that form the basis for the design and use of computers. Information is its most important element. Computers take information from an environment and store it to process it and deliver it back to the environment.

Computer Science involves theories, algorithms, coding, engineering, and much more. As simple as it might sound, it’s actually pretty complex and AI is one of its many complexities.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is a series of computational techniques that enable effective problem solving, similar to that of a human. These tasks can be performed without any guidance and learn from experience to improve its performance.

Considering this definition, it is important to note that the ability to solve one problem does not imply that there is an ability to solve a different one.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence. It is the ability of the systems to adapt and improve their performance based on the data provided, without necessarily using programming.

With machine learning, researchers believe that computers can work towards mirroring human intelligence. In order to achieve this, computers need deep learning.

Deep Learning

Deep Learning refers to the techniques of Machine Learning that allow computers to solve complex mathematical models. The “deep” has to do with the complexity of the model.

The architecture of Deep Learning is similar to that of our brain, made up of neural networks that process information back and forth. These networks help to improve deep learning areas such as Natural Language Processing.

Robotics

We constantly relate Artificial Intelligence to robots. Although this association might not be as accurate as it really is — Terminators, really? -, it actually has everything to do with AI. Robots are built to operate in complex scenarios.

To do so, machine learning is the central subfield for robots. This provides them with computer vision, speech recognition, Natural Language Processing, and much more.

We might not be using robots to perform our daily tasks and make our lives easier (yet). However, we all use Artificial Intelligence in some way or another, although we may not always be aware of it.

Now, this is a just a bit of what AI is. We could continue talking about it for paragraphs and paragraphs, but let’s leave it for other posts, shall we? Stay tuned for more articles about it and let us know - how do you feel about Artificial Intelligence? How do you use it?