Transcript Week 2 - School of Computer Science

Introduction to AI
&
AI Principles (Semester 1)
WEEK 2
John Barnden
Professor of Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham, UK
Do You Have an Intelligent Pet?
What Would It Mean for an Alien to be Intelligent?
What AI Have You Encountered?
INTRODUCTION
Ways I Have Been Stupid
 Getting into bed when I didn’t mean to.
 Making silly mistakes when nervous.
 Leaving house keys indoors.
 Thinking it was Thursday when it was Wednesday.
 Double-booking.
 Chasing a mugger.
 Not asking enough questions in lectures when a student.
In What Ways Have You Been
Stupid?
ANY OBSERVATIONS?
Stupidity and Intelligence
So, we’re not intelligent creatures?
Stupidity in the context of intelligence.
Could an ant/rat/dog/monkey be stupid in those ways?
Did those mistakes arise out of good reasons, actually? The
necessity of stupidity.
Emotion and thought. (Huge but hot topic.)
We can intelligently reflect on our stupidity!
As well as being stupid about our intelligence!!
What is the Field of
“Artificial Intelligence”
????
Not an easy question, for many reasons, incl.:

What is “intelligence”????

What does “artificial” mean or imply?
Basically, AI (the field) is the study of how to create
artificial objects that have features that we associate with
intelligence, and cognition more generally, in humans (and
other living things), such as reasoning, planning,
communicating in language, solving problems, seeing
what’s around, moving around in the world, creating
artworks, playing games, learning, emoting, being
conscious, etc.
Caution
 The “artificial objects” are currently computers, robots, computer
programs, etc., as we know them today, but could include radically
different types of artefact in future …
 And given the possibility of synthetic biology, we might eventually
grow our artefacts … and how different would that be from a
woman just giving birth?
 And who is that “associates” those features with intelligence? …
In fact AI covers a lot of things most people would not have
thought of as “intelligent” – e.g. seeing that there’s a pencil on a
desk. (Hence my inclusion of “cognition in general”.)
 Many AI researchers don’t themselves produce or directly study
programs, computers, robots, etc., but instead: underlying
computational principles or frameworks, mathematical theory, etc.
Why Do We Do AI?
An “Engineering” Aim
A “Psychological” Aim
A “General/Philosophical” Aim
“Engineering” Aim
To engineer, or provide computational principles and
methods for engineering, useful artefacts that are arguably
intelligent (in the broad sense above), without necessarily
having any mechanistic similarity to human or animal
minds/brains.
The usefulness may be in an industrial domain or an
everyday, practical domain, but may also be in other
domains such as art or mathematical theorem proving.
“Psychological” Aim
To devise computational principles, computationallydetailed theories, or running computational systems that
provide a basis for possible testable accounts of cognition
in human or animal minds/brains.
In short, contributing computationally to questions such
as, how does the human mind work?
But why not leave that to Psychologists? Answer: they
don’t know AS much about computation. Also, thinking
“outside the human box” is liberating.
“General/Philosophical” Aim
To devise computational principles, computationallydetailed theories, or running computational systems that
serve as or suggest possible accounts of cognition in
general, whether it be in human-made artefacts, in
naturally-occurring organisms, or in cognizing organisms
yet to be discovered,
or that illuminate philosophical issues such as the nature
of mind, thought, intelligence, consciousness, perception,
language, representation, learning, rationality, society, etc.
Mixing of Aims
 The three aims are often inextricably combined in a given
piece of research.

An individual researcher may subscribe to more than one of the
aims.

Developments in pursuit of any one of the aims could happen to
inspire advances towards one of the others.

Endeavours that have any one of the aims can deliberately look
for inspiration from research that has one of the other aims.
Why Am I (Puzzled Student) Doing AI??
 It is a particularly fascinating, fun, liberating, inspiring,
challenging, breathtaking, … in short, sexy aspect of CS.
 AI technology (software, hardware) is creeping more and more into
practical applications.
 It’s a relatively people-orientated side of CS, and interacts/overlaps
with many other disciplines such as Psychology.
 Good basis for interesting final-year projects.
Some Actual or Emerging Applications
Learning, planning & communication in computer games.
Diagnosis, in many areas including medical.
Intelligent conversational agents (incl. chatbots, helpful
avatars on company sites, ICAs fronting travel services).
Emotive ICAs.
Military apps, incl. battle planning, target identification.
Aircraft/spacecraft/planet-craft control & action planning.
[See Callan book]
Some Example Applications, contd. 1
Stock market prediction.
Fraud-detection: credit cards, phone usage.
Data mining for marketing purposes.
Text summarization and information-extraction.
Artistic creativity (music, paintings).
Building design.
Intelligent transport systems, utility networks, etc.
Some Example Applications, contd. 2
Intelligent personalized web-search agents.
Policing and national security.
Machine translation (of language).
Semantic web.
WHAT DOES “ARTIFICIAL”
MEAN??