Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive thinking in humans is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge or information through senses and experience (learning), analysing that information (comprehension and thinking), remembering it over time (memory), and using to solve problems or improve processes or create new creative works or works of knowledge.

AI is used to describe computing devices and software programs and applications that mimic cognitive thinking.AI involves computing devices that can learn, analyze, and use information in a manner similar humans. AI systems have a significant advantage over humans in that they are able to process larger amounts of data than humans much faster and they are able to identify more extensive patterns and relationships in that data than is typically possible for humans.

The learning aspect of AI is a complex enough field of study and development to be separated into what we call Machine Learning. Just as humans take decisions based on current inputs and past experience, so does AI work closely with ML. The more data the algorithms can process and be allowed to determine a pattern the better their analysis and decisions will be.

AI and ML are complementary solutions, since without learning, an AI solution would only be able to solve a defined set of problems, which is not much better than decision support systems that have been around for ages.

Several solutions can be categorised as AI/ML applications:

• Recommendation systems that suggest products and services you may like based on your profile or your previous activities or purchases.
• Speech recognition systems (such as Siri and Alexa) that recognise voice commands and can respond.
• Self-driving cars that can follow roads and traffic signs and detect objects to avoid collisions.
• Strategic game systems (such as chess)

Interestingly, as computing devices and AI/ML algorithms become increasingly capable, tasks initially considered to require cognitive skills or intelligence are now considered to be normal computing capabilities, a phenomenon known as the AI effect. For instance, optical character recognition (OCR) which came into use many years ago and has now matured, actually does mimic the human ability to read and recognise written text but is no longer considered AI or ML.

We will start off by getting familiar with the concepts of AI/ML and the approaches to building AI/ML solutions and incorporating AI/ML in your solutions.