“Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do” -John Piaget

Artificial intelligence which was born as a brain child of fiction writers is not a fiction anymore and has started its advent our daily lives, though not an integral part of our lives yet days are not far when our lives become easier with applications of AI.

The first thought that would come to our mind when we think of AI is a Robot, but Robot’s are just one of the multiple applications of AI, It’s true that in our future we will be having robots working all along with us simplifying all the tedious tasks but AI is not just about robots it’s about the system, that can act intelligently. Well this article is an attempt to present you a glimpse of our future based on the current research ongoing in the field of AI.

To give a non conventional introduction to AI, let me give this small example:

Given to a system that X is son of A also Y is son of A, the system must be able to say that X and Y are siblings. Yes, It’s the way of making system behave as humans, one of the hottest research going on is the develop a system that actually reason like human beings, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have been successful to create a system which is able to reason as a 4-year-old child, it was named Eddie and its able to reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children of that age. The possible applications of this might be a virtual negotiator for a business company or a virtual online customer support, the user might be made to think that he is chatting with a human when he is actually chatting with an AI system and one thing we can learn here is the Turing test, which says that a system is said to be intelligent when an human judge is not able to reliably determine that the response is from a machine or human.

ALICE  : This video shows the latest evolved version of ALICE tested for turing’s test.

Applications of AI have grown. There are wide applications of developing a reasoning system , one day a system might become so intelligent that it might overtake man and build much more better systems that we cannot imagine!. Run Bot ,WIND The robot that can mimic human walking. ALICE , ELIZA This is AI system that can interact with human, it talks like a human being. Games, this is a no brainer… games use AI. Lace, an AI system to help people with cognitive disability. http://www.yourdiagnosis.com This is an online system developed , which uses AI to diagnose patients. http://witchit.com/ AI search engine, this searches based on contents instead of links. Inter Language search engines Search content in any language.  ASIMOV A famous humanoid robot, it can learn work and help in doing work. OmniZero, Robot and automobile! PARRO, Robot that nurse patients. Rice Planting Robot This can grow rice on it own.

RunBot Walking

Two things that scientists believed robots can never do is cycling and catching a ball as former requires balancing and the later requires dynamic judgment, but  the developments in robotics is showing all signs to disprove it. “RunBot” is a developed by Worgotter and his fellow researchers in Germany, the specialty of this bot is that it has an intelligence system designed to learn walking, the runbot can now not only walk mimicking human but can also climb higher terrains as ramps. This can be helpful for people with disability to regain their mobility, which can be a greatest gift to mankind. Engineers from Future Robotics Technology Center (fuRo), a division of the Chiba Institute of Technology, recently presented their latest invention Wireless Intelligent Networked Device (WIND), Device that allows a Robot to mimic a person’s moves.

AI in games

One of the most implemented form of AI is games, imagine a combat where a the opponent character learn your moves and try to avoid your attack the next time you do the same trick, or the difficulty of game increasing based on how successful you were in the previous round. This is possible with ai in games!

The web is now an integral part of our lives, and AI in web can change the way we use web, One thing that come to our mind when we think of web is Google, this is a search engine following Traditional Information Extraction (IE), it  takes a relation name and hand-tagged examples of that relation as input. Open IE is a relation independent extraction paradigm that is tailored to massive and heterogeneous corpora such as the Web. An Open IE system extracts a diverse set of relational tuples from text without any relation-specific input. With the application of AI Open IE can be a reality, with the efforts of M. Banko and O. Etzioni , A new model of Open IE has come to reality as TextRunner , this is a search engine for text content. You can try this at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/textrunner. One more such search engine available is http://witchit.com/ this provides the content to user directly instead of providing link to web pages, this is really a great feature but is in initial stages of development and since this is based on machine learning it gets better day by day with its usage.

AI systems are also developed for the betterment of lives of people for whom there were no hopes or other solutions, one such system is LACE, The goal of the Laboratory for Assisted Cognition Environments (LACE) is to create advanced computer systems that will enhance the quality of life of people suffering from cognitive disabilities. This interdisciplinary project combines computer science research in artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing with clinical research on patient care.  Assisted Cognition systems are proactive memory and problem solving aids that help an individual perform the tasks of day-to-day life.

AI has a lot of applications in the field of medicine. AIM : Artificial intelligence in medicine is a new discipline dealing with the issue, al lot of research is going on to develop a perfect “doctor in a box”, http://www.yourdiagnosis.com is an online doctor, which attempts to diagnose disease by asking various questions just like a doctor does also The Mayo Clinic is one such national integrated group of practice .

AI can be bought down to every single need of us and simplifying the most complex task, an example would be an application of library. Right now a digitalized library is a library where the book issue and search system is digital, think of a library where you can search for a topic you want to learn and you get list of books available with the given content, or the content with the same meaning as your search and in all languages that are in library! And yes this is possible with the application of AI.

Robots are sure to replace humans in many places of work, with the advent of Humanoid robots this is already becoming a reality, but it is somehow safer to use robots to very dangerous tasks performed by humans, tasks like mining where the workers are under extreme conditions of external environment really risk their life, it is also true that robots can perform many tasks better than human beings. With the application of AI like machine learning, we can have no doubts about robots outperforming humans. Japan, which can be considered as the capital of modern robots, sees its future in service robots. Economists predict that this helps Japan to re-emerge as the world top economic leader. ASIMOV a master piece by Japanese scientists is a humanoid robot which has a high level of communication and mobility skills is being used in posh business centers as a guide in their building to guide visitors of the building and to attract people. This has the capability to learn how to work based on the owners command. OmniZero is a Robot which can transform itself into car, wheel chair and also walk! PARO the furry robot. Robots are also used in Hospitals to help and nurse patients; PARO is once such robot which also got listed in Guinness book of records.One worth mentioning robot is Rice-Planting-Robot, which can sow and tend paddy all on its own.

Robo serving Food

We also have robots that can cook and also assist people in shopping by helping customers pick materials. Though all above mentions robots are developed by Japanese, it’s not a discouraging factor to others; it just shows the potential market to others and their opportunity for the future.

There are lot of areas where AI can be used, be it agriculture, design, banking, engineering, fraud detection, Law, tutoring systems, military, sports, telecommunication, scientific discovery etc. With the latest technologies that are emerging to build sophisticated robots powered with artificial intelligence is definitely going to create a revolution in the way we are living today. The future generation may look back at us and wonder how we were relying on a human doctor’s memory and experience or the man power we are wasting for the work that is obsolete to them.

Scientists speak on future of AI:

Having mentioned many of the advantages we shall also look at the problems that may arise due to use of robots, Of course nothing can beat the human brain as yet but the technologies developed right now if available to wrong hands can definitely cause a disaster. Imagine a spy robot with a camera which can follow any one anywhere which is now following you or a robot which can read persons mind based on neural activity in brain. But thank god such robots are not a reality yet though their prototypes and experiments are going on.

With all these said, let’s get ready for an intelligent future ahead!

Manu C
Student Content Intern