Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We recently had a discussion with some senior business leaders about Artificial intelligence (AI). It seems that a lot of people don’t understand that we are using AI practically every day and it’s not all about robots, Star Wars or Star Trek. AI is seeping its’ way into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves and its influence is likely to grow in the coming years.

Below is Wikipedia definition of AI.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, the field of AI research defines itself as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving.

As in all my articles, I like to use examples to help explain concepts. Let’s provide some examples of where we are using AI in our everyday lives.

Virtual Personal Assistants

Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are all intelligent digital personal assistants on various platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile). In short, they help find useful information when you ask for it using your voice; you can say “Where’s the nearest Chinese restaurant?”, “What’s on my schedule today?”, “Remind me to call Jerry at eight o’clock,” and the assistant will respond by finding information, relaying information from your phone, or sending commands to other apps.

AI is important in these apps, as they collect information on your requests and use that information to better recognize your speech and serve you results that are tailored to your preferences. Microsoft says that Cortana “continually learns about its user” and that it will eventually develop the ability to anticipate users’ needs. Virtual personal assistants process a huge amount of data from a variety of sources to learn about users and be more effective in helping them organize and track their information.

Video Games

One of the instances of AI that most people are probably familiar with, video game AI has been used for a very long time—since the very first video games, in fact. But the complexity and effectiveness of that AI has increased exponentially over the past several decades, resulting in video game characters that learn your behaviours, respond to stimuli, and react in unpredictable ways. As far as AI goes, video games are somewhat simplistic, but because of the industry’s huge market, a great deal of effort and money are invested every year in perfecting this type of AI.

Smart Cars

You probably haven’t seen someone reading the newspaper while driving to work yet, but self-driving cars are moving closer and closer to reality; Google’s self-driving car project and Tesla’s “autopilot” feature are two examples that have been in the news lately. An algorithm has been developed by Google that could potentially let self-driving cars learn to drive in the same way that humans do: through experience. These technologies are certainly on their way in as many Car manufacturers like Ford, BMW, Honda and many others are exploring.

Purchase Prediction

Large retailers and everyday businesses like Carrefour, Target and Amazon stand to make a lot of money if they can anticipate your needs. Amazon’s anticipatory shipping project hopes to send you items before you need them, completely obviating the need for a last-minute trip to the online store. While that technology isn’t yet in place, brick-and-mortar retailers are using the same ideas with coupons; when you go to the store, you’re often given several coupons that have been selected by a predictive analytics algorithm.

This can be used in a wide variety of ways, whether it’s sending you coupons, offering you discounts, targeting advertisements, or stocking warehouses that are close to your home with products that you’re likely to buy.

Fraud Detection

Have you ever gotten an email, SMS or a letter asking you if you made a specific purchase on your credit card? Many banks send these types of communications if they think there’s a chance that fraud may have been committed on your account, and want to make sure that you approve the purchase before sending money over to another company. Artificial intelligence is often the technology deployed to monitor for this type of fraud.

In many cases, computers are given a very large sample of fraudulent and non-fraudulent purchases and asked to learn to look for signs that a transaction falls into one category or another. After enough training, the system will be able to spot a fraudulent transaction based on the signs and indications that it learned through the training exercise.

Online Customer Support

Many websites now offer customers the opportunity to chat with a customer support representative while they’re browsing—but not every site has a live person on the other end of the line. In many cases, you’re talking to a rudimentary AI. Many of these chat support bots amount to little more than automated responders, but some of them can extract knowledge from the website and present it to customers when they ask for it.

Perhaps most interestingly, these chat bots need to be adept at understanding natural language, which is a rather difficult proposition; the way in which customers talk and the way in which computers talk is very different, and teaching a machine to translate between the two isn’t easy. But with rapid advances in natural language processing (NLP), these bots are getting better all the time.

Music and Movie Recommendation Services

While they’re rather simple when compared to other AI systems, apps like Spotify, Pandora, and Netflix accomplish a useful task: recommending music and movies based on the interests you’ve expressed and judgments you’ve made in the past. By monitoring the choices you make and inserting them into a learning algorithm, these apps make recommendations that you’re likely to be interested in.

Much of this functionality is dependent on human-assigned factors. For example, a song might have “driving bass,” “dynamic vocals,” and “guitar riffs” listed as characteristics; if you like that song, you’ll probably like other songs that include the same characteristics. This is the basis of many recommendation services; and while it’s not futuristically advanced, it does do a pretty good job of helping you discover new music and movies.

Smart Home Devices

Many smart home devices now include the ability to learn your behaviour patterns and help you save money by adjusting the settings on your thermostat or other appliances to increase convenience and save energy. For example, turning your oven on when you leave work instead of waiting to get home is a very convenient ability. A thermostat that knows when you’re home and adjusts the temperature accordingly can help you save money by not heating the house when you’re out.

Lighting is another place where you might see basic artificial intelligence; by setting defaults and preferences, the lights around your house (both inside and outside) might adjust based on where you are and what you’re doing; dimmer for watching TV, brighter for cooking, and somewhere in the middle for eating, for example. The uses of AI in smart homes are limited only by our imagination.

Your smartphone, your car, your bank, and your house all use artificial intelligence daily; sometimes it’s obvious what its’ doing, like when you ask Siri to get you directions to the nearest gas station. Sometimes it’s less obvious, like when you make an abnormal purchase on your credit card and don’t get a fraud alert from your bank. AI is everywhere, and it’s making a huge difference in our lives every day we expect AI to continue to grow and become more intelligent as more data is provided through IOT and Big Data.

Sources:

Wikipedia, Beebon