Artificial Intelligence Synonyms

(You can also view this post and others at https://www.definingdata.com)

Synonyms are words that mean largely the same thing, although there may be contextual differences. In my view, the following terms are synonyms. 

Artificial Intelligence - often focused on robotics. The AI field used to approach intelligence by building models of the world. There may still be pockets of people that still do that, but if there are, they publish papers and attend conferences that I haven’t come across yet. My understanding of the AI field is that it’s largely adopted the Machine Learning Approach.

Machine Learning - largely similar to Artificial Intelligence in it’s application, although it’s usually defined in a way that simply finds patterns/correlations in past data. Machine learning usually focuses on what’s going to happen and doesn’t care as much about “why”.

Data Science/Data Mining - largely generic terms. I went to KDD2014, a conference that labels itself as “Knowledge and Data Discovery” There was an entire “visualization” track of presentations that to me felt strikingly similar to Business Intelligence.

Informatics/Bioinformatics - focused on various aspects of the medical profession/business. Applications here are wide and deep, and include everything from real-time disease prediction to analyzing who’s (not) going to pay their bills.

Natural Language Processing - focused on gleaning insights from a large collection of unstructured text. 

Computer Vision - often similar in practice to Natural Language Processing, although it analyzes pixels of pictures/videos rather than collections of text.

Business Intelligence - Anecdotally, my experience is that many BI people focus on questions that they can answer with sums and averages. Data Scientists may look at the practice of BI and assert that BI practitioners don’t ask hard enough questions. Sales professionals from BI vendors have been known in the past to push back on this assertion from Data Scientists.

If you disagree, I love comments! Please be nice.