Hi, everyone,

it's really a pleasure to welcome you all to artificial intelligence or AI course.

In this lecture, we'll review the what, the why, and
the who of AI along with AI applications and history.
We'll also review some course logistics and roadmap.
So welcome again and let's get started.
First of all, AI has always intrigued people.
And has been the topic of TV shows and movies for decades.
For example, conversing with a computer using natural language has always been
a dream for humanity.
And seen in TV, such as Space Odyssey.
AI is actually an active and attractive field for
the movie making industry in many ways.
It is the perfect kind of topic to craft thrillers, adventures and dramas.
And keep people on the edge of their sofa.
Remember Terminator, AI, Her, Space Odyssey and
HAL, Ex machina and so on and so forth.
There have been several attempts to define artificial intelligence.
But let's start with the most basic definition of intelligence,
according to the Webster dictionary.
It's the ability to learn and solve problems.
This is a definition independently of whether it's Human intelligence or
machine intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, according to Wikipedia,
is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software.
We're being more specific here, and talking about machines and
software that show signs of intelligence.
More specifically, according to McCarthy, who is one of the pioneer of artificial
intelligence, and who even coined the term AI.
It's the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.
And finally, the definition we adopt in this course is coming from Russell and
Norvig the authors of the famous artificial intelligence book.
Artificial intelligence is the study and design of intelligence agents
where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives it's environment and
takes actions that maximizes its chances of success.
This is the most specific definition of all, in which we are talking about
intelligence agents and the fact that they perceive their environment and
act upon that environment to maximize their chances of success.
This is a definition that we will adopt in this course.
So why artificial intelligence?
I would like to refer to this quote from Andrew Ng,
who is an active researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Who said that just as the industrial revoluton freed up a lot of humanity from
physical drudgery.
I think AI has the potential to free up
Humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.
So, this is beautiful, because it just puts
artificial intelligence as a second kind of revolution from Humanity.
So, what is artificial intelligence?
There's four schools of thought, according to Russell and Norvig.
The first one is about thinking humanly.
In which, several researchers defined it as, how to make computers have a mind,
or think.
One of them is Haugeland in 1985 who said
that it is the exciting new efforts to make computers think.
Machines with minds in the full and literal sense.
The second school of thought is about acting humanly as defined by Rich and
Knight in 1991.
As the study of how to make computers do things,
which at the moment people are better at.
The third school of thought is about thinking rationally in which we want to
study the mental faculties through the use of computational models.
So we started talking about computational models to mimic the brain or
mimic our mental faculties.
And finally,
the last school of thought is about acting rationally as defined by Poole et al.
in 1998.
Which is, computational intelligence is the study and
the design of intelligent agents.
So we start talking about intelligent agents in 98,
in which we want to design those systems.
We don't talk any more about making the machine have a mind or
making the machine think rationally, or making the machine act humanly.
We want the machine to act rationally rather than humanly.
So first of all, let's go through this schools of thought individually.
The first school is about thinking humanly.
Also called the cognitive approach in which we want to design machines,
with what?
With minds, machines that think in the full and literal sense.
This requires first to determine how humans think.
It was actually in the 60s when this kind of cognitive revolution started.
It requires scientific theories of internal activities of the brain,
answer questions like what level of abstractions.
Is it knowledge or circuits and how to validate the knowledge.
Today, cognitive science and artificial intelligence are distinct disciplines and
we really don't want to have machines with minds.
We want to understand how brains function.
This is part of the cognitive science field.
The second school of thought is about acting humanly.
In which case, we want to have machines do things just like humans, do things.
And this school of thought, started with Alan Turing in 1950.
When he published his paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
in which he defined what we call the Turing Test, or the Imitation Game.
In his test, he actually deem a computer
to be passing a test of intelligence if it can fool a human interrogator.
So to picture this, we have a human interrogator on one side and there is
wall separating this human interrogator from another human and another AI system.
So the human interrogator would be asking questions to the other side of the wall.
And the AI system would be deemed as intelligent if
the human interrogator can't tell which is the AI system from which is the human.
So it says that it fooled the human interrogator and it showed to exhibit some
form of intelligence because it was able to do that.
So in his paper, Alan Turing also suggested major components of AI including
knowledge, reasoning, language understanding and learning.
He also suggested in his paper major components of AI including knowledge,
reasoning, language, understanding and learning.
And he finally anticipated many of the problems or
many arguments against AI that's coming up in the next 50 years.
Acting humanly or making machines do things
has actually inspired many discoveries, including flying.
So flying is one example in which actually we
made the machine do things based on what we observe in humans and in animals.
For example we know that birds can fly so
the concept of flying, the proof of concept is out there.
We know it's possible to fly but
then the process to fly has been invented by humans.
And we don't see airplanes flapping their wings :),
however airplanes use similar, have the same effect of flying using different
principles including aerodynamics processes, etc, etc.
So acting humanly has inspired discoveries even though the process at
the end has been different from what we observe in nature.
The third school of thought also called thinking rationally, or
laws of thoughts, involves using math and logic to do artificial intelligence.
It's about codifying the right thinking with logic.
And it all started with several Greek schools that developed various forms of
logic.
Such as first order of logic, propositional logic and more.
It uses some notations and rules of inference or derivations for thoughts.
And the idea is to use/codify all knowledge in this representation and
use it to derive new knowledge.
The problems with this,
is that first of all not all knowledge can be expressed with logical formulations.
Sometimes, for example, to express time or space.
It's hard and can lead to complicated logical formulas for that.
And finally, it also leads to computational blow up,
if you want to consider all possible factors that come into play with logic.
If you want to use all possible factors that come into play with logic.
And finally the last school of thought is about acting rationally,
design intelligent systems that actually act to maximize their goal.
It's about agents that do the right thing, that which is actually expected to
maximize the goal achievement giving the available information about
the environment, the background knowledge, etc.
So we want to devise in this school of thought rational agents,
that is actually one that acts to achieve the best outcome and
when there is a scholastic environment it means uncertainty.
Want to achieve the best expected outcome given these agents.
And so we quote here Aristotle when he said.
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and
pursuit, is thought to aim at some good.
This is exactly the spirit of this school of thoughts in designing
intelligent agents.
Finally, in this course, we're going to adopt the fourth line of research or
fourth line of thoughts.
Which is acting rationally.
Or how to divide intelligence systems that act rationally in order to achieve
their goals.