INTRODUCTION TO

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
FOR IT & NON-IT PROFESSIONALS
WHAT IS LEARNING
WHAT IS LEARNING?

• Learning is a process that allows an agent to adapt and improve its

performance through instruction or experience
• Example: a child learns not to touch a hot item as it burns fingers
• Example: A dog learns to associate the command sit with the physical
response of sitting
ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING

• It is fundamental to many tasks

• Example: we are born with the physical attributes to ride a bike, not
with the knowledge that links sensory-input to the required actions
needed to stay upright on the bike
LEARNING

• Another common form of learning is the acquisition of skills through

direct interaction with the environment, a try-to-do, learn-by-doing,
approach
• For some form of learning prior knowledge might need to be
significant
• Prior knowledge might be implicit or explicit
LEARNING

• Learning is a very active and large area of AI research

• From Biological and cognitive perspectives we have a desire to
understand more about ourselves
• Example: a large body of research involves building computational
models of some small part of human brain in an attempt to explain
how our own neural circuitry performs tasks and adapts
• we are interested in real-world applications of Learning
LEARNING

• The successes in learning are many and varied: learning to recognize

customers; purchasing patterns of customers so that credit card fraud
can be detected, profiling consumers to target marketing campaigns,
categorizing content on the Internet and automated channeling of the
data according to the user interest, credit scoring of loan application,
parts-diagnosis for gas turbines, etc
LEARNING

• Learning has proved itself to be a valuable tool for both research and
commercial applications
• learning system compromises the sensing technology and response
effectors in those agents that learn through interaction with their
environment
ELEMENTS OF LEARNING

• An algorithm defines the process that is used for learning

• The job of the algorithm is to transform the input data into a particular
form of useful output
LEARNING - DEFINITION

• Learning denotes changes in a system that enables a system to do

the same task more efficiently the next time. - Herbert Simon
• Learning is constructing or modifying representations of what is being
experienced. - Ryszard Michalski