Introduction to Artificial

Intelligence
Lecture 01
Amna Iftikhar
Email : amnaiftikhar.bukc@bahria.edu.pk

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 Today’s Agenda

• Course Contents

• Grading Policy

• Projects

• Overview of the Main Topics

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

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 Course Outline
• Introduction
• Reasoning and Knowledge Representation
• Problem Solving by Searching
• Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• Adversarial Search
• Learning
• Uncertainty handling
• Recent trends in AI and applications of AI algorithms

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 Text Book and Reference Books
Text Book
• S. Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach, Prentice Hall, (3rd edition)

Reference books
• Ben Coppin, “Artificial Intelligence
Illuminated”, Jones and Bartlett illuminated
Series
• Richard O. Duda, Hart, David Stork, “Pattern
Classification”, 2nd Edition
• Steven Rabin, AI Game Programming Wisdom

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 Marks Distribution

Assignments (Theoretical) 30%

Midterm Examination 20%
Final Examination 50%
Total 100%

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 What is Artificial Intelligence?

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How would a pacman agent be intelligent?

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 Basic Questions
(Taken from http://www-formal.stanford.edu)

• What is artificial intelligence?

• It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent
computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human
intelligence.
• Yes, but what is intelligence?
• Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world OR “Ability
to make the right decisions given set of inputs and a variety of possible actions.”
• Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.
• Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to human
intelligence?
• Not yet. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of
computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the
mechanisms of intelligence and not others.

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 Basic Questions(contd)
• Isn't AI about simulating human intelligence?
• Sometimes but not always or even usually. On the one hand, we can
learn something about how to make machines solve problems by
observing other people or just by observing our own methods. On the
other hand, most work in AI involves studying the problems the world
presents to intelligence rather than studying people or animals. AI
researchers are free to use methods that are not observed in people or
that involve much more computing than people can do.
• Does AI aim at human-level intelligence?
• Yes. The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve
problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However,
many people involved in particular research areas are much less
ambitious.

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 What is Intelligence ?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence)
• How to define intelligence is controversial.

• As stated by "Mainstream Science on Intelligence"

(1994), an editorial statement by fifty-two researchers:
“A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability
to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas,
learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a
narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and
deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on,"
"making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.”

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 Intelligence

• Intelligent behavior exhibit some or all of the

following characteristics:
– Problem Solving
– Reasoning
– Planning
– Decision making
– Inference
– Learning
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 Strong vs. Weak AI

• Strong AI refers to the field of research that is interested

in making computers think at a level equal to humans

• Weak AI represents the wider domain of AI

technologies. Weak AI features can be added to systems
to give them intelligent qualities.

• The course focuses on weak AI.

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 Strong vs. Weak AI

• The followers of strong AI believe that by giving a computer

program sufficient processing power, and by providing it with
enough intelligence, one can create a computer that can literally
think and is conscious in the same way that a human is conscious.

• Many philosophers and Artificial Intelligence researchers consider

this view to be false, and even ludicrous.

• Weak AI, in contrast, is simply the view that intelligent behavior

can be modeled and used by computers to solve complex
problems.

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 Philosophical vs. Practical AI

• Philosophical:
– Can machines think, in principle?
– Will machine thought be different from human
thought?
• Practical
– Collection of techniques to automatically solve
particular problems that require “intelligence”
(whatever that is)
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 Philosophical vs. Practical AI

• Philosophical AI Questions
– Can we make something that is as intelligent as a human?
– Can we make something that is as intelligent as a bee?
– Can we get something that is really evolutionary and self-improving
and autonomous and flexible….?
• Practical AI Questions
– Can we save this plant $20 million a year by improved pattern
recognition?
– Can we save this bank $50 million a year by auto fraud detection?
– Can we start a new industry of handwriting recognition / automated
negotiation / helpdesks/ …..?

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 Big Milestones
• On May 11, 1997, an IBM
computer called IBM ®Deep Blue®
beat the world chess champion
after a six-game match: two wins
for IBM, one for the champion and
three draws. The match lasted
several days and received massive
media coverage around the world.
It was the classic plot line of man
vs. machine.

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 Big Milestones

• DARPA Urban Challenge

• The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize
competition for driverless cars.
• The 2007 Challenge was held in California.
– 96 KM course
– 6 hours time duration
– Rules included obeying all traffic regulations
while negotiating with other traffic and
obstacles and merging into traffic.
– The $2 million winner was Tartan Racing, a
collaborative effort by CMU and GM.

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2015 – Machines “see” better than humans
•  ImageNet challenge --
algorithms compete to show
their proficiency in recognizing
and describing a library of 1,000
images – declare that machines
are now outperforming humans
.
• Since the contest was launched
in 2010, the accuracy rate of the
winning algorithm increased
from 71.8% to 97.3% 
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 2018 – Self-driving cars hit the roads
• the launch of Google spin-off Waymo’s 
self-driving taxi service in Phoenix,
Arizona
•  The first commercial autonomous
vehicle hire service, Waymo One is
currently in use by 400 members of the
public who pay to be driven to their
schools and workplaces within a 100
square mile area
• this undoubtedly marks a significant
step towards a future where self-
driving cars will be a reality for all of us

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 AI Competitions
• ROBOCUP
• The official goal of the project:
"By the middle of the 21st century, a team of
fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer
 players shall win a soccer game, complying with
the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of
the most recent World Cup.“

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 TeamNUST – RoboCup SPL 2015 – Qualification Video
https://vimeo.com/116190627

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 RoboCup
• SAVIOUR, Ghulam Ishaq
Khan Institute of Engineering
Sciences and Technology
• Karachi Koalas - Institute of
Business Administration,
Pakistan
• NUST SMME - 
National University of Scienc
es and Technology
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 DARPA Challenge
• DARPA Challenges
• The DARPA Robotics Challenge Held from 2012
to 2015
• aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground
robots that could do “complex tasks in
dangerous, degraded, human-engineered
environments”

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 Angry Birds Challenge
• The long term goal is to build AI agents that
can play new levels better than the best
human players
• http://aibirds.org/ (IJCAI 2018)

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 GOOGLE AI Challenge
• Google.org issued an open call to
organizations around the world to submit their
ideas for how they could use AI to help
address societal challenges.

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 AI Competitions
• PAKDD Datamining competition (Pacific Asia
Know..)
– “Auto ML”
•  In this challenge you are asked to provide code for
solving real world classification problems without any
human intervention. 
• And many more

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 History of AI
• 1950s –The Birth of AI
– 1950: Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."
– 1956: John McCarthy coins the term, "Artificial Intelligence" at a Dartmouth
computer conference.
– 1958: John McCarthy invents the Lisp language, an AI programming language,
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
• 1960s –The Rise of AI
– 1965: Joseph Weizenbaum builds ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on
a dialogue in English on any topic (MIT).
– Arthur’s Clark book titled “2001: A Space Odyssey” –HAL, an intelligent
computer onboard a Jupiter-bound spacecraft, murdered most of the crew
out of paranoia over its own survival.
– Knowledge representation was a strong theme during the 1960s, as strong AI
continued to be a primary theme in AI research.

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 History of AI
• Overwhelming Optimism
– I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to program computers…to make
them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than
70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence, 1950.

– Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work

a man can do 
Herbert Simon, 1956

– In from three to eight years, we'll have a machine with the general
intelligence of an average human being.
Marvin Minsky to Life magazine, 1970

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 History of AI
• 1970s – The Fall of AI – AI Winter
– 1969: Excitement of neural networks came to an
end in 1969 with the publication of the mongraph
titled “Perceptrons.”
– The 1970s represented the fall of AI after an
inability to meet irrational expectations.
– End of fundings
– The First AI winter 1974-1980

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 History of AI
• 1980 - 1987 – AI Rises Again
– Advancement in probabilistic reasoning, machine
learning, intelligence agents, and computational
intelligence systems.
– Expert Systems
– Knowledge Representation
– Return of Funding

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 History of AI
•1988 - 1993 – Second AI Winters
–The first indication of a change in weather was the sudden
collapse of the market for specialized AI hardware in 1987.
Desktop computers from Apple and IBM had been steadily
gaining speed and power and in 1987 they became more
powerful than the more expensive Lisp machines made
by Symbolics and others. There was no longer a good
reason to buy them. An entire industry worth half a billion
dollars was demolished overnight.
–Unreal Expectations

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 History of AI
• 1993 to date
– 1997: IBM computer Deep Blue beats world
champion Garry Kasparov in chess match.
– Deep Learning
– Big Data
– AI behind the scenes

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 Turing Test
• Alan Turing, in his famous paper “Computing Machinery and
Intelligence” (1950), suggested that instead of asking whether
machines can think, we should ask whether machines can pass a
behavioral intelligence test, which has come to be called the Turing
Test.
– The test is for a program to have a conversation (via online typed messages)
with an interrogator for five minutes.
– The interrogator then has to guess if the conversation is with a program or a
person
– The program passes the test if it fools the interrogator 30% of the time.
• Turing conjectured that, by the year 2000, a computer with a storage
of 10^9 units could be programmed well enough to pass the test. He
was wrong—programs have yet to fool a sophisticated judge.

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 Loebner Prize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize
•
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence
 that awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the
judges to be the most human-like.

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 Critiques on Turing Test

• It is widely believed today that even if a computer could pass the

Turing test, it would still not truly be conscious or intelligent in the
way that humans are.
• It is more important to study the underlying principle of
intelligence than to duplicate an exemplar.
• Aeronautical engineering tests do not define the goal of their field
as making “machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can
fool even other pigeons”.
• The quest for ‘artificial flight’ succeeded when the Wright brothers
and others stopped imitating birds and started using wind tunnels
and learning about aerodynamics.

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 Intelligence in machines vs. humans

What has happened over the last 40-50 years -

to the disappointment of all those who made
breathless predictions about where AI would
go - is that things such as playing chess have
turned out to be incredibly easy for
computers, whereas learning to walk and
learning to get around in the world without
falling over has proved to be unbelievably
difficult.
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 Applications of AI
• Although many of these fields are intermingled, but
applications of AI can be broadly classified among the
following:
– Industry/ Robotics
– Medical and Health
– Online and Telephone customer service
– Transportation
– Telecommunication
– Toys and games
– News, publishing, and writing
– Natural Language Processing (NLP)
– Marketing , Finance, Fraud detection, Money Laundering etc.
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 Industry/ Robotics
• Assembly line automation
– Baxter
• Warehouse automation
– Amazon using 45,000 Kiva robots in their warehouses.
– Alibaba using Quicktrons instead
• Resource optimization
• Robotics
– Firefighting
– Search and rescue
– Disaster management
– Robotic surgery

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 Medical and Health
• BioMind:
– Chinese AI beats 15
doctors in tumor
diagnosis
competition (July
2018)

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 Online/ Customer service
• Recommendation systems
– Netflix
– Facebook
– Twitter
– Linkedin
– MySpace
• Customer service representatives:
– Telephone
– Email
– Chat
– Social media
• A lot of customer support inquiries can simply be prevented by knowing what
customers need before customers turn to support – a win-win for everyone.
• Companies are combining both AI with a human touch to help customer service
reps prioritize responses and respond both faster and better.

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 Transportation/ Aviation
• Transportation:
– Fleet management
– Logistic Planning
– Route Planning
• Technological Improvement
– Fuzzy logic controllers for:
• Gear box
• Fuel consumption
• Break assist/ collision avoidance, ABS
– Self driving cars
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 Toys and Games
• AI pets
• Board Games
– Chess, Go, Checkers, Poker, Bridge
• Modern Video Games:
– Path finding, strategy design, navigation
• Combat AI:
– Action, first person shooter, adventure
• Cheating AI:
– Common variations include giving AIs higher speeds in racing games to catch up to
the player or spawning them in advantageous positions in first person shooters.
– The use of cheating in AI shows the limitations of the "intelligence" achievable
artificially; generally speaking, in games where strategic creativity is important,
humans could easily beat the AI after a minimum of trial and error if it were not for
this advantage.

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 News, publishing and writing
• AP, Fox, and Yahoo! all use AI to write simple stories like
financial summaries, sports recaps, and fantasy sports reports.
• AI isn’t writing in-depth investigative articles, but it has no
problem with very simple articles that don’t require a lot of
synthesis.
• “Dante” Pakistan introduces first business robot journalist
(20th January 2019)
– “TheRoboJournalist writes the report after taking into account the
related fundamental analytics, technical information (like graphs and
charts) and gauging prevailing sentiments. It also takes into account
the development taking place on social media, irrespective of
whether the development is true or not to gauge the sentiment,”

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 Fraud Detection
• Loan Defaulter
• Intrusion Detection
• Stock Prediction
• Money Laundering

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 Natural language processing
• Spam filtering
• Information retrieval: rank web pages based
on relevance to query
• Machine translation: Google Translate handles
more than 100 languages (37 via photo, 32 via
voice)
• Speech recognition: personal assistants (Siri,
Google Now)

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 Chinese Social Credit System
• In 2020, China will fully roll out its controversial 
social credit score. Under the system, both financial
behaviors like “frivolous spending” and bad behaviors
like lighting up in smoke-free zones can result in stiff
consequences.
• Penalties include loss of employment and educational
opportunities, as well as transportation restrictions.
• Those with high scores get perks, like discounts on
utility bills and faster application processes to travel
abroad.
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 AI for corona virus
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/02/02/coronavirus-can-ai-arti
ficial-intelligence-make-a-difference/#
25277a8b5817
•  BlueDot, which is a venture-backed startup. The company has built a
sophisticated AI platform that processes billions of pieces data, such as from
the world’s air travel network, to identity outbreaks.
• Hospital starts to use AI-powered droids capable of disinfecting
themselves to help treat patients
• Two robots took to their posts yesterday at a hospital in southern China
• They were tasked to deliver medicine and collect bed sheets and rubbish
• The AI devices can cut the workload of medics and curb cross-infection
• 20 medical workers in China have caught the coronavirus from patients 

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 The droids began to deliver medicine and food to patients as
well as collecting bed sheets and medical rubbish yesterday in
Guangdong, according to the provincial health commission

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