Lecture 1:

Introduction

Sarun Dahal
sarun.dahal@islingtoncollege.edu.np

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Agenda
• Introduction and overview of the module
• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Applications of Artificial Intelligence
• Data structures recap

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What is Artificial Intelligence?
“Intelligence: The ability to learn and solve problems” - Webster’s
Dictionary.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence exhibited by machines or
software” - Wikipedia.
“The science and engineering of making intelligent machines” – John
McCarthy.
“The study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a
system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its
chances of success.” - Russel and Norvig AI book.

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Why AI?
“Just as the Industrial Revolution 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.” - Andrew Ng.

“Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity.” - Andrew Ng.

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Overview of the module
• Semester Long Module
• Fully assessed by coursework
• 2 courseworks
 CW1 (20%) – Research work on a chosen AI topic
 CW2 (80%) – Development of an AI system based on topic chosen in
CW1
• Students will be required to present their work in form of a
VIVA/Presentation

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Applications of AI
Speech Recognition
• Virtual assistants: Siri (Apple), Echo (Amazon),
Google Assistant, Cortana (Microsoft)
• “They” help get things done: send an email,
make an appointment, find a restaurant, tell
you the weather and more
• Leverage deep neural networks to handle
speech recognition and natural language
understanding

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Applications of AI
Handwriting recognition (check, zipcode)

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Applications of AI
Machine Translation

100+ languages

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Applications of AI
Robotics: Awesome robots today!

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Applications of AI
Recommendation Systems

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Applications of AI
Recommendation Systems

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Applications of AI
Search Engines

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Applications of AI
Email (spam detection)

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Applications of AI
Chess (1997): Kasparov vs IBM Deep Blue

Powerful search algorithms !!

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Applications of AI
Jeopardy! (2011): Humans vs. IBM Watson

Natural Language Understanding and information extraction!

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Applications of AI
Go (2016): Lee Sedol versus Google AlphaGo

Deep Learning, reinforcement learning, and search algorithms!

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Applications of AI
Autonomous Driving

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State-of-the-art Applications
• Speech recognition
• Autonomous planning and
• Scheduling
• Financial forecasting
• Game playing, video games
• Spam fighting
• Logistics planning
• Robotics (household, surgery,
navigation)
• Machine translation
• Information extraction
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• Automatic assembly • Traveling salesperson
• Sentiment analysis • Document summarization
• Fraud detection • Transportation/scheduling
• Recommendation systems • Computer animation
• Web search engines
• Autonomous cars Many more !!
• Energy optimization
• Question answering systems
• Social network analysis
• Medical diagnosis, imaging
• Route finding
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Applications of AI
What will AI allow us to automate?
We'll be able to automate everything that we can describe. The
problem is: it's not clear what we can describe. - Stephen Wolfram,
MIT

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Foundation of AI

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Foundation of AI
• Philosophy
– Logic, methods of reasoning.
– Mind as physical system that operates as a set of rules.
– Foundations of learning, language, rationality.
• Mathematics
– Logic: Formal representation and proof.
– Computation, algorithms.
– Probability.

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Foundation of AI
• Economics
– Formal theory of rational decisions.
– Combined decision theory and probability theory for decision making under
uncertainty.
• Neuroscience
– Study of brain functioning.
– How brains and computers are (dis)similar.

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Foundation of AI
• Psychology
– How do we think and act?
– Cognitive psychology perceives the brain as an information processing machine.
– Led to the development of the field cognitive science: how could computer
models be used to study language, memory, and thinking from a psychological
perspective.
• Computer engineering
– Cares about how to build powerful machines to make AI possible.
– E.g., Self-driving cars are possible today thanks to advances in computer
engineering.

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Foundation of AI
• Control theory and cybernetics
– Design simple optimal agents receiving feedback from the environment.
– Modern control theory design systems that maximize an objective function over
time.
• Linguistics
– How are language and thinking related.
– Modern linguistics + AI = Computational linguistics (Natural language
processing).

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History of AI
• 1940-1950: Gestation of AI
– McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit to model of brain
– Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence
http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/9
• 1950-1970: Early enthusiasm, great expectations
– Early AI programs, Samuel’s checkers program
– Birth of AI @ Dartmouth meeting 1956.
– Check out the MIT video “The thinking Machine” on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aygSMgK3BEM

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History of AI
• 1970-1990: Knowledge-based AI
– Expert systems, AI becomes an industry
– AI winter
• 1990-present: Scientific approaches
– Neural Networks: le retour (the return)
– The emergence of intelligent agents
– AI becomes “scientific”, use of probability to model uncertainty
– AI Spring!
– The availability of very large datasets.
*Big Data will drive future discoveries and alleviate the complexity in AI.

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What we will be learning
• Introduction to artificial intelligence, history of Artificial
Intelligence.
• Building intelligent agents (search, games).
• Machine Learning algorithms.
• Applications of AI (Natural Language Processing, Vision).
• Solving interesting real AI problems through programming Python.

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Rational Intelligent Agents
• We will be learning about designing intelligent agents.
• An agent perceives the environment and acts upon that
environment to achieve some task.
• We care specifically about rational agents.
• Rational agents act based on or in accordance with reason or logic.
• Rationality is relative to how to act to maximize a performance
measure.
• AI aims to design the best agents (programs) that achieve the best
performance given the computational limitations.
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Search agents
• Agents that work towards a goal.
• Agents consider the impact of actions on future states.
• Agent’s job is to identify the action or series of actions that lead to
the goal.
• Two kinds of search:
 Uninformed Search (use no domain knowledge)
 Informed Search (use domain knowledge reach the goal faster)

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Search Agents

The 8-queen problem: on a chess board, place 8 queens so that no queen is

attacking any other horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

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Search Agents

Find the shortest route.

Start: Las Vegas

Goal: Calgary

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Prerequisites for the course:
• Python will be the programming language for this course, so
familiarize yourself with python
• We will be using the Anaconda python distribution
https://www.anaconda.com/
• Familiarize yourself with jupyter notebooks
• Data structures

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Data structures
Stack
Stack is a linear data structure which follows a particular order in which
the operations are performed. The order is LIFO(Last In First Out).

image credit: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/stack-data-structure/

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Data structures
Queue
A Queue is a linear structure which follows a particular order in which the
operations are performed. The order is First In First Out (FIFO).
The difference between stacks and queues is in removing. In a stack we remove
the item the most recently added; in a queue, we remove the item the least
recently added.

image credit:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/queue-data-structure/

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Data structures
Priority Queue
Priority Queue is an extension of queue with following properties.
1) Every item has a priority associated with it.
2) An element with high priority is dequeued before an element with low
priority.
3) If two elements have the same priority, they are served according to
their order in the queue.
go and implement these data structures in python

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Summary
• AI is a hard (computational complexity, language, vision, etc), and a
broad field with high impact on humanity and society.
• What can AI do for us is already amazing!
• AI systems do not have to model human/nature but can act like or be
inspired by human/nature.
• Rational (do the right thing) agents are central to our approach of AI.
• Note that rationality is not always possible in complicated environment
but we will still aim to build rational agents.
• AI is a flourishing and exciting field: everyone can contribute.

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Suggested readings
• Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach; Stuart Russel & Peter
Norvig
• Programming Collective Intelligence; Toby Segaran
• Python Machine Learning; Sebastian Raschka

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 End of Lecture 1

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 Thank you !
Any questions ?

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