WHAT IS AI

AI is the ability of machines to make optimal decisions. For understanding AI better let's first define Intelligenge, so what is intelligenge? It is a persons decision making ability keeping his environment, circumstances and past experience into perspective. Artificial intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving.

TYPES OF AI

Narrow AI (or weak AI): Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI, in that it is

designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car).

General AI (AGI or strong AI): While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

WHAT DOES AI DO TODAY

There are a vast number of emerging applications for AI: interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines, organizing personal and business calendars, responding to simple customer-service queries, co-ordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location, helping radiologists to spot potential tumors in X-rays, flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices, and so on.

WHY THE RECENT SURGE

Although reserch and development started as late as 1950's it is only recently that the field took off. The major roadblocks researchers faced were the unavailability of data and inadequate processing power, though what truly has fueled the rise is new programming languages such as python and r and their powerful libraries specifically desinged to deal with AI and also online community which keeps the libaries updated and has now made it easy for newcommers to make entry into this once reserved for only elites field.

WHAT IS MACHINE LEARNING

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence whose primary aim is to allow the computers to learn automatically without human intervention or assistance and adjust actions accordingly. The process of learning begins with observations or data, such as examples, direct experience, or instruction, in order to look for patterns in data and make better decisions in the future based on the examples that we provide.Machine learning algorithms are used in a wide variety of applications, such as email filtering and computer vision, where it is difficult or infeasible to develop conventional algorithms to perform the needed tasks.

TYPES OF MACHINE LEARNING

Supervised learning : The computer is presented with example inputs and their desired outputs,  and the goal is to learn a general rule that maps inputs to outputs.

Unsupervised learning : No labels are given to the learning algorithm, leaving it on its own to find structure in its input. Unsupervised learning can be a goal in itself (discovering hidden patterns in data) or a means towards an end (feature learning).