What is Artificial Intelligence?

According to the father of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy, it is “The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”

Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a software think intelligently, in the similar manner the intelligent humans think.

Artificial Intelligence is accomplished by studying how the human brain thinks, and how humans learn, decide, and work while trying to solve a problem, and then using the outcomes of this study as a basis of developing intelligent software and systems.

Most of us have used Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, or even Bixby at some point in our lives. What are they? They are our digital personal assistants powered with Artificial Intelligence. They help us find useful information when we ask for it using our voice; we can say ‘Hey Siri, show me the closest fast-food restaurant’ or ‘Who is the 21st President of the United States?’, and the assistant will respond with the relevant information by either going through your phone or searching on the web. This is a simple example of Artificial Intelligence!

 Artificial Intelligence works with large amounts of data which are first combined with fast, iterative processing and smart algorithms that allow the system to learn from the patterns within the data. This way, the system would be able to deliver accurate or close to accurate outputs. As it sounds, Artificial Intelligence is a vast subject, which involves much-advanced and complex processes, and hence its field of study includes many theories, methods, and technologies

What are the applications of Artificial Intelligence?

Fraud Detection :  Every time you make a transaction online/offline, using your credit or debit card, you receive a message from your bank asking if you have made that transaction. The bank also asks you to report if you haven’t made the transaction. The bank feeds its Artificial Intelligence system with data regarding both fraudulent and non-fraudulent transactions. The Artificial Intelligence system learns from this data and then predicts which transactions are fraudulent and which are not based on this huge training set.

Music and Movie Recommendations:
Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg had created Synapse, a music player which suggested songs that users would likely to listen to? Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora also recommend music and movies for users based on their past interests and purchases. These sites accomplish this by garnering the choices users had made earlier and providing these choices as inputs into the learning algorithm.

Artificial Intelligence in Retail :
The market size of Artificial Intelligence software is expected to reach up to $36 million by 2025. This hype in the market has caused retailers to pay attention to Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the majority of big- and small-scale industries are adopting Artificial Intelligence tools in novel ways across the entire product life cycle—right from the assembling stage to the post-sale customer–service interactions.

Autopilot Flight:
With the Artificial Intelligence technology, the pilot only needs to put the system on the autopilot mode and then the majority operations of the flight will be taken care of by Artificial Intelligence itself. It is reported by The New York Times that only seven minutes of human intervention (which mostly relates takeoff and landing) is required for the average flight of a Boeing plane.