What is Artificial Intelligence

INVITED SPEAKER:

Bohdan Macukow, Department of Computer Science and Numerical Methods, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, macukow@mini.pw.edu.pl

Lecture title:
What is Artificial Intelligence?

Abstract: I suppose everybody heard of Artificial Intelligence, but relatively few people have had a really good idea of what the term really meant. For many people Artificial Intelligence associates with some science-fiction products of Hollywood filmmakers. Well, perhaps that’s how the things will be with some super computers of the future but not how they are now in the contemporary research laboratories.

Artificial Intelligence is sometimes defined as the science of making computers do things that require intelligence when done by humans. It is a young field. Its birth occurred in the early 1950s. More precisely, Artificial Intelligence “was born” as a discipline at the conference "The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956.

Artificial intelligence is a scientific field whose goal is to understand intelligent thought processes and behaviour, and to develop methods for building computer systems that act as if they were “thinking” and could learn from own actions. Although the study of intelligence is the subject of other disciplines, such as philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience, people in those disciplines have begun to work with computational scientists to build intelligent machines. The computers offer effective means for testing theories of intelligence, which in turn enable further exploration and understanding of the concept of intelligence.

I will try to present some facts from the history of Artificial intelligence as well as the current state of the art in the field.

 

Bohdan Macukow graduated in 1969 from the Warsaw University of Technology where he currently holds the position of full professor. Currently he is also the Coordinator of the Quality of Education and the System of Studies at the Warsaw University of Technology. He has published over 90 scientific papers and is also co-author of five books and author of the six chapters in scientific monograph, and co-editor of the book Optical Processing and Computing published in 1989 by Academic Press. His current research interests are: applied computer sciences, mathematical and computer modeling of recognition systems and associative memories. Since 1994 he has been involved in several Projects devoted to organization of engineering programs taught in English, and the development of the Internal Quality Assurance and Assessment Systems. From 2002 to 2007 he was the member of State Accreditation Commission (PKA). Since 2009 he is the president of the Accreditation Commission for Technical Universities (KAUT).