What do the Next 20 Years Hold for AI?

And the President of AAAI gives a short, nontechnical interview on the future of AI.  Points to a new road map on this topic, reading now.

What do the next 20 years hold for artificial intelligence?  by Caitlin Dawson, University of Southern California

Yolanda Gil, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), discusses what it will take to move AI forward without moving safety backward.

The year is 2031. An outbreak of a highly contagious mosquito-borne virus in the U.S. has spread quickly to major cities around the world. It's all hands on deck to stop the disease from spreading–and that includes the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which scour online news and social media for relevant data and patterns.

Working with these results, and data gathered from numerous hospitals around the world, scientists discover an interesting link to a rare neurological condition and a treatment is developed. Within days, the disease is under control. It's not hard to imagine this scenario—but whether future AI systems will be competent enough to do the job depends in large part on how we tackle AI development today.

That's according to a new 20-year Artificial Intelligence Roadmap co-authored by Yolanda Gil, a USC computer science research professor and research director at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI), with computer science experts from universities across the U.S.  ... "

The AI Behind Watson

A reexamination of current cognitive methods, and their use of knowledge representations, led me to this 2010 article:  The AI behind Watson, from AAAI magazine.  Nicely done overview. Necessarily dated, but a useful place to start.    Historical and also focused on the Jeopardy challenge.  How differently are things being done in applications today? Also:   Index of DeepQA technical papers that form the basis of Watson.  See also AAAI.org.

More from Cognitive Assistance Symposium

More from:   AAAI FSS-15 Cognitive Assistance Symposium - Part 2
by Frank Stein, Director of Analytics Solution Center at IBM.  At the link, more from other parts of the report.

" ... This is a continuation from my earlier post. The afternoon session of Day 1 started with 2 interesting talks on cognitive assistance for helping those with cognitive disabilities. Madelaine Sayko described Cog-Aid which would include a cognitive assessment, recommender system (based on the assessment) and an intelligent task status manager to help the patient. Then Daniel Sontag, DFKI, described the Kognit technology program which includes tracking dementia patient’s behavior using eye tracking and mixed reality displays to assist the patient perform activities in daily living. We expect to see more in this area in future symposiums.  ... " 

AI Magazine

Been a while since I have looked at this, but now that AI is reemerging with a vengeance, it is back on my list.    Worth following to connect the research and practical side of AI.   Some colleagues of mine will be publishing.  I will point out items as they are relevant. Subscription required for some content.

AI Magazine ... " .... This serial is an official publication of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. From these pages, you can access editorial, advertising, and subscriber information about the publication.

Called the “journal of record for the AI community,” AI Magazine helps AAAI members stay abreast of significant new research and literature across the entire field of artificial intelligence. This quarterly publication features timely, feature-length articles, consistently crafted to be clear enough to permit specialists to review work outside their particular area of expertise.

AI Magazine (ISSN 0738-4602) is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The Magazine is a direct benefit of membership in the AAAI. Inquiries regarding membership in AAAI can be made using AAAI's contact form.  ... " 

How Enterprises Use AI

In CWorld:   Good overview of the expansion of the use of cognitive, AI and links to Machine learning.  Based on learnings at the recent AAAI meeting.   My experience and connections, have led to getting lots of queries about where to start.

" .... While A.I. is being used in smartphones and self-driving cars, it's also working its way into the enterprise to filter spam out of email, handle complicated scheduling or detecting fraud in big data deployments.

"I think IT probably needs artificial intelligence," said Stephen Smith, a professor who specializes in robotics and A.I. at Carnegie Mellon University. "There are increasing cyberattacks we're dealing with. We have bigger, more complex problems with all the issues arising out of the explosion of the Web and all of our big data. We're already using A.I. It's already there. I think A.I. in the enterprise is going to start to cascade." ... " 

KNext: Knowledge in Texts

Jim Spohrer Writes about KNext:
Len Schubert (U Rochester) has developed KNEXT http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~schubert/projects/world-knowledge-mining.html -- more triples than ConceptNet, and apparently designed with inference in mind - I need to check it out more. (Len's was the next to last talk at AAAI, and I was lucky enough to share a cab ride with him to the airport and got a chance to chat with him) .... "

MIT ConceptNet5 Stores Knowledge

Via Jim Spohrer, some Notes from the recent AAAI meetings:

" .. I ran into Henry Lieberman (MIT) at AAAI15 conference on Artificial Intelligence/Robotics/CognitiveScience (AI/Robotics/CogSci). Henry suggested that I check out MIT's ConceptNet5

ConceptNet5 contains over 10 millions assertions (facts) about the world.  An example fact is "An apple is a fruit" ... Here are some fun facts about MIT's ConceptNet5: (1) over 10 million assertions (facts)  (2) over 7 million English assertions (facts) (3) 50 relationships (4) nearly 3 million English concepts  If you want to know more, check out my blog post here:
http://service-science.info/archives/3701    

Further .... ConceptNet includes Cyc's upper ontology and some items from DBpedia as well.    ... "  

Some of my response: I wrote more about our investigation of the Cyclopedia work here. 

Also for a while, Cycorp was posting snippets of knowledge on Twitter. Which I thought was a clever idea. But they have not done so since March 2013. More about that effort here, and a link to the tweets to date.  With IBM's collaboration with Twitter this might be an interesting effort to reexamine.

Herb Simon's Last Lecture

From the currently ongoing AAAI conference via Jim Spohrer.  On Herb Simon.  I was most interested in his work about systematizing decision making and AI, still very relevant in the new cognitive world.  Some discussion of Herb Simon's last public lecture.   Will follow up on that.   Also, a YouTube video of Herb Simon speaking.  Talked of engaging him, but never met him.

Games Matter in the Progress of AI

In IBM Research News:  We used a number of game approaches to teach AI.  But business decisions are much harder than games.   So games are pointers to AI, but rarely directly applicable.

" ... Dr. Gerald Tesauro, the IBM Research scientist who taught Watson how to make wagers when its Jeopardy!, has been named an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow. His development of TD-Gammon, “a self-teaching neural network that learned to play backgammon at human world championship level,” and work applying machine learning across disciplines from computer virus recognition to computer chess, and other fields made him an ideal candidate for the association’s title.

You’ve worked on machines that play Jeopardy!, chess and backgammon.  What is the significance of machines that can play games?
         
Dr. Gerald Tesauro: 
In the early decades of AI, algorithms were not ready to tackle the ambiguous, ill-defined nature of real-world problems. Researchers therefore proposed that complex board games like chess and backgammon could serve as an ideal testing ground for AI algorithms (the so-called "Drosophila of AI"). Tasks such as playing grandmaster-level chess may be incredibly complex, but they can be precisely specified for the computer.

By working in these domains, researchers made enormous progress in search, learning, and simulation techniques, to the point where the best computers now surpass the best humans in virtually all classic board games. As a result, AI is now moving on to tackle real-world ambiguity head-on.  ... " 

AAAI Opens Digital Library

The premier professional Artificial Intelligence society, AAAI, has opened its digital library to the public.
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