Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
"If, in 1901, a talented and sympathetic outsider had been called upon (say, by a granting-giving agency) to survey the sciences and name the branch which would be least fruitful in century ahead, his choice might well have settled upon mathematical logic, an exceedingly recondite field whose practitioners could all have fit into a small auditorium — algebraists consumed by abstractive passion, or philosophers pursuing fantasies of Leibnitz and Ramon Llull, or (like Whitehead) both. It had no practical applications, and not even that much mathematics to show for itself: its crown was an exceedingly obscure definition of cardinal numbers. When, in 1910, it produced a work which the learned world was forced to notice — the first volume of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica — it was, so to speak, the academic Brief History of Time of its day, often mentioned, never used.
Our outsider would, of course, have been wrong. Mathematical logic was the inspiration for perhaps only half of twentieth-century philosophy …; many of our finest mathematicians, such as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann and Andrei Kolmogorov cut their teeth on it, and notation (and notions) which began in the obscurities of Peirce and Peano are now to be found in every undergraduate math book. True, some early application — one thinks particularly of Woodger's axiomatization of biology — have, perhaps unfairly, gone nowhere, and McCulloch and Pitt's' "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" is more important for launching neural nets upon the world than for using Carnap's formalism. But in one extremely important field, however, it reigns supreme, and that is computation. Programming is, simply, mathematical logic in action; the melding of theory and practice is so complete that most practioners have no idea that their speech — recursion, lexical scope, data abstraction … — is prose… Of course, some of the computer's intellectual roots were more obviously useful — but since these were the study of Brownian motion, and the physics of crystals and spectral lines, not much…
I don't really know what the moral is, beyond the obvious one that useless knowledge isn't."
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the subfield of computer science concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolic inference by computer and symbolic knowledge representation for use in making inferences. From the perspective of intelligence, AI can be seen as an attempt to model aspects of human thought on computers. From a research perspective, AI is the study "of how to make computers do things which, at the moment, people do better" (Rich and Knight).
Major issues include:
• Agents
• artificial life
• Bayesian Inference, uncertainty management, decision theory
• case-based reasoning
• chaos, complex systems, nonlinear systems
• cognitive science
• computer vision
• constraint logic programming and constraint satisfaction
• cybernetics and systems theory
• design and AI
• distributed AI
• evolutionary algorithms, genetic algorithms, genetic programming
• expert systems and knowledge-based systems (expert problem solving restricts domain to allow including significant relevant knowledge)
• fuzzy logic
• human-computer interaction
• intelligent agent architectures
• knowledge representation
• logical inference
• machine learning
• medical applications
• natural language processing and computational linguistics
• neural networks
• parallel and distributed algorithms and architectures
• philosophy of AI
• planning
• qualitative modeling and reasoning
• reasoning
• reinforcement learning
• robotics
• search (playing games, solving puzzles)
• speech recognition and synthesis
• Turing Test (inability to distinguish computer responses from human responses).
Introductory Web resources
An Introduction to AI (ThinkQuest)
Covers the history of AI, methods, applications, interviews with and biographies of AI experts in different fields, links to other AI resources, an updated message board, and examples of notable AI programs.
Introduction to AI and Expert Systems (Carol E. Brown and Daniel E. O'Leary)
The Intro to AI Show (Selmer Bringsjord)
Introduction to AI (Distributed Learning Centre)
Includes a useful glossary of AI-related terminology and uses WebBoard, a Web-based discussion tool from O'Reilly & Associates for asynchronous conferencing between students and facilitators in this online course.
Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) (Imperial College Department of Computing)
Periodicals
Communication and Cognition — Artificial Intelligence (CCAI)
(Quarterly; Communication & Cognition.) Publishes articles and book reviews relating to the evolving principles and techniques of Artificial Intelligence as enriched by research in such fields as mathematics, linguistics, logic, epistemology, cognitive science and biology. Provides a forum for discussion of such topics as cognitive modeling, logic programming, automatic learning, automatic knowledge extraction, AI and art, applied epistemology, and general aspects of AI. Furthermore, CCAI is concerned with developments in the areas of hard and software and their applications within AI. CCAI invites computer firms to submit special articles about new products, processes and/or information which they want to disseminate within the AI community as well as the business and industrial community.
[TOCs (June 1995— )]
Connection Science is an interdisciplinary scientific journal with a focus on the mechanisms of adaptation, cognition and intelligent behaviour in both living and artificial systems. The traditional scope of the journal has been broadened from connectionist research and neural computing to encompass work on other adaptive methods (e.g. evolutionary computing) as well as biologically inspired techniques and algorithms in applied domains.
(Quarterly; available online; MIT Press.) Provides an international forum for facilitating and enhancing the exchange of information among researchers involved in both the theoretical and practical aspects of computational systems of an evolutionary nature.
Expert Systems
The International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Neural Networks
[TOCs (February 1997— )]
(Quarterly; available online. Blackwell.) A forum for the expert systems and neural networks community devoted to all aspects of AI and advanced computing. Covers the development and use of advanced computing in areas which humans find intellectually difficult, which involve expertise or specialized knowledge, and which are the subject of continuing research, or of interest to those implementing current systems.
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Intelligence Magazine
New Visions of AI in Practice
International Journal of Expert Systems: Research and Applications (IJES)
(Quarterly. JAI Press.) Archival journal; seeks high quality original research papers providing clearly formulated theoretical results, or descriptions of novel applications, or empirical studies relating to issues of importance to the knowledge-based systems approaches to the construction of intelligent artifacts, that is, 'expert systems' in the broad sense of the term. A system is knowledge-based' when its behavior depends largely on information encoded in it or to which it has access, and is an 'expert system' when this knowledge would be considered expertise in a human. Encourages the submission of papers dealing with knowledge-based systems in general and expert systems in particular. Strives to strike a useful balance between theory and practice. Will not publish "look-Ma-no-hands" papers which simply report the existence of yet another expert system. Application papers should address some theoretical or practical issues in the design and construction of knowledge-based systems.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) (1993— )
[TOCs with article full text access]
(Available online; bound volumes by Morgan Kaufmann. ) Electronic and print journal; covers all areas of AI, publishing refereed research articles, survey articles, and technical notes. Reviews papers within approximately two months of submission and publishes accepted articles on the internet immediately upon receiving the final versions.
Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI) (1988— )
(Quarterly. Taylor & Francis.) Advances scientific research in AI by providing a public forum for the presentation, evaluation and criticism of research results, the discussion of methodological issues, and the communication of positions, preliminary findings and research directions. JETAI features work in all subfields of AI research that adopts a scientific rather than engineering methodology, focusing on work in cognitive science, problem solving, perception, learning, knowledge representation, memory, and neural system modelling. All papers are peer-reviewed.
Societies
American Association for Artificial Intelligence (1979— )
A nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence, improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions. Major AAAI activities include organizing and sponsoring conferences, symposia, and workshops, publishing a quarterly magazine for all members, publishing books, proceedings, and reports, and awarding grants, scholarships, and other honors.
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) (1982— )
A representative body for the European Artificial Intelligence community.
Evolutionary Programming Society (1991— )
Promotes research in the areas of evolutionary computation and self-organizing systems. Sponsors the Annual Conference on Evolutionary Programming and offers its members discounted registration at the conference, as well as a substantially discounted subscription rate for the journal BioSystems.
Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (USA)
Centers, Departments, and Institutes
Computational Biology Group, Michigan State University (USA)
Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(UK)
MIT AI Lab (USA)
SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center (AIC) (1966— ) (USA)
One of the world's major centers of research in artificial intelligence. A pioneer and a major contributor to the development of computer capabilities for intelligent behavior in complex situations. Its objectives are to understand the computational principles underlying intelligence in man and machines and to develop methods for building computer-based systems to solve problems, to communicate with people, and to perceive and interact with the physical world.
Other resources
Adaptive Systems WWW Resources
AI Access Information, Inc. (1993— )
A nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to facilitate the dissemination of scientific results in artificial intelligence. Publication of JAIR is its primary activity at present.
Calculating Machines
(Erez Kaplan)
The history of mathematics goes a long way back with devices and methods of calculation. Starting with the ancient Abacus, the slide rule and the logarithms, the mechanical calculating machines, the electromechanical calculators and finally the electronic computer.
This site deals mainly with the mechanical calculating machines from a collector's point of view.
CogPrints
Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive
An electronic archive for papers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), medicine (e.g., psychiatry, neurology, human genetics, imaging), anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.
Computational Biology Related Journals
(Washington University, Saint Louis)
A professional association for artificial intelligence, information science, and computer science researchers. Several concise email newsletters are available to members each week, covering AI research funding, software industry trends, leading-edge technologies, job opportunities, research software announcements, and other useful news. Technical topics frequently include neural networks, intelligent agents, fuzzy logic, robotics, artificial life, machine learning, genetic algorithms, intelligent scheduling, logic programming, expert systems, knowledge-based systems, case-based inference, intelligent databases, data or scientific visualization, data mining, natural language, machine translation, computational linguistics, and information retrieval.
Explanation by Pattern Means Massive Simplification
(David J. Cox)
A web site that explains how to use a method of visualizing strings of complex logical relationships such as those found in computer programs.
Geometry search: "Artificial Intelligence"
Geometry (the online learning center) search: "Robotics"
JAIR’s links to AI starting points on the web
Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI)
Literature Information and Documentation System (LIDOS)
(German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH)
Perceptrons: An Associative Learning Network
(Michele D. Estebon, Virginia Tech)
The Modularity Home Page
(Raffaele Calabretta)
Alan Turing Home Page
(Andrew Hodges)
The gateway and guide to a large Website dedicated to Alan Turing (1912-1954).