One of the dreams of the computing sector is to build an intelligent digital assistant that could serve people according to peoples’ nature. Building this type of intelligent mac hine is a big challenge to computer scientists. An intelligent mac hine must have at least the following behaviours – vision, speech and voice recognition, smelling sense, learning from experience to solve new problems and coping with the unknown. The science of artificial intelligence (AI) is trying to overcome these challenges by combining the study of nature, understanding from humans' intelligent behaviour and brain function, other animal’s acute senses, with mathematic s, statistics, logic and traditional computer science. Some of AIs achievements include the NASA's Mars Rover, Google's Self-Driving Cars, IBM’s Watson, Microsoft's Xbox 360 (the first gaming device to track human body movement) and muc h more.
This unit is designed to introduce the philosophy behind artificial intelligence, the most efficient techniques of AI and various intelligent systems that help us to overcome various challenges. This unit guides the student to investigate the emerging AI technologies which could solve various real-world challenges and problems.
Topics included in this unit are the philosophical background to AI, current trends and the future of AI, ethics and issues in AI ,a range of AI applic ations (computer vision, speech processing and so forth), top-down approach of AI techniques, fuzzy logic, knowledge-based systems, natural language proc essing), bottom-up approach of AI techniques (neural networks, evolutionary computing, swarm intelligence), and emerging AI technologies (Brain Computer Interfacing, Ambient AI, Smart City, GPU AI etc).
On successful completion of this unit students will be able to understand the fundamental concepts in artificial intelligence from a theoretical, practical and cognitive point of view, and also gain innovative thought processes to build intelligent systems for future needs. Furthermore, the students can gain hands-on experience in developing intelligent systems using a programming language such as C/C++, C#, Java, Prolog, Lisp, Python, R, or a tool such as Weka, KNIME, MS AzureML, Accord.NET, AForge.NET, Neuroph, tools for NLP (NLTK, AIML), tools for swarm robotics (Microsoft robotics developer studio, Orocos, ‘Player Stage Gazebo’) etc.
As a result students will develop skills such as communic ation literacy, critical thinking, analysis, reasoning and interpretation, which are crucial for gaining employment and developing academic competenc e.
By the end of this unit students will be able to:
LO1. Analyse the theoretical foundation of artificial intelligence, current trends and issues to determine the effectiveness of AI technology.
LO2. Impleme nt an intelligent system using a technique of the top-down approac h of AI.
LO3. Impleme nt an intelligent system using a technique of the bottom-up approac h of AI.
LO4. Investigate and discuss a range of emerging AI technologies to determine future changes in industry.
