Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future

Artificial intelligence is front and center, with business and government leaders pondering the right moves. But what’s happening in the lab, where discoveries by academic and corporate researchers will set AI’s course for the coming year and beyond?

The beginnings of modern AI can be traced to classical philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. But the field of AI wasn't formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined.

Let’s take Google Duplex Project example that is very explained on Google AI Blog.




Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, introduces a new robotic assistant in his keynote address to Google's 2018 conference in California on Tuesday. The virtual assistant, powered by Google Duplex, uses a very natural speech pattern that includes interjections such as 'er' and 'mmm-hmm' so that it sounds eerily lifelike.

Google's robot assistant now makes really life like phone calls for you https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html 
Gartner Think cast has shared the perspective on Provider ViewWell you can find the Artificial Intelligence Provider’s Gartner view by Jim Hare (Gartner) in the following article & Webinars. There are more links below that are providing more information & perspectives of ongoing & upcoming Projects

https://www.gartner.com/podcasts/artificial-intelligence-the-provider-view/


In 2011, IBM's question-answering system Watson won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" by beating reigning champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Credit: IBM/Jeopardy!

Well, there is history of AI starting since 1940, but let’s take a quick look the AI milestone technologies of this decade below.
2010
Microsoft launched Kinect for Xbox 360, the first gaming device to track human body movement, using just a 3D camera and infra-red detection, enabling users to play their Xbox 360 wirelessly. The award-winning machine learning for human motion capture technology for this device was developed by the Computer Vision group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge

2011

IBM's Watson computer defeated television game show Jeopardy! champions Rutter and Jennings.

2011-2014

Apple's Siri (2011), Google's Google Now (2012) and Microsoft's Cortana (2014) are smartphone apps that use natural language to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions.

2013

Robot HRP-2 built by SCHAFT Inc of Japan, a subsidiary of Google, defeats 15 teams to win DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Trials. HRP-2 scored 27 out of 32 points in 8 tasks needed in disaster response. Tasks are drive a vehicle, walk over debris, climb a ladder, remove debris, walk through doors, cut through a wall, close valves and connect a hose.

NEIL, the Never Ending Image Learner, is released at Carnegie Mellon University to constantly compare and analyze relationships between different images.

2015

An open letter to ban development and use of autonomous weapons signed by Hawking, Musk, Wozniak and 3,000 researchers in AI and robotics.

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo (version: Fan) defeated 3 time European Go champion 2 dan professional Fan Hui by 5 games to 0.

2016

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo (version: Lee) defeated Lee Sedol 4–1. Lee Sedol is a 9 dan professional Korean Go champion who won 27 major tournaments from 2002 to 2016. [56] Before the match with AlphaGo, Lee Sedol was confident in predicting an easy 5–0 or 4–1 victory.

2017

Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI was held, to discuss AI ethics and how to bring about beneficial AI while avoiding the existential risk from artificial general intelligence.

Poker AI Libratus individually defeated each of its 4 human opponents—among the best players in the world - at an exceptionally high aggregated winrate, over a statistically significant sample. In contrast to Chess and Go, Poker is an imperfect information game.

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo (version: Master) [54] won 60–0 rounds on two public Go websites including 3 wins against world Go champion Ke Jie.

An OpenAI-machined learned bot played at The International 2017 Dota 2 tournament in August 2017. It won during a 1v1 demonstration game against professional Dota 2 player Dendi

Google DeepMind revealed that AlphaGo Zero - an improved version of AlphaGo - displayed significant performance gains while using far fewer tensor processing units (as compared to AlphaGo Lee; it used same amount of TPU's as AlphaGo Master). Unlike previous versions, which learned the game by observing millions of human moves, AlphaGo Zero learned by playing only against itself. The system then defeated AlphaGo Lee 100 games to zero, and defeated AlphaGo Master 89 to 11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_intelligence#cite_note 0-54 Although unsupervised learning is a step forward, much has yet to be learned about general intelligence. AlphaZero masters chess in 4 hours, defeating the best chess engine, StockFish 8. AlphaZero won 28 out of 100 games, and the remaining 72 games ended in a draw.

2018

Alibaba language processing AI outscores top humans at a Stanford University reading and comprehension test, scoring 82.44 against 82.304 on a set of 100,000 questions

The European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (aka Ellis) proposed as a pan-European competitor to American AI efforts, with the aim of staving off a brain drain of talent, along the lines of CERN after World War II.

Announcement of Google Duplex, a service to allow an AI assistant to book appointments over the phone. The LA Times judges the AI's voice to be a "nearly flawless" imitation of human-sounding speech.

Reference Links for Artificial Intelligence Projects & more information.

https://www.gartner.com/webinar/3838573

https://www.gartner.com/webinar/3805163
http://www.eu-ems.com/summary.asp?event_id=4342&page_id=9546
https://deepmind.com/ 
https://hackernoon.com/50-killer-ai-projects-f1b6966c7dbc

Azeem Ahmed Mughal, System Support Engineer, Abu Dhabi. Azeem is tech savvy and started learning computer at the age of 10 but he never thought that his curiosity & passion will turn into his profession. He has always enjoyed the mystifying challenges, in the Black Text VGA screen era of Games, OS CLIs or Hardware & Network Trouble shootings skills since the times of GWBASIC, Dangerous Dave and DOS 5.0.