Artificial Intelligence | Lesson 1.1
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Overview
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has different meanings to different people.
- For a videogame designer, AI means writing the code that affects how bots behave and how the environment reacts to the player’s actions.
- For a data scientist, AI is a way of exploring and classifying data to get insight.
- For Microsoft, AI means technology that can perceive, learn, and reason to extend the capabilities of people and organizations.
Today there are many AI applications. AI algorithms that learn by example are why we can talk to Watson, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant, and they can talk back to us. Natural language processing and natural language generation are fields of computer science that utilize AI to create new opportunities and smart ways of impacting business and the way we interact with computers. They provide students with easy-to-learn conversational interfaces and on-demand online tutors.
AI has improved the quality of our daily lives. AI can be found in our Netflix queue, navigation and music streaming apps, in our inboxes watching for spam, and as an event reminder. AI is working behind the scenes monitoring our investments, detecting fraudulent transactions, identifying credit card fraud, and preventing financial crimes.
Even ten years ago, AI impacted healthcare by helping doctors arrive at more accurate preliminary diagnoses, reading medical imaging, and finding appropriate clinical trials for patients. Advances in speech synthesis is helping patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease to regain their voice rather than using a computerized voice. With the advances in AI in fields such as computer vision, computers have surpassed humans in tasks related to detecting and labeling objects. Computer vision algorithms are helping us detecting cancerous moles in skin images or finding symptoms in x-ray and MRI images.
In this section you will learn what AI, Machine Learning (ML) and Data Science is, and what nonprofits can achieve by implementing AI. If you don’t have the technical background or experience you may find some of these topics a bit overwhelming. That is alright. Remember the goal is to become familiar enough with these topics to understand them at a level that allows you to engage and partner with those that do have the expertise, resources, and genuine interest in working with nonprofits and community led organizations to solve real-world problems. These partners can be universities, community colleges, corporations, foundations, and other non-profits.