The news about IBM Watson Supercomputer being commercialized to give business intelligence for banks is making rounds in tech world. Artificial Intelligence in simple words is the technology behind efficient embedded systems, Automation software, robotics , smart networks etc.
The Watson supercomputer uses artificial intelligence[AI] to quickly analyse vast amounts of data and understand human language to the extent where it can hold sophisticated conversations.
Two new banks namely DBS bank based in Singapore and NED bank in south africa are planning to adopt this system. IBM Watson became famous when it beat human contenders on Game-show Jeopardy in February 2011 .It uses natural language understanding and artificial intelligence[AI] to read large volumes of data in less time to give answers very fast. Several other banks like Citibank , ANZ bank of Australia are already using few services of IBM Watson.
This is not the only application of AI, recently University of Brighton in UK teamed up with advertising company Crimtan to apply AI into advertising and branding efforts for Crimtan’s client base and help Crimtan into more radical , new and accelerated decision making.
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| Small Robos playing Soccer in RoboCup |
So the question arises will AI become mainstream and start affecting our day to day life ?
Well the answers can be found in deliberate investments made by technology companies and universities in field of AI. Google’s Acquisition of Datamind technologies , Nest , Schaft.inc , Meka Robotics, Boston Dynamics and its ongoing work at Google X labs’ the Google driverless car shows the way company will be moving forward in future.
Also investment done by Facebook to form a AI team shows how social networks will evolve. Facebook started this AI team to understand the data shared by users[quoted by mark Zuckerberg ] “to do world-class artificial intelligence research using all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook”.
Best implementation of AI can be seen in transportation.
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| AutoNOMOS from Germany |
A car named AutoNOMOS made in germany has already made successful test runs in daily traffic in Berlin city.Organisations like Toyota, Audi, are already into massive R&D efforts to develop intelligent transport systems.
Professor Andrew Ng, (center) and his graduate students Pieter Abbeel (left) and Adam Coates have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables “autonomous” AI helicopters to teach themselves to fly by watching and learning the maneuvers of a radio-control helicopter flown by a human pilot.
We can say this field has started becoming exciting as more and more day to day activities will be affected by systems enabled with artificial intelligence.
Also I think this is a high time if anyone wants to make career out of this opportunity.
I think a M.Sc Computing (Artificial Intelligence ) will be a great degree. As entry barriers are one can check universities like Cambridge , Imperial college of London, Stanford, University of Brighton etc for admissions.
May be getting into universities like Imperial college of London and university of Brighton can help you land directly on an ongoing Artificial Intelligence project. Well my personal favorite is Imperial college of London due to the high research climate and its high ranking among world universities. Four of the top six universities in the world are in the UK.
Also if you are looking forward for courses in UK then have a look at this website by British council.
It gives you detailed information about studying in UK.
http://knowledgeisgreat.in/
On that note I will end this post. Hope this article has been useful to you.
Thanks to : Digit magazine for its Fast Track on Artificial Intelligence.
Related Post:
https://www.tech-fruit.com/2014/02/improving-productivity-using-quip-cross.html