Artificial Intelligence: a good assistant in daily life

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating term in computer science. I believe that to let computer have the intelligence as a human being is the dreams to many CS people from day one they involve in this science field. With many years’ research and practices in this field, computers are becoming much smarter than before. Here, I would like to discuss some good applications of AI in today’s real life and my opinions for AI’s tomorrow.

It might not be known by many people that AI technology has already been used widely and people can find the track of it everywhere. One famous example is Siri (as with several latest versions of iPhone by Apple), which will turn your mobile phone to be a magic box that is able to talk to you and answer any of your questions. Although Siri is not perfect to deal with many hard questions and some strange replies are appearing now and then, it does bring better user experience with your phone in a more “human” way. Beside the necessary support from infrastructure improvement such as cloud computing, AI is the critical technology to enable this. AI will not only do help during human voice analysis and understanding, but also help search the correct answer from the internet and compose voice to express the answer back to users. 

reference: Where Is Technology Going To Take Us Next? 

If you are amazed about the intelligence of Siri, then you might not notice that there might be an even smarter AI that most people are using every day. Yes, it is Google. Behind many Google’s products, such as Google search engine, Google AD, Google map, there is a powerful “brain” behind to let Google’s service meet your requirement in the right way. By learning the huge amount of data from customers and on the internet, Google’s AI brain is accumulating knowledge in a fast way and has already be the most knowledgeable guy in the world and serve different kinds of requests around the world in a fast way. The brain is built up by “deep learning” technology, which is one of the fast developing technology in AI fields. Deep learning means that the more inputs to the brain, the smarter that the brain will be since it keeps learning from input data.

With the help of AI, computers are more like human beings and can take charge of many affairs that are done before by people. However, I believe that the final target of AI is not to totally replace or fully simulate people’s brain, but will be a strong enhancement to part of the brain’s functions that will do benefit to us. For example, a computer with human like mood will not be useful and might even be dangerous since it is hard to control.  We need AI to help understand the nature, such as to identify the valuable knowledge from big data and assist people to make critical decisions based on data analysis, while we don’t want AI to peep at everybody’s privacy and release to others. We want AI to be a smart guy while more important is to be a nice guy first.

History of computer science: penetrating into personal life

Computer, when it is first developed more than 60 years before, is a giant monster which takes over the big area with several rooms of diodes and connecting wires. Today, computers can be found in every home and anywhere, even in your wrist watch or glasses. The fast progresses of computer hardware provide computer science good opportunities to penetrate into personal life in everywhere.

 

Reference from http://www.electronicproducts.com/Computer_Peripherals/There_can_be_only_one_device.aspx

In the earlier stage of computer science, the emphasis is on the automation of industry manufacturing and big engineering projects. You might know that the first computer is designed to aid calculating the rocket track to be more accurate. The quickly increasing demands on more precise instruments and more efficient product lines contribute to the big power of the development of computer science. Computer scientists around the world have developed countless of computational solutions to develop smart Robot to perform complex manufacturing actions in Automobile assembly line, and developed the extensible network model to populate information around the world with internet. Although these progresses in computer science haven’t directly interactive with humans’ daily life, it did profound impacts to our approaches for changing the world. With more and more automation adopted in various industries, people’s ability to create is largely improved.

With the popularization of personal computers, computing resources are easily obtained by each person. How to aid people to better handle important affairs in their daily life and work is the new motivation to computer science. The invention of Office Kits like Microsoft Office software largely improved people’s productivities in editing and publications. It also let the paperless office to be possible and save lots of natural resources. The same time, computer science has large progress in graphical computations and brought us vivid 3-dimensional animations which are hard to tell which is real or not. With innovative research in human-computer interface, computing resources are becoming much easier to normal people who don’t have professional knowledge in computer science.  Cloud computing and mobile computing are two recent big breakthroughs in computer science, which help to equip small mobile devices with the powerful computing ability to aid people’s daily life by the most convenient way. 

Computer science is still a flourishing field with lots of potentials to be identified. As a student in statistics, I also wish to take the benefit of the big achievements in computer science and combine statistical analysis methods with powerful computing algorithms to explore valuable unknowns beneath the big data.

 

History of computer science: hardware driven to software driven

Computer science (abbreviated as CS) is the scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. The history of computer science is the best example of innovation. Based on my knowledge, the history of CS can be divided into two stages, the hardware driven stage and the software driven stage.

In the first stage of computer science, the hardware played a central role in its development. Abacus is the first kind of computing machine which helped human to perform simple mathematical computation in an efficient way. However, the abacus can’t automatically work and the usage is very limited. With the introduction of the punched card system in 1843, the first programmable computer is built by mechanical techniques. Although the way to use it is still very clumsy, many people are attracted to find out many novel ways to use it in different fields. The basic idea of the program is developed in that time. With the innovation in electronic industry, the punched card systems were quickly replaced by electronic circuits in the 1940s. The modern computer with Von Neumann architecture provided a powerful computing platform, which can’t only perform all kinds of computations but also can store inputs and results in memory. 

The second stage of computer science is driven by software. After the invention of the modern computer, the structure is kept unchanged for many years, which provided a very stable platform for the development of software. More and more applications are found out based on this platform and implemented as software in various programming languages. And requests from applications also drove the progress of hardware for faster computing speed and bigger memory size. The most recent progress as cloud computing has finally emancipated software from limitation of hardware. Hardware such as the central computing unit (CPU) and memory is abstracted to be computing resource and storage resource. Therefore, complex software can be run almost anywhere, even on a glass with a very tiny client-side computing unit, since most heavy-duty computing is performed in cloud side. This really brings computer science a brand new era with foreseeable big progress.