Making AI Practical and Practicable
Machine learning, combinatorial optimization, computer vision, LLMs, anything that’s been understood to be AI from 1950 to now.
AI is changing every facet of our lives, from the way we cook to the way we work. Customer service is the most important aspect of any business. It defines the relationship between business and customers. Like all aspects of work, AI is changing how we approach customer service. Full…
Previously, we discussed how there is a large class of business problems that AI can address. Here, we’re going to follow up that thought with a hypothetical case study. In particular, we’ll look at how AI could be part of a product for addressing elder care. When we hear elder care…
I use Generative AI tools because, as a developer, I can’t ignore them. My clients and peers expect me to be at least conversant, if not an expert, in AI technologies. Maintaining that expertise means engaging with new tools as they come out. I’ve made a point to use them…
We often hear or read that artificial intelligence will change the world as we know it. This misses the mark; AI has changed the world that we live in forever. It isn’t some futuristic technology that will alter our lives someday. It’s a feature in products that we interact with…
One of the most useful skills I picked up during my Ph.D. studies was how to turn light refreshments into a whole meal. The trick is to combine hunger and the ability to ignore shame for personal gain. Then one needs only spend an awful lot of time at the…
We’ve discussed several applications of machine learning before. We teach a machine a concept from stored data so that it can: The common thrust is that, using supervised learning, we’re teaching a machine some concept from recorded data so that we can identify the same concept in data we haven’t…
I have a relative that frequently has medical problems. This despite the fact that he’s a healthy young man. His problem is that he has too many names. He’s James-Robert, but depending on whom you ask, you’ll hear him called: He has five names at least, and that’s before considering…
Death Stranding was a surreal experience for several reasons. First, the game has a weird story line that’s a little hard to follow at times; exactly what you’d expect from the game’s director Hideo Kojima. Secondly, I’m still not used to seeing recognizable famous people in games. Facial capture isn’t…
Heuristic search is a subfield of artificial intelligence. It is the study of algorithms meant for general problem solving. The problems solved with heuristic search come from a variety of domains, including: These varried domains have two things in common. First, the difficulty of solving these problems grows far faster…
Introduction This post originally appeared on SEP’s Blog People often ask questions like "What is AI?", or "Is AI worth of the hype?". Both questions are non-trivial to answer, but let’s start with the first one: "What is AI?". This is a perennial favorite at academic conferences on AI for…
