A Brief Guide to Artificial Intelligence

by James V Stone

Overview

Artificial intelligence (AI) has now mastered tasks which could, until recently, be performed only by humans. These tasks include cancer diagnosis, drug design, object recognition, speech recognition, chess, backgammon and Go, which AI systems perform at super-human levels of performance.

This richly illustrated book is a brief but comprehensive overview (without equations) of current AI systems, how they work, their applications, and their limitations. Artificial neural networks, which are the engines of AI, are introduced in the context of deep learning algorithms. After surveying the impressive capabilities of AI systems on certain tasks, the limited ability of AI to perform tasks that humans find trivial is discussed. The strengths and weaknesses of the key neural network learning algorithms employed by AI are then described. Finally, the question of whether AI systems can be intelligent is discussed, along with the controversial issue of machine consciousness. Written in an informal style, with a comprehensive Glossary and a list of Further Readings, this book represents an ideal introduction to the rapidly evolving field of AI.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781916279117
Publisher:	Tutorial Introductions
Publication date:	03/30/2020
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.13(d)

Table of Contents

Preface

1 What is Artificial Intelligence?

1.1 Introduction

1.2 AI, AGI and Other Euphemisms

1.3 So, What Is AI?

1.4 Almost Human Memory

1.5 Interpretability

1.6 Why Now?

2 What AI Can, and Cannot, Do

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Visual Recognition

2.3 Deepfakes

2.4 The Player of Games

2.5 Skilled Control

2.6 AI in Medicine

2.7 Language

2.8 Is AI Biased?

2.9 What AI Cannot Do

3 How AI Works

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Supervised Learning

3.3 Convolutional Neural Networks

3.4 The Backprop Algorithm

3.5 Semi-Supervised Learning

3.6 Self-Supervised Learning

3.7 Unsupervised Learning

3.8 Reinforcement Learning

3.9 Over-Fitting

3.10 Is AI Just Curve Fitting?

4 The Future of AI

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Time Enough For AI?

4.3 Another Revolution?

4.4 Machine Consciousness

Further Reading

Glossary

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

"An excellent short primer to quickly get the uninitiated grounded in the field of artificial intelligence."

Professor Eric Topol, MD, Executive Vice-President, Scripps Research, USA.

"There are very few people that have both a technical understanding of recent achievements in artificial intelligence, and a deep appreciation of the nature of human intelligence. James Stone is one of those people. Fortunately for us, he has distilled much of his understanding into this book, which doesn't sacrifice accuracy for brevity, and which summarises recent achievements, as well as the challenges that lie ahead. I'm often asked to recommend a short introduction to artificial intelligence; this book will do the job perfectly."

Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, University of Cambridge, and Senior AI Fellow at the Turing Institute.

"This is the book you need if you want to understand the basics of AI, including its triumphs and limitations. Stone takes the reader on an authoritative whirlwind tour, and delves into just enough technical detail to give an overview of key concepts, such as neural networks, deepfakes, and overfitting. An essential and timely summary of modern AI. "

James Marshall, Professor of Computational Biology, University of Sheffield, and Co-Founder of Opteran Technologies.

From the Publisher