Artificial Intelligence

Lecture 1: Introduction

Assoc.Prof. Diaa Salama

Computer Science

[These slides adapted from Dan Klein and Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley.]
 Course Information
 Communication:
 Announcements on Moodle
 Questions? Discussion on Moodle
 Email: [email protected]

 Course technology:
 New infrastructure
 Autograded projects, interactive
homeworks (unlimited submissions!) +
regular homework
 Help us make it awesome!
 Course Information
 Prerequisites:
 (Algorithms) and (Math courses)
 There will be a lot of math (and programming)

 Work and Grading:

 2 programming projects: Python, groups of 1 or 2

 ~9 homework assignments:
 Part 1: interactive, solve together, submit alone
 Part 2: written, solve together, write up alone, electronic submission through
Schoology

 Two quizzes, one midterm

 Fixed scale

 Contests!
 Textbook
 Not required, but for students who want to read more we recommend
 Russell & Norvig, AI: A Modern Approach, 3rd Ed.

 Warning: Not a course textbook, so our presentation does not necessarily follow the
presentation in the book.
 Important This Week

• Important this week:

• Register for the class on Schoology
• Access code VM5XD-GKRMG
• Python tutorial First lab

• Also important:
• Sections start this week. You have to attend in your section.
• Office Hours start next week (Wednesday 10 am – 3 pm )
 Today

 What is artificial intelligence?

 What can AI do?

 What is this course?

Sci-Fi AI?
AI in the News
AI in the News
AI Booming In Industry
 What is AI?
The science of making machines that:

Think like people Think rationally

Act like people Act rationally

 Rational Decisions
We’ll use the term rational in a very specific, technical way:
 Rational: maximally achieving pre-defined goals
 Rationality only concerns what decisions are made
(not the thought process behind them)
 Goals are expressed in terms of the utility of outcomes
 Being rational means maximizing your expected utility

A better title for this course would be:

Computational Rationality
Maximize Your
Expected Utility
 What About the Brain?
 Brains (human minds) are very good
at making rational decisions, but not
perfect
 Brains aren’t as modular as software,
so hard to reverse engineer!
 “Brains are to intelligence as wings
are to flight”
 Lessons learned from the brain:
memory and simulation are key to
decision making
 Designing Rational Agents

 An agent is an entity that perceives and acts.

 A rational agent selects actions that maximize its
(expected) utility.
 Characteristics of the percepts, environment, and
action space dictate techniques for selecting
rational actions
 This course is about:
 General AI techniques for a variety of problem

Environment
types Sensors
Percepts

Agent
 Learning to recognize when and how a new
problem can be solved with an existing ?
technique
Actuators
Actions
 Pac-Man as an Agent

Agent Environment
Sensors Percepts
?
Actuators Actions

Pac-Man is a registered trademark of Namco-Bandai Games, used here for educational purposes Demo1: pacman-l1.mp4 or L1D2
 Course Topics

 Part I: Making Decisions

 Fast search / planning
 Constraint satisfaction
 Adversarial and uncertain search

 Part II: Reasoning under Uncertainty

 Bayes’ nets
 Decision theory
 Machine learning
Artificial Intelligence Domain
A (Short) History of AI
 A (Short) History of AI
 1940-1950: Early days
 1943: McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
 1950: Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
 1950—70: Excitement: Look, Ma, no hands!
 1950s: Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers program,
Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist, Gelernter's Geometry Engine
 1956: Dartmouth meeting: “Artificial Intelligence” adopted
 1965: Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
 1970—90: Knowledge-based approaches
 1969—79: Early development of knowledge-based systems
 1980—88: Expert systems industry booms
 1988—93: Expert systems industry busts: “AI Winter”
 1990—: Statistical approaches
 Resurgence of probability, focus on uncertainty
 General increase in technical depth
 Agents and learning systems… “AI Spring”?

 2000—: Where are we now?

 What Can AI Do?
Quiz: Which of the following can be done at present?

 Play a decent game of table tennis?

 Buy a week's worth of groceries on the web?
 Buy a week's worth of groceries at Berkeley Bowl?
 Discover and prove a new mathematical theorem?
 Converse successfully with another person for an hour?
 Perform a surgical operation?
 Put away the dishes and fold the laundry?
 Translate spoken Chinese into spoken English in real time?
 Write an intentionally funny story?
 Unintentionally Funny Stories
 One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend
Irving Bird where some honey was. Irving told him
there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe walked to
the oak tree. He ate the beehive. The End.
 Henry Squirrel was thirsty. He walked over to the
river bank where his good friend Bill Bird was sitting.
Henry slipped and fell in the river. Gravity drowned.
The End.
 Once upon a time there was a dishonest fox and a vain crow. One day the crow
was sitting in his tree, holding a piece of cheese in his mouth. He noticed that
he was holding the piece of cheese. He became hungry, and swallowed the
cheese. The fox walked over to the crow. The End.

[Shank, Tale-Spin System, 1984]

 Natural Language
 Speech technologies (e.g. Siri)
 Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
 Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS)
 Dialog systems

Demo: NLP – ASR tvsample.avi

 Natural Language
 Speech technologies (e.g. Siri)
 Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
 Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS)
 Dialog systems

 Language processing technologies

 Question answering
 Machine translation

 Web search
 Text classification, spam filtering, etc…
 Vision (Perception)
 Object and face recognition
 Scene segmentation
 Image classification

Demo1: VISION – lec_1_t2_video.flv

Demo2: VISION – lec_1_obj_rec_0.mpg
Demo3: VISION -- lec_1_obj_rec_1.mpg
Images from Erik Sudderth (left), wikipedia (right)
Demo4: VISION -- SRI meeting.mov
 Demo 1: ROBOTICS – soccer.avi Demo 4: ROBOTICS – laundry.avi

Robotics Demo 2: ROBOTICS – soccer2.avi

Demo 3: ROBOTICS – gcar.avi
Demo 5: ROBOTICS – petman.avi
Demo 6: office_stapler_6x.wmv

 Robotics
 Part mech. eng.
 Part AI
 Reality much
harder than
simulations!

 Technologies
 Vehicles
 Rescue
 Soccer!
 Lots of automation…

 In this class:
 We ignore mechanical aspects
 Methods for planning
 Methods for control

Images from UC Berkeley, Boston Dynamics, RoboCup, Google

 Logic

 Logical systems
 Theorem provers
 NASA fault diagnosis
 Question answering

 Methods:
 Deduction systems
 Constraint satisfaction
 Satisfiability solvers (huge advances!)

Image from Bart Selman

Game Playing
 Game Playing
 Classic Moment: May, '97: Deep Blue vs. Kasparov
 First match won against world champion
 “Intelligent creative” play
 200 million board positions per second
 Humans understood 99.9 of Deep Blue's moves
 Can do about the same now with a PC cluster
 Open question:
 How does human cognition deal with the
search space explosion of chess?
 Or: how can humans compete with computers at all??
 1996: Kasparov Beats Deep Blue
“I could feel --- I could smell --- a new kind of intelligence across the table.”
 1997: Deep Blue Beats Kasparov
“Deep Blue hasn't proven anything.”
 Huge game-playing advances recently, e.g. in Go!

Text from Bart Selman, image from IBM’s Deep Blue pages
 Simulated Agents

[Schulman, Moritz, Levine, Jordan, Abbeel, ICLR 2016]

Interacting with AI: Very Open
Interacting with AI: Very Open
 Decision Making
 Applied AI involves many kinds of automation
 Scheduling, e.g. airline routing, military
 Route planning, e.g. Google maps
 Medical diagnosis
 Web search engines
 Spam classifiers
 Automated help desks
 Fraud detection
 Product recommendations
 … Lots more!