Structure and contents

Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber
Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-director of the Master in Artificial Intelligence 2017-2020

Artificial Intelligence may not only be the most exciting field in computer science, but of science in general. In fact, the best scientists of the future might even be AIs themselves. Hardware soon will have more raw computational power (CP) than human brains, since CP per cent is still growing by a factor of 100-1000 per decade. And there is no reason to believe that general problem solving software similar to that of humans will be lacking: there already exist mathematically optimal (though not yet practical) universal problem solvers developed at IDSIA. And existing highly practical (but not quite as universal) AI already learn from experience, outperforming humans in more and more fields. For example, biologically plausible deep / recurrent artificial neural networks are learning to solve pattern recognition tasks that seemed infeasible only 10 years ago. Examples: images, handwriting, traffic signs, since 2011 even with superhuman performance - no end in sight. Even creativity has been formalized such that it can now be implemented on machines. The current developments in AI may soon lead to the end of history as we know it (more), and as an IS master student you can become part of this revolution.

Artificial Intelligence systems have knowledge, beliefs, preferences and goals, and they have informational as well as motivational attitudes. They observe, learn, communicate, plan, anticipate and commit. They are able to reason about other systems and their own internal states, to simulate and optimize their performance. AI systems react to dynamic situations adapting their capabilities through learning mechanisms, with a high degree of autonomy.

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