Re: [asa] Artificial Intelligence blogs etc?

Hi, Preston,

I would be interested to see this come up on the list more often.

My own area of work, neural networks, has been peripherally connected
with AI. Neural Networks are based around structures that are
inspired by the connectionist architecture of the brain. They are
massively parallel architectures of very simple processing units that
can either "fire" or not fire, which are multiply connected to other
such units - which are known biologically as "synapses". In the
computer simulation, the synapse strengths are modelled by numerical
values (whereas in biological systems they are due to concentrations
of neurotransmitter chemicals). With artificial neural networks, the
synapse strengths are "learnt" via repetitive presentations of data,
and application of learning rules.

The subject has moved on greatly recently - initial research came from
the field of cognitive psychology (an early text by Rumelhart and
McLelland relied on this analogy). However nowadays, more principled
probabilistic mathematical models tend to be used, and the term
"neural network" is a little old-fashioned - one tends to use the term
"Machine Learning". It is interesting to notice that the Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures this year were given by my PhD
supervisor Chris Bishop, who wrote one of the standard texts on the
subject (Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition). However his
lectures made no mention of neural nets, but in the last lecture
demonstrated "machine learning".

To what extent this is close to AI depends on the degree of hype you
want to put on it! The systems I work on are to do with pattern
recognition, and in particular the recognition of "novel" patterns -
which are used in condition monitoring of systems, for example to give
early warning of failure. My company works in two fields - condition
monitoring of Jet engines, and also continuous monitoring of vital
sign data from human patients - interestingly the same techniques can
be applied to both.

There are people in the field (for example Prof. Igor Aleksander of
Imperial College London) who attempt to apply the techinques to
building "conscious machines", but the bulk of the work done is for
practical tasks - like handwriting recognition, detection of disease,
 etc.

Regards,
Iain

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Preston Garrison <pngarrison@att.net> wrote:
> All,
>
> Is anyone aware of lists or blogs where AI is discussed by Christians who
> are really knowledgeable in the relevant subjects? It doesn't seem to come
> up on this list much, at least that I'm aware of.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Preston G.
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
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>

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