Chapter 15 - Robotics

Artificial Intelligence	The fields of computer science devoted to making computers perceive, reason, and act in ways that have, until now, been reserved for human beings.	IBM’s supercomputer “Watson” uses artificial intelligence to recognize questions and take part in “Jeopardy”.
Artificial Life	Systems related to life, its, processes, and its evolution through simulations that use computer models, robotics, and biochemistry.	Hard Alife creates hardware constructs of life-like systems, such as robotic insect colonies
Automatic Translation	The process of using software to translate written or spoken communication from one natural language to another.	Google Translate is an online tool that translates written text from and into any language.
Digitized sound	Computerized sound output.	The sound of a windows error message.
Digitized speech	Computerized voice output that mimics human speech.	Microsoft Sam mimics the human voice by reading out written texts.
Expert system	Information systems or software programs designed to replicate the decision-making process of a human expert.	Windows system help provides suggestions based on the analysed issues.
Expert system shell	Generic expert systems containing human interfaces and inference engines.
Heuristic	A rule of thumb.	“To loosen a stuck jar, run warm water over it.”
Image analysis	The process of identifying objects and shapes in a photograph, drawing, video, or other visual image.	iPhoto’s face recognition recognizes people in the picture and lets users apply tags.
Knowledge base	A database that contains both facts and a system of rules for determining and changing the relationship among those facts.
Machine learning	Artificial intelligence techniques that make it possible for machine performance to improve based on feedback from past performance.	Speech recognition software can adjust to the users accent and pronunciation to provide accurate results
Nanotechnology	A billionth of a second; a common unit of measurement for read and write access time to RAM.	Molecular-scale electronics that produce Nano computers.
Natural language	Language that people speak and write every day.	Conversation between two people speaking english
Neural network	Distributed, parallel computing systems inspired by the structure of the human brain.	Non-player characters in games can be driven by neural networks.
Optical character recognition (OCR)	Locating and identifying printed characters embedded in an image, allowing the text to be stored as an editable document. OCR can be performed by wand readers, pen scanners, and OCR software.	Scanners can identify text in the scanned image and transform it into and editable document.
Parallel processing	Using multiple processors to divide jobs into pieces and work simultaneously on the pieces.	Multicore processors can work on the same process while dividing it amongst the cores
Parsing program	In translation, a program that analyzes sentence structure and identifies each word according to its part of speech. Another program looks up each word in a translation dictionary and substitutes the appropriate word.	ANTLR is a parsing program that translates programming languages not only from word to word but also contextually.
Pattern recognition	Identifying recurring patterns in input data with the goal of understanding or categorizing that input.
Robots	Computer-controlled machines designed to perform specific manual tasks.	Automated car factories use robots on assembly lines
Searching	An artificial-intelligence technique wherein the computer looks ahead at the possible outcomes of a given action, such as a move in a game of chess.	IBM’s Watson searches for alternative answers to the asked question and answers with the most suitable one.
Semantics	The underlying meaning of words and phrases.
Speech recognition	The identification of spoken words and sentences by a computer, making it possible for voice input to be converted into text files.	Apple’s iOS 5 on the iPhone provides a SIRI function that allows the user to ask simple questions.
Speech synthesis	The use of software or hardware to allow PCs to recite anything typed, though with voices that sound artificial and robotic.	Microsoft Sam
Syntax	A set of rules for constructing sentences from words. Every language has syntax.
Turing test	A way to test machine intelligence.	Asking questions that could identify a human but the machine has to be able to answer.