Welcome
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974. My dissertation was on natural language understanding. I have done research on case-based reasoning, memory-based language understanding, and authorable intelligent systems for education. I am a co-director of The Center for Computer Science and Learning Sciences , the director of the MS program in Computer Science, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
What is AI?
Anyone who works in Artificial Intelligence should be able to define what that means. If you Google "define:artificial intelligence", you'll see lots of definitions, mostly oriented around the notion of computers doing things that require intelligence.
These definitions are clearly inadequate, for at least three reasons:
- There are tasks that we think require intelligence when humans do them, that are not AI, e.g., calculating complex sums.
- Conversely, there are tasks we don't think require intelligence when humans do them, that are AI tasks, e.g., computer vision.
- And, of course, there are tasks that were called AI until we figured out how to get a computer to do them, e.g., optical character recognition.
So here's a definition of AI that gets at the heart of why we study what we do:
Artificial Intelligence is the search for the answer to the fundamental question: Why are computers so stupid?
It's left as an exercise for the intelligent reader as to why this definition addresses the three weaknesses listed above.
