Expert offers insight on artificial intelligence

The new movie “Artificial Intelligence” is a tug-of-war between the artistic styles of two directors — the dark cynicism of Stanley Kubrick and the sentimental optimism of Steven Spielberg. Some reviewers have suggested that this tension also captures the duality that exists in artificial intelligence research today.

Jude Shavlik, a UW–Madison computer scientist, researches artificial intelligence technology and its potential applications. Shavlik helped organize a national conference on artificial intelligence and chaired the international conference on machine learning. He also served for three years as the editor in chief of the AI Magazine, which is the flagship publication of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.

Shavlik says artificial intelligence already is finding its way into practical, everyday applications. Among the most common are software for voice and hand-writing recognition. Other applications help doctors diagnose serious diseases. Internet users may be familiar with “intelligent agents” that automatically search and retrieve on-line information and learn the difference between good and irrelevant data.

Ironically, Shavlik says, some tasks, such as speech recognition, are much tougher propositions for a computer than for a human.

“The easier a task is for a person to do, the harder it is for a computer, and vice versa,” Shavlik says.