Moving Smartly : New Directions in Artificial Intelligence Mean Opportunities for Business
Advances in the field of artificial intelligence are still far from creating a thinking machine like the half-human, half-robot killer cyborg popularized again this summer by Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Terminator 2.”
But proponents of artificial intelligence--teaching machines to mimic a human’s ability to make decisions--are gathered here with plenty to tout regarding the latest applications for businesses and consumers.
The conference and trade show, sponsored by the Menlo Park-based American Assn. for Artificial Intelligence, demonstrates how the arcane theories of artificial intelligence have crept from science fiction into our everyday lives with the spread of computers.
Instead of hyping fancy robots or thinking machines that replace people, the artificial intelligence community has taken a step back from its earlier expectations and is now promoting technologies that make information more accessible to people, said Daniel Bobrow, a research fellow at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center and outgoing president of the association.
Today’s artificial intelligence is “increasingly hidden within the core computer software,” Bobrow said. “It is transparent.”
The artificial intelligence community has been criticized so often as wildly speculative and unrealistic that Bobrow refuses to estimate how large the industry has become. But he says the discipline became practical in the 1980s as the research found a home in software applications known as expert systems or knowledge-based systems.
In developing such systems, computer programmers debrief human experts, cull their knowledge into a set of rules that can be applied to different situations, and develop programs to emulate the expert’s decision-making process. The systems are used to assist those same experts, who are left with more time to concentrate on difficult problems that can’t be solved by computers.
The systems work best in complicated business tasks that are burdensome for employees, such as airline scheduling and maintenance, loan application processing, coordinating traffic signals in a city, and even shuttling job resumes to the proper screening managers within a large corporation.
The bulk of the 70 exhibitors at the trade show are demonstrating artificial intelligence systems that use computers to perform sophisticated analytical tasks. Other branches of research, such as robots and neural networks--computers that mimic the reasoning processes of the human brain--have also made progress. But they are only beginning to find widespread business uses.
Inference Corp., a software firm in El Segundo, was demonstrating a computerized dating system that matches perfect couples based on their personal tastes. Once one person’s characteristics are typed into the computer, the ExperDate program searches its database and comes up with a ranking of appropriate matches and their picture-files.
“We tried to give the technology a human face and came up with this application,” said Peter Altschuler, director of marketing at Inference.
While dating services used computers for years, Altschuler says his program is more sophisticated because of the ranking system for perfect matches, which would change its results if even one characteristic of one of the subjects was altered.
More serious applications are possible. Police departments could use a version of the system to analyze crimes and develop a list of suspects who have the same modus operandi, Altschuler said. The least expensive Inference system costs $6,000 and runs on a personal computer.
Neuron Data Corp., a 6-year-old Palo Alto company, developed an expert system for American Airlines to automatically calculate the ideal configuration of passengers and cargo in an airplane.
With the system, the airline operates with better fuel efficiency and has fewer foul-ups at airports due to loading problems, said Alain Rappaport, president of Neuron Data Corp. The airline uses eight artificial-intelligence-based software systems and is developing six others, Rappaport said.
Andersen Consulting, the management consulting arm of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, was showing off a system it produced to automate the ticket accounting and auditing practices at Northwest Air Lines.
The carrier found it could keep better track of the 70,000 tickets it issued daily if it scanned them into a computer system and used the computer program to analyze whether the ticket price was properly calculated and the fare was collected.
As a result of productivity gains, the airline saved $10 million to $20 million a year, said Pat Hayes, the association’s president-elect and a researcher at Microelectronics and Computer Corp., an industry research consortium based in Austin, Tex.
Closer to the heart of Southern Californians, Gensym Corp. was showing off software being developed to help cities manage traffic better by using a network of television cameras and computer programs that can determine the optimum timing for traffic signals.
The system is being tested in Paris, and another version is being used in a joint research effort with UC Irvine to improve emergency response to freeway accidents, said Robert Moore, president of Cambridge, Mass.-based Gensym.
Moore said the software, based on expert system technology, could also be used in Southern California to help with the analysis and control of pollution, such as monitoring the content of pollution produced by factories and computer models that could test the effects of different corrective actions.
“Some people look at artificial intelligence as a caterpillar, but these are signs that a butterfly has emerged,” said Jim Wattenmaker, spokesman for the association. .
