CHAPTER 12

Modern Trends in the Workplace

Expert Systems, Robotics, and Virtual Reality

Artificial Intelligence

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of study that explores how computers can be used for tasks that require the human characteristics of intelligence, imagination, and intuition.

AI Subsets of Interest

• Problem solving covers a broad spectrum, from playing games to planning military strategy.
• Natural languages are the study of the person / computer interface in unconstrained English language.
• Fuzzy logic is a type of AI that allows machines to "think" more along the lines of humans, providing a method of precisely measuring vague concepts.
• Expert systems present the computer as an expert on some particular topic.
• Robotics is the study of endowing computer-controlled machines with vision, speech, and touch.

How Computers Learn

• A knowledge base is a set of facts and rules about those facts.
• An inference engine accesses, selects, and interprets a set of rules.
• The inference engine applies the rules to the facts to make up new facts.

Neural Networks

• Neural networks are computers with chips designed to mimic the human brain.
• Instead of following the usual step-by-step series of instructions, neural net computers form a grid, much like a nerve cell in the brain.
• The grid is used to recognize patterns.

Natural Languages

• A natural language is the language people use on a daily basis to write and speak (e.g. English).
• Understanding natural languages is a skill thought to require intelligence.
• A key function of the AI study of natural languages is to develop a computer system that can resolve ambiguities.

Expert Systems

• An expert system is a software package used with an extensive set of organized data that presents the computer as an expert on a particular topic.
• The facts and rules used by an expert system originally come from a human expert.

Robotics

• A robot is a computer-controlled device that can physically manipulate its surroundings.
• The most common industrial robots today are mechanical devices with five or six axes of motion.
• Field robots are remotely controlled to handle dangerous tasks.

Virtual Reality

• Virtual reality involves immersing a user in a computer-created environment so that the user physically interacts with that environment.
• Often involves headsets and gloves to sense the user's movement and display the virtual world.
• Through the VRML standard, many web sites are providing VR interfaces.