The Hindu Business Line : Artificial intelligence: Making rapid strides

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Bangalore Jan. 28 Phraselater - a pencil box shaped device that translates phrases in 15-20 languages and the vacuum-bot called Roomba that automatically finds its way back to its charging point. Examples that indicate that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make itself seen and heard.

"What people don't know is that AI has been around for years now," said the AI expert, Dr Ron Brachman, V-P of Worldwide Research Operations, Yahoo! Research, speaking to Business Line recently. His contributions to the science include developing cornerstone ideas behind the sub-field of Description Logics. He was recently awarded the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Hyderabad.

AI functions

AI makes spam filters smarter, search engines more efficient and is even behind speech-to-text software. Yahoo is using artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning - algorithms that are used by a search engine to classify Web sites, for example. Continuous efforts in this as well as parallel computing will mean that services on a network, in the long run, will be well matched to the needs of the users. This, according to Dr Brachman, would take may be 50 years. But time does not seem to concern these researchers. They realise that there are many years ahead for science fiction to come true.

For now, we must be sated with the upcoming auto-correction of typos. When a user keeps misspelling a certain word, AI, in the form of software, will be able to correct for the human error. We will soon see a combination of Web services that will aim at cutting short our efforts, says Dr Brachman. AI is currently being used hand-in-hand with human intervention (in the form of Web sites asking users if they think some mail belongs to spam/ if an image is offending).

INDIAN CONTRIBUTION

Commending the contribution of Indian researchers at Yahoo in the field of AI, he said, "The talent here is extraordinary." Work on various AI themes - speech to text, computer vision, Indic language processing and translation, multimodal communication (voice communication) and handwriting recognition is being conducted at various research labs across the country.

Yahoo engineers are working on machine learning and language processing as well as image search and localisation. Yahoo Spamguard multi-level filter is an example of the work done by the Indian engineers.

In 5-10 years, says Dr Brachman, we will see lots of services, both offline and online, which will leverage AI research. It will remain a supporting field to computers. Many computational challenges remain ahead. Yet the researchers' `never say never' attitude will mean a future where AI will make our daily routine a lot easier.