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Nand Kishor is the Product Manager of House of Bots. After finishing his studies in computer science, he ideated & re-launched Real Estate Business Intelligence Tool, where he created one of the leading Business Intelligence Tool for property price analysis in 2012. He also writes, research and sharing knowledge about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data Science, Big Data, Python Language etc... ...

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Nand Kishor is the Product Manager of House of Bots. After finishing his studies in computer science, he ideated & re-launched Real Estate Business Intelligence Tool, where he created one of the leading Business Intelligence Tool for property price analysis in 2012. He also writes, research and sharing knowledge about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data Science, Big Data, Python Language etc...

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Defined

By Nand Kishor |Email | Aug 28, 2017 | 10446 Views

This week's milestones in the history of technology include the coining of the term "artificial intelligence," the digitization of the Library of Congress, and the first penny paper.

August 28, 1845

The first issue of Scientific American is published by Rufus Porter as a weekly broadsheet subtitled "The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements."

"In an era of rapid innovation, Scientific American founded the first branch of the U.S. Patent Agency, in 1850, to provide technical help and legal advice to inventors. A Washington, D.C., branch was added in 1859. By 1900 more than 100,000 inventions had been patented thanks to Scientific American.

August 31, 1955

The term "artificial intelligence" is coined in a proposal for a "2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence" submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). The workshop, which took place a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally recognized as the official birthdate of the new field.

The proposal defined what its authors meant by "artificial intelligence":

"An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. ... For the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving".

And it promised results:

We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

In July 13-15, 2006, the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years (AI@50), commemorated the 50th anniversary of the original "Dartmouth Conference." Five of the original ten attendees were present: Marvin Minsky, Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, and John McCarthy. The conference director, James Moor, published a summary report (PDF) in AI Magazine. It reads, in part:

Dating the beginning of any movement is difficult, but the Dartmouth Summer Research Project of 1956 is often taken as the event that initiated AI as a research discipline. John McCarthy, a mathematics professor at Dartmouth at the time, had been disappointed that the papers in Automata Studies, which he co-edited with Claude Shannon, did not say more about the possibilities of computers possessing intelligence. Thus, in the proposal written by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester for the 1956 event, McCarthy wanted, as he explained at AI@50, "to nail the flag to the mast." McCarthy is credited for coining the phrase "artificial intelligence" and solidifying the orientation of the field. It is interesting to speculate whether the field would have been any different had it been called "computational intelligence" or any of a number of other possible labels.
Five of the attendees from the original project attended AI@50. Each gave some recollections. McCarthy acknowledged that the 1956 project did not live up to expectations in terms of collaboration. The attendees did not come at the same time and most kept to their own research agenda. McCarthy emphasized that nevertheless there were important research developments at the time, particularly Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon's Information Processing Language (IPL) and the Logic Theory Machine. Marvin Minsky commented that, although he had been working on neural nets for his dissertation a few years prior to the 1956 project, he discontinued this earlier work because he became convinced that advances could be made with other approaches using computers. Minsky expressed the concern that too many in AI today try to do what is popular and publish only successes. He argued that AI can never be a science until it publishes what fails as well as what succeeds. Oliver Selfridge highlighted the importance of many related areas of research before and after the 1956 summer project that helped to propel AI as a field. The development of improved languages and machines was essential. He offered tribute to many early pioneering activities such as J. C. R. Licklider developing time-sharing, Nat Rochester designing IBM computers, and Frank Rosenblatt working with perceptrons. Trenchard More was sent to the summer project for two separate weeks by the University of Rochester. Some of the best notes describing the AI project were taken by More, although ironically he admitted that he never liked the use of "artificial" or "intelligence" as terms for the field. Ray Solomonoff said he went to the summer project hoping to convince everyone of the importance of machine learning. He came away knowing a lot about Turing machines that informed future work.
Thus, in some respects the 1956 summer research project fell short of expectations. The participants came at various times and worked on their own projects, and hence it was not really a conference in the usual sense. There was no agreement on a general theory of the field and in particular on a general theory of learning. The field of AI was launched not by agreement on methodology or choice of problems or general theory, but by the shared vision that computers can be made to perform intelligent tasks. This vision was stated boldly in the proposal for the 1956 conference: "The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."


Although AI has enjoyed much success over the last 50 years, numerous dramatic disagreements remain within the field. Different research areas frequently do not collaborate, researchers utilize different methodologies, and there still is no general theory of intelligence or learning that unites the discipline.

September 1, 1994

The United States Library of Congress holds the first meeting to plan the conversion of printed materials to a digital format in order to make them accessible through the internet and to preserve rare materials. During the initial meeting, librarians and technical experts project that the library's most vulnerable materials might be digitized as soon as by the year 2000. In 2015, the library of Congress has preserved more than 9 million items from its collections.

September 2, 1969

The first automatic teller machine (ATM) in the United States is installed by Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. Chemical's cash machine, initially known as a Docuteller was designed by Donald Wetzel of Docutel. The first cash machines were designed to dispense a fixed amount of cash when a user inserted a specially coded card. A Chemical Bank advertisement boasted "On Sept. 2 our bank will open at 9:00 and never close again."

The theme of non-stop banking continued to evolve as ATMs proliferated. When a huge blizzard hit New York in January 1978, banks were closed for days and ATM use increased by 20%. Within days, Citibank had launched its "The Citi Never Sleeps" ad campaign. Today, there are over 2.2 million ATMs in use worldwide.

September 3, 1833

The first issue of the The New York Sun is published. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: 

New technology, in fact, came along after [italics mine] the renaissance of the newspaper. The New York Sun was the first "penny paper," featuring sensational stories aimed at mass audience... it stretched the limit of its hand presses with its 10,000 copies a day. (When a series of stories announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared, it sold 20,000 copies in a day; by then it had switched to a steam-powered press). Benjamin Day, its published, bragged about its power: "Since the Sun began to shine upon the citizens of New York, there had been a great and decided change in the condition of the laboring classes, and the mechanics. Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun."... Between 1828 and 1840 the number of daily newspapers doubled from 852 to 1,631 and total circulation increased from 68 million to 195 million. More daily newspapers were printed in the United States than in the rest of the world.

Day also introduced a new way of selling papers - newsboys hawking their newspapers on the streets. After paying a visit to the United States, Charles Dickens described (in Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844) the newsboys greeting a ship in New York Harbor:

"Here's this morning's New York Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the New York Private Listener! ... Here's the full particulars of the patriotic loco-foco movement yesterday, in which the whigs were so chawed up, and the last Alabama gauging case ... and all the Political, Commercial and Fashionable News. Here they are!" ... "It is in such enlightened means," said a voice almost in Martin's ear, "that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent."

Another visitor from abroad, the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, could discern (in Portrait of America, 1876) in the mass circulation of newspapers, the American belief about the universal need for information:

In Poland, a newspaper subscription tends to satisfy purely intellectual needs and is regarded as somewhat of a luxury which the majority of the people can heroically forego; in the United States a newspaper is regarded as a basic need of every person, indispensable as bread itself.

Basic need for information, of all kinds, as Mark Twain observed (in Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1897): "The old saw says, â??Let a sleeping dog lie.' Right. Still, when there is much at stake, it is better to get a newspaper to do it."

Today, the need for "serious" and "sensational" information is satisfied less and less by newspapers alone. The Pew Research Center reports...

in March 2010:

The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.

and in July 2016:

Social media, messaging apps, texts and email provide a constant stream of news from people we're close to as well as total strangers. News stories can now come piecemeal, as links or shares, putting less emphasis on the publisher. And, hyper levels of immediacy and mobility can create an expectation that the news will come to us whether we look for it or not... Fully 81% of Americans get at least some of this news through websites, apps or social networking sites.

and in May 2017:

Democrats and Republicans, who already tend to place their trust in different news sources and rely on different outlets for political news, now disagree more than ever on a fundamental issue of the news media's role in society: whether news organizations' criticism of political leaders primarily keeps them from doing things they shouldn't - or keeps them from doing their job.

Source: Forbes
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