This exciting field of computer science focuses on technologies that mimic human intelligence — with AI systems becoming way more prevalent in recent years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to any technology exhibiting some facets of human intelligence, and it has been a prominent field in computer science for decades. AI tasks can include anything from picking out objects in a visual scene to knowing how to frame a sentence, or even predicting stock price movements.

 

Scientists have been trying to build AI since the dawn of the computing era. The leading approach for much of the last century involved creating large databases of facts and rules and then getting logic-based computer programs to draw on these to make decisions. But this century has seen a shift, with new approaches that get computers to learn their own facts and rules by analyzing data. This has led to major advances in the field.

 

Over the past decade, machines have exhibited seemingly “superhuman” capabilities in everything from spotting breast cancer in medical images, to playing the devilishly tricky board games Chess and  Go — and even predicting the structure of proteins.