Interest in Artificial Intelligence Rekindled

"After a speculative boom in the '80s, attempts to encode humanlike intelligence into systems that could categorize concepts and relate them to each other didn't really pan out, and "expert systems" packed with rules derived from human authorities couldn't translate their expertise into areas beyond the subject matter for which they were programmed...

Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. Researchers are building AI-inspired user interfaces, systems that can perform calculations or suggest passages of text in anticipation of what users will need, and software that tries to mirror people's memories to help them find information amid digital clutter...

Several industry trends also are helping move AI up on labs' agendas. The emerging field of wireless sensor networks, which have the potential to collect vast amounts of data about industrial operations, the ecosystem, or conditions in a building or home, could benefit from the use of AI techniques to interpret their data. The Pentagon continues to fund AI research, partly to lay the groundwork for intelligent vehicles and robots..."

Read more in this InformationWeek article.