Artificial Intelligence...Defined

Image credit: Wired.com

John McCarthy (Standford)

Q. What is artificial intelligence?

A. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Defined (Forbes)

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.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Definition of artificial intelligence

1 :a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers

2 :the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior

Part 1: Artificial Intelligence Defined (Deloitte)

• Artificial intelligence is a computerised system that exhibits behaviour that is commonly thought of as requiring intelligence.” (3)
• “Artificial Intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by man.” (4)
• The founding father of AI, Alan Turing, defines this discipline as:
• “AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.” (5)

Super-shopper chat bots poised to disrupt e-commerce - Beerud Sheth

Super-shopper chat bots poised to disrupt e-commerce (Beerud Sheth)

• "These intelligent bots will be hyper-rational shoppers"
• "Shopping bots can visit hundreds of merchant bots to find the best product or price"
• "Bots will render dynamic pricing algorithms irrelevant"
• "Bots may help the user transact anonymously"
• "Bots will diminish the value of customer loyalty"

"The very nature of the shopper is about to change: the new customer is a super shopper, an economically rational actor with practically infinite information, memory and compute capabilities. They will not care about convenience or selection – they can take care of it themselves. The only way to appease them will be to deliver better quality or price."

Levi Virtual Stylist + "Stop pretending you really know what AI is" (John Pavlus)

Image credit: www.multichannelmerchant.com

Levi Strauss & Co. Launches New ‘Virtual Stylist’ Feature

"The virtual stylist, which is powered by mode.ai and personalized fit data from TrueFit, provides the in-store expertise in the hands of every consumer.  It is built with the help of artificial intelligence.  Users are able to receive fashion advice throughout the site, on either their mobile devices or laptop."

Stop pretending you really know what AI is and read this instead

• "Artificial intelligence (AI) is the general label for a field of study—specifically, the study of whatever might answer the question 'What is required for a machine to exhibit intelligence?'”
• "If that doesn’t sound very satisfying, the experts don’t disagree. 'At this point, AI is an aspirational term reflecting a goal,' Darrell says. What he means is that “AI” isn’t, technically speaking, a thing. It’s not in your phone. It isn’t going to eat the world or do anything to your job. It’s not even an “it” at all: It’s just a suitcase word enclosing a foggy constellation of “things”—plural—that do have real definitions and edges to them. All the other stuff you hear about—machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, what have you—are much more precise names for the various scientific, mathematical, and engineering methods that people employ within the field of AI."
• Great read...be sure to checkout his full post

ai eCommerce News Sept 4th

Image credit: eweek.com

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Alexa-Cortana Deal to Boost AI and Voice-Enabled Commerce Markets

"The Aug. 30 announcement by Microsoft and Amazon that they will enable their respective virtual assistant technologies, Cortana and Alexa, to talk to one another, is being regarded by industry experts as the first crack in the wall that separates today's leading virtual assistant technologies." 

"‘Alexa enables a set of defined skills for specific use cases and Cortana is designed to be a voice interaction interface’ for finding and retrieving information. Together, Cortana and Alexa will push the boundaries of what voice-enabled AI can do beyond what each platform can do alone."

How AI-Powered Personalization Could Reshape E-Commerce

"Russian retailer Lamoda’s use of Dynamic Yield resulted in a $15 million uplift in gross profit, a staggering 35-times return on their investment in the platform. The company built over 160 unique audience segments, and delivered unique experiences to each in the form of segment-specific coupons and personalized category pages."

Google and Microsoft Can Use AI to Extract Many More Ad Dollars From Our Clicks

"Perhaps not surprisingly, Rajan believes deep learning still has much more to offer the ad industry. For example, it could figure out long-term cause and effect relationships between what you see or do online today and what you click on or buy next week. 'Being able to model the timeline of user interest is something that the deep models are able to do a lot better,' she says."