AI Adventures Worth Writing Home About

Abstract

This paper provides a backdrop to my invited talk at the conference. The talk itself will focus on selected successes of artificial intelligence from the industrial perspective. The selected success stories will demonstrate that artificial intelligence has a strong and meaningful influence on our lives by impacting development of products and services we use daily. They will show how the technical results in the field have been used to make a difference in designing complex artifacts, in coordinating our actions, in playing games and in other activities. The emphasis is on transformation processes rather than on specifies of achievements in knowledge representation, case-based reasoning, or sophisticated search techniques. I could not have given this type of a talk ten or even five years ago because this was the initial period of attempts to insert into the business processes of companies. Today, ten years later, we have a large number of systems that are an integral part of critical business processes, I shall describe some shining examples in my talk. However, the expectations generated ten years ago were much higher than what we were able to achieve in ten years Because of this we have pessimists who talk of failure and AI winter. Since I want to concentrate on the accomplishments in my talk, I wish to get the negative aspects out of the way here in this paper. Taking the metaphor of a partially filled glass of water, I will describe the empty portion of it in this paper and only remind you of it during the talk. Conversely, this paper just outlines the content of the filled portion while the talk will give you its full taste.