Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Abstract

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have always been hot topics in news and science fiction. Recently they got more media attention because of technology breakthroughs in deep learning and more consumer-facing applications on the market. The terms machine learning and artificial intelligence are sometimes used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference. Artificial intelligence focuses on “intelligence”. An AI system tries to behave as if it possesses human intelligence, no matter what the underlying method or algorithm is. But in machine learning, the focus is on “learning,” where the system is trying to learn something from the data without a human explicitly programming the knowledge. For example, one of the early successes in AI was the expert system. In an expert system, the knowledge of a particular field is written down as rules and programmed directly into the code, so the system can answer questions or perform tasks as if it were a domain expert. This kind of system might appear to have some level of human intelligence, but underneath it’s not actually “learning” from data. So this system can be called an AI system but not a machine learning system.