Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
Robot
Robot: _ Pepper (above), a humanoid robot developed by SoftBank Robotics, was launched in 2014 and can read human emotions. Over 2,000 companies around the world have adopted Pepper as an assistant to welcome, inform and guide visitors in an innovative way. ____ Section-1 Prologue: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a robot? For many people it is a machine that imitates a human—like the androids in Star Wars, Terminator and Star Trek: The Next Generation. However much these robots capture our imagination, such robots still only inhabit Science Fiction. Science-fiction films and novels usually portray robots as one of two things: destroyers of the human race or friendly helpers. People still haven’t been able to give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world and the independent intelligent machines seen in science fiction are still a […]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI): _____ ______ Prologue: Mention Artificial Intelligence (AI) and most people are immediately transported into a distant future inspired by popular science fiction such as Terminator and HAL 9000. While these two artificial entities do not exist, the algorithms of AI have been able to address many real issues, from performing medical diagnoses to navigating difficult terrain to monitoring possible failures of spacecraft. In the early 20th century, Jean Piaget remarked, “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do, when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.” A 1969 McKinsey article claimed that computers were so dumb that they were not capable of making any decisions and it was human intelligence that drives the dumb machine. Alas, this claim has become a bit of a “joke” over the years, as the modern computers are gradually replacing skilled practitioners in fields […]
