Artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning: a brief explanation

Ever since Allan Turing published: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, artificial intelligence has become a major topic on the news and daily life.

We hear it on the radio and read it in the front cover of the newspapers, magazines and titles of articles. Notions such as: Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing pop out of our screens every day. Do we really know what these words mean? Can we see the difference among these terms?

The concept of artificial intelligence was first introduced in 1950. The Turing test permitted to decipher whether an entity was intelligent or not. Now we know that an agent, like you, me, a dog, a thermostat, a machine or a computer, is said to act intelligent when three conditions are supplied.

1. What the agent does is appropriate for its goals
2. The agent’s actions are flexible to evolving environments
3. The choices it makes are appropriate

When intelligence comes from humans or animals, is said to be natural intelligence, in contrast to intelligence showed by machines, artificial intelligence or machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence creates systems that can function independently and intelligently. This field of computer science enables computers to perform intelligent human tasks without being exclusively programmed. When we say exclusively programmed we introduce the term of machine learning.

Machine Learning consists in computers learning without being programmed to perform specific tasks. Machines use algorithms to parse data next, they will learn from the data they collect to finally make predictions and reliable decisions. Humans learn from past experiences, machines learn from data and past patterns. Due to the facility of handling big data, the use of Machine Learning has grown exponentially in industries such as Customer Service, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare and finance.

For the computer to gather valuable information, it first needs to understand it. At this point deep learning is developed. Deep learning is specialized type of Machine Learning. It articulates three specific tasks: image recognition, machine translation and Natural language processing NLP. Natural language processing is the bridge between computers and humans. NLP analyzes texts, allows machines to understand how human speak, assimilate words linked together and giving them a meaning. Some of the roles of Natural language processing would be to correct the grammar, converting speech to text and translation between languages.

Written by: Maria Palacio
The Praips Team
https://praips.io