William Flannery
Artificial intelligence (AI) was first coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955. There is no accepted definition of AI but we
could start with ‘machines that perform tasks that require intelligence when performed by humans’.
The formal birth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in 1956 at the Dartmouth conference. AI has had several boom/bust cycles however
in the 1990s, AI started to gain traction exemplified by IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov. Millennial AI has been
aided by increasing computing power web usage (search, eCommerce, sharing economy, regulated industries etc.). AI is now fullyembedded
in many areas of our lives.
What are the mechanics of Artificial Intelligence? It is difficult to explain AI without resorting to code and algebra. This presentation
gives an overview of the mechanisms of AI for the lay person focusing on the 3 main types of machine learning.
Healthcare is a difficult area for AI to crack. This is partly because it is highly-regulated and because computers are not good at natural
language – human communication which has developed over time through use and repetition. In 2010, Deepmind (artificial neural
networks) was launched and IBM introduced Watson a question- answer computer system which could answer questions posed in
natural language
