Artificial Intelligence

Research Area

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the study of how computer systems can simulate intelligent processes such as learning, reasoning, and understanding symbolic information in context. AI is inherently a multi-disciplinary field. Although it is most commonly viewed as a subfield of computer science, and draws upon work in algorithms, databases, and theoretical computer science, AI also has close connections to the neurosciences, cognitive science and cognitive psychology, mathematical logic, and engineering.

IBM has been a leader in AI since AI's earliest days, when Arthur Samuels (in the 1950s) developed an expert checkers-playing program that learned from experience. Forty years later, IBM Research's chess-playing program Deep Blue made history by beating world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

AI Research at IBM goes far beyond game-playing programs and is at the forefront of many of the hottest areas of Artificial Intelligence. Research in AI at IBM can be characterized by the AI techniques or methodologies used in a particular project, or by the motivating application for which AI is used. AI techniques and methodologies include learning, Bayesian Reasoning, intelligent agents, knowledge representation, logic programming, and planning. AI applications include electronic commerce, intelligent tutoring systems, knowledge management, performance management, and exploratory vision.

Projects

Activities 

News

  • IBM uses semantics to get better search
    Scobleizer talks to Shiv Vaithyanathan at IBM Almaden about what gets him jazzed up every day: Helping searchers find what they really want. [FastCompany.tv]
  • How can you govern software creativity?
    Clay Williams: "Organizations are not processors that you simply program. Creative things happen in them and we want to support that creativity."
  • What is Web science?
    British computer scientists begin a discipline to study Web phenomena. Podcast (8 minutes)

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