We hear more and more sad stories every day and not all of them have a happy ending except that recent news we were able to witness.

This story links an abducted boy, technology – artificial intelligence – and his way to home. But first of all let’s explain you what is the artificial intelligence for the one who have never heard about it.

What is artificial intelligence (A.I.)?

In basic words, artificial intelligence is the fact that machines, especially computer systems, process the simulation of human intelligence. There are different types of process:

• Learning (the acquisition of information and rules to use the information)
• Reasoning (the use of the rules to try to reach a conclusion)
• Self-correction

Machine vision, speech recognition and expert systems are included in some applications of A.I.

What are the types of artificial intelligence?

There are two kind of categories. The first one it is about the types of artificial intelligence. They are weak and strong A.I.:

• Weak A.I.: (or also called narrow A.I.) such as Apple’s Siri - a personal assistant. That kind of A.I. are trained to do a particular task.
• Strong A.I.: (or artificial general intelligence) such as the Turing Test developed by Alan Turing to determine if a computer can think like a human (although the method is controversial).

The second kind of category is from Arend Hintze, an assistant professor at Michigan State University. He categorizes four types of A.I. (some existing nowadays and others not yet):

• Reactive machines: can only make predictions but has no memory (so cannot use its past experiences to inform the future ones) such as Deep Blue, the chess program of IBM.
• Limited memory: can use past experiences to inform futures decisions but only for not-so-distant future.
• Theory of mind: psychology term. Term in consideration that the others have believes, desires and intentions that influence the decisions they make. This A.I. does not exist yet.
• Self-awareness: A.I. has consciousness and have a sense of self. The machine understands its current state and take in consideration the feeling of the others. Doesn’t exist either.

What are the applications for the A.I.?

A.I. in business: it is used for highly repetitive tasks usually performed by humans. Machines learning algorithms are integrated into analytics and CRM platforms to be able to reply to customers when they need basic information. They are commonly called chatbot.

A.I. in education: it can be used to grade, asses the students and adapt to their needs.

A.I. in healthcare: it could be used to improve the patient outcomes and reducing the cost. It could give a better and faster diagnoses than humans. Some companies are trying to develop at the moment.

A.I. in law: it can be used to help the lawyers to sifting through the documents to find the right information. Startups have built a question-and-answer computer to reply to the clients’ requests.

A.I. in finance: it is used with personal finance applications but it could be improved to advise the people when they want to buy a house for instance. Moreover, it is already used with softwares for the trading on Wall Street.

A.I. in manufacturing: it is used for quite a long time where robots took over some tasks from humans.

What are the most powerful examples of artificial intelligence in use today?

Siri: as said below, it is the Apple’s personal assistant. It helps for any kind of task such as find information, give directions, add event to the calendars… It uses machine-learning technology to get smarter and better able to predict and understand our natural-language questions.

Tesla: it is an intelligent car that have predictive capabilities, self-driving features…The car is getting even smarter and smarter thanks to their updates.

Alexa: it is the smart home’s hub launched by Amazon. It helps us to set alarms, shop, schedule appointment. It can catch any speech in the room to help us to organize ourselves.

Amazon: its transactional A.I. allow to make huge amount of money online. Thanks to their algorithms, they can predict what we are interested in buying based on the online behavior.

Netflix: it suggests movies to people based on what they have previously watched and how they have reacted after watching the movies. The only issue of this technology is the small-labeled movies go unnoticed while they big-named movies grow and balloon the platform.

What is the recent story about the abducted boy?

A 33 years old Chinese man, named Fu, have found his biological parents thanks to the facial recognition technology 27 years after he was kidnapped.

This Chinese man was living in the Southeastern province of Fujian after his abduction. The motives to believe his foster parents were not his biological parents came from some slight memories from his youth.

He posted in 2009 his information on website to help to locate missing children. Since then it was not really successful until the day the website told him they have found his potential parents. After a DNA test, there was a match with Fu and a man living in the city of Chongqing, in Southwest China.

The father was searching after his son for 27 years. At that time, internet did not exist so he did what he could by asking to the strangers in his area. But last year he posted his information on the missing children database and it was finally possible to reunite them.

The successful match was only possible thanks to the recent artificial intelligence technology. It uses the human facial features to enable face detection, recognition and matching across age categories.

This biometric technology is a revolution in the face recognition field. It was developed by the Chinese Internet Baidu. They applied the technology in March in the purpose to cooperate with the missing children database to fight the human trafficking.

What is your next step?

If you are interested to know more about the artificial intelligence and maybe you would like to apply that technology to your business whatever your business is, do not hesitate to contact us.