Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence heralds the promise of computers that can exhibit human-like behavior and has progressed steadily by mastering a series of increasingly challenging benchmark tasks. In sharp contrast to the state of the field twenty years ago, today there are automated tools to perform facial recognition from a corpus of images, play world-championship chess, and even win at Jeopardy.  One particular subfield has made especially remarkable advances, and that is the area of machine learning, in which the algorithms used for these tasks are “trained” by their experience in handling a series of inputs for the task at hand. Machine learning algorithms rely upon sophisticated new mathematics that ties problems in high-dimensional statistics to new approaches to non-convex optimization. Cornell is an international leader in AI research, including machine learning. CAM facilitates collaborations of this inherently interdisciplinary field that connects computer science, the mathematical and physical sciences and engineering.