The Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) at the School of Informatics

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in Informatics....

 at the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 is a non-profit

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 technology transfer organisation that promotes the benefits of the application of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 research to commercial, industrial, and government organisations worldwide.

History

AIAI was created in July 1983, and received it formal charter from the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 in July 1984. It joined the School of Informatics

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in Informatics....

 when this was created from a number of departments and research institutes in 1998. The Director of AIAI is Austin Tate

Austin Tate

Professor Austin Tate FRSE FBCS FAAAI is Director of AIAI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He holds the Chair in Knowledge-based systems at the University of Edinburgh...

.

Activities

AIAI specialises in Intelligent

Intelligent Systems

is a Japanese first-party video game developer and internal team of Nintendo Co., Ltd. It has its headquarters in the Nintendo Kyoto Research Center in Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture....

 and Knowledge-based systems

Knowledge-based systems

Knowledge based systems are artificial intelligent tools working in a narrow domain to provide intelligent decisions with justification. Knowledge is acquired and represented using various knowledge representation techniques rules, frames and scripts...

, including:

• Ontology
  Ontology (computer science)
  In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...
  
   development and knowledge engineering
  Knowledge engineering
  Knowledge engineering was defined in 1983 by Edward Feigenbaum, and Pamela McCorduck as follows:At present, it refers to the building, maintaining and development of knowledge-based systems...
  
  ;
• Case-based reasoning
  Case-based reasoning
  Case-based reasoning , broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning...
  
  : a technique for utilising past experiences and existing corporate resources such as databases to guide diagnosis and fault finding;
• Genetic algorithm
  Genetic algorithm
  A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural evolution. This heuristic is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems...
  
  s: an adaptive search technique with very broad applicability in scheduling, optimization, and model adaptation;
• Planning
  Automated planning and scheduling
  Automated planning and scheduling is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles. Unlike classical control and classification problems, the solutions are...
  
   and workflow
  Workflow
  A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...
  
  : the modelling, task setting, planning, execution, monitoring and coordination of activities;
• Data mining
  Data mining
  Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
  
  : the identification and extraction of useful general patterns from data.

External links

• AIAI website
• AIAI projects
• AIAI people
• AIAI2 - AIAI in Second Life
  Second Life
  Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...