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Dr. Juergen Abel (Germany)
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Dr. Malika Mahoui (United States)
Introduction:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with the development of
machines that can perform intelligent behaviour as well as humans, or possibly
even better. AI has two main goals: the first is to build intelligent
entities (or intelligent agents), and the second is to understand
intelligent behaviour, whether it occurs in machines or in humans or other
animals.
AI has a short history as a discipline, beginning in the early 1950s,
with the name being coined in 1956. However, many of the important
ideas from Mathematics and Philosophy that are the field's foundation have
originated much earlier. For example, philosophers as early as 400 B.C.
were proposing similar ideas to the ones being examined today, such as the
mind operating like a machine, and that knowledge can be encoded in some
internal language. AI has evolved rapidly since the 1950s, so much
so that many of the ideas that were at the leading edge of research
in the area have jumped back into mainstream computer science and are no longer
thought of as "AI". Some of the contributions of AI include problem solving
(searching e.g. chess); logical reasoning (deduction, large databases);
language understanding (e.g. translation); automatic programming;
learning (machine learning, data mining, neural networks);
knowledge-based and expert systems; robotics and vision; language,
operating systems and tools (e.g. LISP, Prolog and
object oriented languages). If it is no longer called AI, it is because
the field has moved on to exploring other leads in the long process
of trying to get a machine to think.
The Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents research group (AIIA)
at Bangor has broad interests in many areas
including knowledge-based systems, logic, multi-agent systems, distributed
systems, machine learning, data mining, computational linguistics, natural language
processing, information theory and information retrieval.
A central goal of the research is
to develop intelligent agents, which have weak properties
such as autonomy, social ability, reactivity, proactivity, termporal continuity
and goal orientedness as well as strong properties such as mobility, benevolence,
rationality, collaborative ability and adaptivity.
Current Projects:
HOME PAGE of the research group.
