ABSTRACT
The pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in our world is continuously growing. AI not only contributes to revolutionize science in many ways: it is also part of the everyday lives of billions of people around the world through a vast spectrum of industrial applications that are now well embedded in our daily routines and lifestyles. This chapter will first provide an historical account of trends, ideas, and paradigms that contributed to the formation of AI as a scientific field as we know it today, in the attempt to offer a brief but informative survey on the “collective journey of AI.” Then, it will discuss what AI is and means, covering the main distinction between Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). Once these concepts are explained, this chapter will introduce the main concepts in machine learning, a branch of AI that has become particularly popular in the last decades. To conclude, it will offer a concise overview on deep learning, a subfield of machine learning that has led to major breakthroughs in many domains after its rise in early 2000s.
