AI Panel

Artificial Intelligence

What is AI?

AI is research in learning, reasoning, communication, perception and robotics.

Computational intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence (or AI), is the study of the design of intelligent agents.

An agent is something that acts in an environment—such as a mobile robot, a web crawler, an automated medical diagnosis system, or an autonomous character in a video game. An intelligent agent is an agent that acts appropriately in order to satisfy its goals. That is, the agent must perceive its environment, decide what action to perform, and then carry out the action.

Perception comes in many modalities—visual, haptic (touch), speech, textual/ linguistic, etc. Decision-making also comes in many flavors, depending on whether the agent has complete or partial knowledge of its world, whether it is acting alone or in collaboration/ competition with other agents, etc. Finally, taking actions can have different forms, depending on whether the agent has wheels, arms, or is entirely virtual. An intelligent agent should also learn to improve its performance over time, as it repeatedly performs this sense-think-act cycle.

AI at UBC Computer Science

There are many facets of AI and how these elements crossover in research and application. Our award-winning research groups in the arena of AI are broken down into core areas of study like machine learning, game theory, computer vision and others. There are currently eight groups under the AI umbrella.