Discuss Kōrero Mai: What is Artifical Intelligence (A.I)?

Artificial Intelligence enhances the speed, precision and effectiveness of human efforts.

Watch this video to learn more:



Where can you find examples of AI?

Consider what you have just learned by watching the video...

  • What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
  • Is all Artificial Intelligence in the form of a robot?
  • Where can you find AI in real life?



    • Some more examples of AI

    • Health Care - AI applications can provide personalised medicine and X-ray readings. Personal health care assistants can act as life coaches, reminding you to take your pills, exercise or eat healthier.

    • Retail - AI provides virtual shopping capabilities that offer personalised recommendations and discuss purchase options with the consumer. Stock management and site layout technologies will also be improved with AI.

    • Manufacturing - AI can analyse factory Internet of Things (IoT) data as it streams from connected equipment to forecast expected load and demand using recurrent networks.

    • Life sciences - From ensuring drug safety to getting new therapies to market faster.

    • Banking - In financial institutions, AI techniques can be used to identify which transactions are likely to be fraudulent, adopt fast and accurate credit scoring, as well as automate manually intense data management tasks.

    • Public sector - Artificial Intelligence can make smart cities smarter. It can support national defense with mission readiness and predictive maintenance.




    Ready? Kua reri? - Ready? It's your turn... Training the computer to 'remember'!

    Head to: https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train

    In this activity you will choose an action that you would like to train the computer program to 'remember'.

    It can be an image, an audio sound or a pose. The more examples that you can give the program...the better it will be 'trained'!

    Here is an example video:



    Discuss Kōrero Mai: What have you learned about AI from the Teachable Machine Activity?

  • What have you learned by creating your own AI?
  • How do you think this AI program works?
  • How do you think you could possible use this type of AI in a Virtual Reality environment?




    • Understanding how A.I works


    Discuss Kōrero Mai: What are the core principles A.I use?

    Decision making!

    At its core, A.I is based around making decisions with the input given. This could be speech, images, sounds or colours!

    As mentioned before, A.I can learn more about certain inputs, to make more accurate decisions on what it's output should be.



    Creating our own basic A.I

    Believe it or not, we’ve already been creating our own versions of basic A.I. These A.I might not remember information, but it can make decisions based on the input provided.

    Where have we done this before? What code do we write to make decisions?

    IF Statements ! Each time we encounter an IF statement, we are asking the computer to make a decision based on the input we provide.

    A.I can be a lot more complicated than simple Yes/No IF statements. However, for now thats all we need to know. Let’s have a look at creating our own A.I as a flowchart. For this example, we will create a A.I that can tell you the weather.


    Receiving Input

    The first step for our application is to receive and translate the information. For our Weather A.I, this input can be human speech.



    Discuss Kōrero Mai: how do you understand a question?

    We tend to listen for keywords in the sentence. If someone wanted to know what the time of day was, we would listen out for:

  • Time
  • How long...
  • When...


    • These keywords indicate that the subject of the question is to do with time.

    What keywords would we listen for about the weather?



    Using keywords to make decisions

    There are many different KeyWords that can be associated with the weather, let alone different languages! That is a job for machine learning however. For now, let’s start off with a few keywords about the weather:

    • Weather
    • Temperature
    • Outside
    • Rain/Cloud/Sun

    What keywords are used to describe a question?



    Usually in english we would look for a ’?’ at the end of the sentence. For a computer receiving raw human speech, it needs to again look for certain keywords. Keywords for a questions could be:

    • What?
    • How?
    • Is it?
    • Will it?


    Outputting the results

    After the computer has broken down the human speech into keywords, it can then determine if an appropriate question has been asked.

    If this is true, we search a weather database online and read the results back outloud

    If this if false, we output the message “Sorry, I didn’t understand your question”




    Ready? Kua reri? - Ready? it's your turn... Construct your own AI

    Construct your own A.I flowchart. Decide on what topic your A.I will help the user with. This could be: Cars, animals, restaurants...

    Then decide on what keywords your A.I should listen for depending on your topic. Such as: speed, colour, location, cost...



    Kua mutu? Finished? - User created AI programs

    Just like the "Teachable Machine" there are lots of other user created A.I programs. Have a try and explore them here.