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CS 640 Lecture Materials: AI Successes


Robotics

Home appliances: Roomba, robotic vacuum cleaner.
Assembly line robots: ABB or Robots.com

Tour guide robots

Boston Dynamics Robots


Computer Vision

Machine Vision Inspection, e.g. Omron or Cognex, (Natick, MA)

Face Recognition. First success: ViiSAGE Face Recognition. Now industry leader: NEC Face Recognition

Microscopy image analysis, e.g., for embryology or human semen analysis, Proiser

Optical Character Recognition: Edit, convert, and compare scanned documents and "born-digital" PDFs

Search by Image: Google Image. First success: Boston University's Image Rover.

Search by Video: Google Video.

Generating Images: Playground AI, DALL-E2 by OpenAI, Midjourney


Intelligent Vehicles and Self-driving Cars

MobileEye Lane Departure

Waymo Autonomous Ride-hailing Service

Cruise (GM) Driverless Cars

AutoX Selfdriving Cars

Self-driving Cars in San Francisco: Fire chief protests and street rebels immobilize driverless car.


Entertainment & Gaming

Mary 1997: Deep Blue and Chess,

February 2011: Watson, IBM's Jeopardy! (= American TV quiz show) playing computing system. Now used for legal and medical research.

March 2016: Google's AI won the game Go: AlphaGo


Expert Systems for Healthcare

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) for Hospitals: In 2017, IBM bought Merge Healthcare Inc (which bought Boston-based Amicas in 2010) and their PACS system.

IBM Watson Imaging Patient Synopsis: AI-enabled solutions for medical imaging

Watson helping to fight cancer

Assistive Technologies: Camera Mouse


Speech Recognition, Intelligent Personal Assistants, Large Language Models

Some history: Emacs "M-x doctor" and the Eliza Chat bot

Early Speech Recognition: Dragon Naturally Speaking. Now Nuance Intelligent Virtual Assistant" Newton, MA.

Intelligent Personal Assistants:

  1. Siri: "Hey, Siri"
  2. Google Home: "Ok Google"
  3. Amazon Alexa: "Echo" or "Alexa"

Large Language Models:


Notable alumni/ae who were my research advisees:

Angshuman Bagchi: AI Tools & Business Software (Sigma Computing)

Danna Gurari: Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Human Computation, Assistive Technology (University of Colorado)

Mehrnoosh Sameki: Responsible AI Tools (Microsoft Azure AI)

Diane Theriault: Video Analysis of Group Behavior, 3D Tracking, Microscopy Imaging (Google)

Jingbin Wang: Artificial Intelligence Products (Google)

Zheng Wu: Selfdriving Cars (AutoX)


Margrit Betke, Professor
Computer Science Department
Boston University
Email: betke @ bu.edu
URL: http://www.cs.bu.edu/faculty/betke