From the course: Cognitive Technologies: The Real Opportunities for Business

Cognitive technologies explained

From the course: Cognitive Technologies: The Real Opportunities for Business

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Cognitive technologies explained

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- In this section of the course we're going to look at a wide variety of cognitive technologies. Cognitive technologies are products of the field of artificial intelligence. They're able to perform tasks that only people used to be able to do such as reasoning and planning, learning, perceiving and interacting with the physical world. The section will be broken up into several parts. First we'll look at cognition, how knowledge can be represented in a computer, enabling the computer to reason automatically. This is not about computers thinking, by the way. It's about computers simulating thinking processes which is very powerful. Next we'll look at learning. This is about computers improving their performance automatically through exposure to data without explicit programming. This is really powerful because there are some problems for which we don't know how to program the solutions but computers can learn them on their own. Next we'll look at perception and natural interfaces. This refers to the ability of computers to take in information more the way we do, through text, speech and vision. Finally, we'll look at physical action or robotics, the ability of machines to interact with their physical environment in ways that seem intelligent. Each lecture follows a similar structure. We're going to define the technology, tell you what it does, we'll give you an example either from the real world or a simplified example, then we'll walk you through, at some level of detail, how it works. Finally, we'll review some real world applications of this technology to give you an idea of how these technologies might be applied in your own organization. To help me with this section, I'll be joined by Eric Nyberg, a Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science here in Carnegie Mellon University.

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