What is AI and what is it to you?

Cindy Candrian’s interest in machine learning began in the most unlikely way. Out driving with her mum, she noticed that, while her latest-model car had a distance control function, her mother wouldn’t use it. Not trusting the technology, she had simply blocked it. The moment sparked an epiphany for Candrian: “I thought, even if we have these amazing tools, they’re useless if people aren’t going to use them. We can have the coolest things, but we need humans to be willing to use them.” That insight led to the realization that AI tools have to be designed in such a way that people want to use them. 

Defining AI 

This brings us to the question: What exactly is AI? In terms of the mathematics behind it, some of the algorithms that we’re still using date back to the 1940s; even the concept of a neural network, which sits deep in the center of learning algorithms today, has been around for almost as long.  

There are almost as many definitions of AI as there are algorithms,…