Intelligence in the Continuum

Intelligence in nature is pervasive, distributed and, in some cases, cooperative, whether we are considering Einstein's development of the General Theory of Relativity, the ability of a mouse to learn a maze, or the ability of a plant to heal a wound). In computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly pervasive, distributed, and often, cooperative. It is an area that has been engineered for 7+ decades (and is ultimately based on the work of Alan Turing a decade before that) and, until recently, has focused on enabling systems to perform tasks, usually repetitive and routine in nature (for example robots in automobile manufacturing). Things are changing, though. AI has been making dramatic progress in generic domains such as speech recognition, visual perception, search, and language translation as well as in industry-specific applications such as manufacturing, education, and healthcare. Intelligence in IT is leveraged in many ways, such as relying on intelligent automation to optimize Infrastructure deployments, to improve the quality of testing, and to improve the effectiveness of security mechanisms.