ficial Intelligence AI is having a Trojan renaissance, says Nick Cassimatis, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys (MIT) Media Lab, in Cambridge, Mass. Vendors are quietly building AI technologies into practical software applications that do everything from recommend music for Web shoppers to direct airplanes at airports. Because of AIs tarnished reputation, vendors arent promoting their products as being AI-based. However, understanding the advanced AI technologies behind the products can help technology managers determine a products value and consider the potential of AI solving related business problems.In business some of the most successful applications have been constructed by building substantial domain knowledge into computer programs. These systems are often referred to as knowledge base systems. Typically, these system use decision and process rules presented from experts to summarize that knowledge. Other systems use representations of cases from past experience to generate solutions for current situations, case-based reasoning (CBR). Law and other domains where reasoning is based on cases, find this approach very useful. Other approaches include so-called data mining and machine learning where knowledge is generated from an analysis of data. That knowledge is then summarized and used to make inferences.Case-based reasoning is an approach to AI where a system stores case studies, responds to a problem by finding similar cases in its memory, and adapts the solution that worked in the past to the current situation. CBR sprang from cognitive science research, which was begun, in the early 1980s by Roger Schank at Yale Universitys AI lab, in New Haven, Conn. Automated Customer-Support systems are an important business use of CBR. This is growing rapidly as companies look to reduce product support costs by encouraging customers to find their own answers on a web site instead, of calling expensi...
