Artificial intelligence available

The goal of an artificial intelligence diagnostic system is to provide the available expert advice to the user, in a time that is probably faster than the human could deliver it. A number of... 

Nevertheless, in many electronic tongue studies, such constraints are ignored and ANNs are used as the default choice. This choice is also made in cases with very poor data sets and without performing a proper validation. This may be due to the fact that the related computational software is easily available and that many people have a propensity to follow the predominant trends and to use the most potent instruments available, without critical considerations. Furthermore, perhaps, there is a fashionable association of ideas coimecting the concepts of artificial tongue and artificial intelligence. 

The development of expert systems need not be costly. There are several expert system shells commercially available, and an expert in artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer needed to program them. Simple IF-THEN rules can easily be programmed in more commonly used languages like FORTRAN and BASIC. In fact, the McDonnell Aircraft expert system referred to earilier was programmed in FORTRAN. Cost depends on the number of rules and... 

Several instruments have emerged in the marketplace and have been popularly described as electronic noses . In reality, these are volatile chemical sensor arrays. To give them more likeness to the human nose (or, more accurately, olfactory system), they are coupled to artificial intelligence systems that require development. The instruments currently available detect most vapours, odorous and non-odorous, including water vapour (to which they are all highly sensitive). Sensitivity to other volatiles, however, is highly variable, dependent... 

The artificial intelligence systems to which sensor arrays are coupled supply the closest likeness to the human olfactory system. Some of the recent theories on olfaction require that the human nose has only relatively few types of receptor, each with low specificity. The activation of differing patterns of these receptors supplies the brain with sufficient information for an odour to be described, if not recognized. As a consequence of this belief, the volatile chemical-sensing systems commercially available only contain from 6 to 32 sensors, each having relatively low specificity. Statistical methods such as principal component analysis, canonical discriminant analysis and Euclidian distances are used for mapping or linked to artificial neural nets as an aid to classification of the odour fingerprints . 

The main thrust of this book is to present examples of how expert systems can solve chemical problems. To make the book more useful to novices in the field of artificial intelligence, we have written a brief introductory chapter explaining expert systems. The glossary at the end of the introduction should be of help to novices and experts alike. We have also included highlights of a panel discussion held at the symposium. The panel was posed the question, Can knowledge bases be made generally available in a useful format Unfortunately, more issues were raised than questions answered. 

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