Monday, March 31, 2008

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

  • It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

  • Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.

APPLICATIONS OF AI:

game playing
You can buy machines that can play master level chess for a few hundred dollars. There is some AI in them, but they play well against people mainly through brute force computation--looking at hundreds of thousands of positions.

speech recognition
In the 1990s, computer speech recognition reached a practical level for limited purposes. It is quite convenient. It is possible to instruct some computers using speech, most users have gone back to the keyboard and the mouse as still more convenient.
understanding natural language
Just getting a sequence of words into a computer is not enough. Parsing sentences is not enough either. The computer has to be provided with an understanding of the domain the text is about, and this is presently possible only for very limited domains.
computer vision
The world is composed of three-dimensional objects, but the inputs to the human eye and computers' TV cameras are two dimensional. Some useful programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of two-dimensional views.

expert systems
A ``knowledge engineer'' interviews experts in a certain domain and tries to embody their knowledge in a computer program for carrying out some task. One of the first expert systems was MYCIN in 1974, which diagnosed bacterial infections of the blood and suggested treatments. It did better than medical students or practicing doctors, provided its limitations were observed.

Friday, March 14, 2008

FIREWALL

A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewalls can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria.
There are several types of firewall techniques:
Packet filter: Looks at each packet entering or leaving the network and accepts or rejects it based on user-defined rules. Packet filtering is fairly effective and transparent to users, but it is difficult to configure. In addition, it is susceptible to IP spoofing.
Application gateway: Applies security mechanisms to specific applications, such as FTP and Telnet servers. This is very effective, but can impose a performance degradation.
Circuit-level gateway: Applies security mechanisms when a TCP or UDP connection is established. Once the connection has been made, packets can flow between the hosts without further checking.
Proxy server: Intercepts all messages entering and leaving the network. The proxy server

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Wi-Fi Technology

Wi-Fi, also, WiFi, Wi-fi or wifi, is a brand originally licensed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to describe the underlying technology of wireless local area networks (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 specifications.Wi-Fi was developed to be used for mobile computing devices, such as laptops, in LANs, but is now increasingly used for more services, including Internet and VoIP phone access, gaming, and basic connectivity of consumer electronics such as televisions and DVD players, or digital cameras. More standards are in development that will allow Wi-Fi to be used by cars in highways in support of an Intelligent Transportation System to increase safety, gather statistics, and enable mobile commerce IEEE 802.11p.A person with a Wi-Fib enabled device, such as a computer, cell phone, or personal digital assistant (PDA) can connect to the Internet when in proximity of an access point. The region covered by one or several access points is called a hotspot. Hotspots can range from a single room to many square miles of overlapping hotspots. Wi-Fi can also be used to create a Wireless mesh network. Both architectures are used in Wireless community network, municipal wireless networks like Wireless Philadelphia [1], and metro-scale networks like M-Taipei [2].Wi-Fi also allows connectivity in peer-to-peer mode, which enables devices to connect directly with each other. This connectivity mode is useful in consumer electronics and gaming applications.When the technology was first commercialized there were many problems because consumers could not be sure that products from different vendors would work together. The Wi-Fi Alliance began as a community to solve this issue so as to address the needs of the end user and allow the technology to mature. The Alliance created another brand "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED" to denote products are interoperable with other products displaying the "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED" brand.