OUTLINE OF OLLI WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTERS VERSUS HUMANS*

Leader: Theo Pavlidis (t.pavlidis@ieee.org)

Note: The June 2010 workshop is a shortened version of the workshop to be offered in the Fall of 2010 and we will not be covering all the material listed below. What will be covered and at what level of mathematical sophistication will be determined by the participants. Active participation is strongly encouraged!

Us Versus Them: The notion of computers as competing with humans in terms of intelligence and cognition has been around for a long time and it becomes periodically the focus of public attention. In 1997 the victory of IBM's Deep Blue machine over the human chess world champion Kasparov generated a fair amount of claims in the news media that computers were outsmarting humans. After 9/11/2001 computers were asked to look for terrorists in crowds raising issues of privacy as well as questions about the effectiveness of the measures

How Computers and Humans Differ in Thinking and Cognition: Our first goal is to demystify the subject of Computer Intelligence (often called Artificial Intelligence). Briefly stated, computers are mathematical machines and can deal only with tasks that are expressed mathematically. In contrast humans have what is called intuitive intelligence and they can decide on whether, for example, they like or trust another person without formalizing their reasoning. We will include a discussion of the fundamental difference between what is called "machine learning" and human learning.

Computer Programs that Seem to Perform Human Functions: Our second goal is to show how such programs work. Topics to be covered include:

• Information retrieval (Google) and why it works much better with text than with pictures;
• Recommendations of books (Amazon) or movies (Netflix);
• Chess Playing;
• Reading Machines (OCR) and their flip side: CAPTCHA, the distorted text that several web sites use to distinguish human users from web-bots;
• Face recognition (Find the terrorist!);
• Speech recognition ("Press or say 1");
• Forest Fire Detection (computers never get bored);
• Robots: For Housecleaning, for industry, and cars driven only by robots (the DARPA challenge);
• Bar Codes as an example where computers are helped by providing information to them in a form adapted to their capabilities;

What is Hard for both Computers and Humans: The third goal is to discuss the limits of mathematics (and as a result of computers) in dealing with problems such as weather or stock market prediction, breaking of certain encryption codes, etc. Such problems are often beyond the abilities of both computers and humans.

Resources: Background material, including links to several web sites, can be found in http://www.theopavlidis.com/CvsH/index.htm.