OUTLINE OF OLLI WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTERS VERSUS HUMANS*

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

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. (What the news media did not say was that the Deep Blue team included an international chess grandmaster.) 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. The following is a broad outline that, in each case, will discuss examples of both successes and failures of computers

1. The basics, including early achievements of computers, such as breaking the German encryption codes in WW II.
2. Finding what People Like: Use of computers to guess customer preferences; the Netflix challenge; Google and why it works much better on text than on pictures; Data Mining.
3. Games Computers Play: Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, and Jeopardy.
4. How Computers read text and how barcodes work.
5. Teaching Computers to Talk and to Listen: Voice Synthesis and Speech Recognition.
6. Making Sense of what a Computer Sees: Image Analysis and Computer Vision.
7. Synthetic Images: Medical applications (such as CAT scans) and entertainment applications (Computer Animation).
8. Robotics: Examples from both industrial and home use, as well as cars driven only by robots (the DARPA challenge).
9. Computer Predictions: From the weather to the stock market.

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 certain problems that seem to be 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.