Tutorials

This is a collection of links to material derived from teaching at Stony Brook University after my retirement. It is not well organized yet, I hope to improve that in the not so distant future. There is a wide range of levels: some of the materials is from lectures to freshmen, other from lectures to graduate students.

WEB PAGES

CAPTCHA: What is behind the "strange" text that many web sites ask you to read before you can register an account. (Version of March 2008.)

EDGE DETECTION: Mainly examples illustrating how hard is for a computer to find object outlines in an image.

FACE RECOGNITION: The Impossible Dream Or "why the security cameras caught me but not bin-Ladden".

MAINLY POWER POINT

(Common) Abstract: The promise of computer programs that would replicate general human intelligence has been around for over 60 years but little progress has been made. In contrast, there has been significant progress in specific areas such as restricted speech recognition, chess playing, etc. I will present the argument that human intelligence operates in quite different ways than computers and it relies on processes that are still poorly understood. Therefore progress can be made only when a task associated with human intelligence is reduced to an engineering description, a slow and hard process but one that has produced results in the past.

November 2002: Computers versus Humans HTML file.

February 2008: Why Machine Intelligence is Very Hard Link to PPT file.

September 2008: Why Artificial Intelligence is Very Hard PPT file. Zipped PPT file

The talks overlap a lot (hence only one abstract). I hope one of these to produce a single HTML file.