What is AI Winter?

Research in "Artificial Intelligence" a unique and curious field of Computer Science has begun to existence even before John McCarthy proposed term "Artificial Intelligence"  at DartMouth Conference in year 1956. But the one month long Conference united a scattered group of individual researchers who were playing with their individual ideas inside their private labs.

This was the Founding Statement Quoted by McCarthy

"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

This conference was actually fruitful for a various society of AI enthusiasts. If we drill down back to the origin of  achievement in AI , we will find someone quoted similar idea back then. in 60's. 

So how did the term AI Winter  appeared?

Back in 80's  Researchers faced a series of  surreal situation in their research. Funding were not available anymore and neither any of the investors of  Think Tank were interested in Artificial Intelligence Research. Researchers of this field faced  several criticism and disappointments.  AI Winter was named with resemblance of Nuclear Winter  .

Lacking the efficient tools to coin their Theory into a practical application and prove it, they needed to face mean critic and disappointments. As a outcome many of the researchers step back to their private labs and kept working on it on their own investments as much as they can. 

I've listed some Researchers who faced a hard time during the AI Winter here. They have great contributions in Artificial Neural Networks and are also knows as the backbone behind the Google's Deep Dream

Canadian Mafias Who made AI Dream alive with their contribution in Artificial Neural Network

An Artile was published on July 2015 at RECODE [1] which introcuded some of the AI Pioneers of Silicon Valley. The article called them as the “Canadian Mafias “ of Silicon Valley, which was fascinating. 

Based on the story I am highlighting the players in Today’s AI a.k.a CANADIAN MAFIA'S. They may be already listed in some answers but this answer happens to be a profile sharing in curiosity.

1. Tomi Poutanen [2] 
   CoFounder and CTO of Milq.Inc, Tomi Graduated did his Dissertation on Neural Network from University of Toronto.
2. Geoffrey Hinton [3]Insctuctor of Tomi Poutanen and also known as the Godfather of neural network is one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural nets. He is an important figure in the deep learning community.
3. Yann LeCun [4] and Yoshua Bengio [5] and Hinton were three visionary Researchers who continiued their research on Netral Netowrks in their own labs even in the demoralizing AI WINTER was going on.
4. Rob Fergus [6] Associate Professor at NYU former LeCun colleague is working as Research Scientis at Facebook AI Research.
5. Juergen Schmidhuber [7], a Swiss AI researcher also know as vocal critic of the Canadian Mafias has generated many Researchers in the field of AI.

The effects and advancement in the field of AI will soon be realized all over the world

Footnotes

[1] Welcome to the AI Conspiracy: The 'Canadian Mafia' Behind Tech's Latest Craze

[2] Tomi Poutanen | LinkedIn

[3] Geoffrey Hinton

[4] Yann LeCun's Home Page

[5] Yoshua Bengio

[6] PmWiki - HomePage

[7] Juergen Schmidhuber's home page

TOP 5 BIGGEST CHALLENGES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 As of 2016, what are the top 5 biggest challenges on the cutting-edge of AI?

Sanjog Sigdel, Somewhere between Skepticism and Optimism

I don’t have enough experience in Artificial Intelligence to provide you sufficient and promising answer buy as per my understanding:

• An Artificially Intelligent Machine has achieved some level of accuracy in Image Processing, machine learning is already 97% accurate in comparison to Human, sound recognizition is also on its hipe, Deep Learning has increased the performance of many tech giants, Internet of Things today is all about being of service with some intelligence.
  
  But:
  Artificially Intelligent Machine can watch a music video process each image frame and at the same time can recognize the voice and the stanzas. But it fails to perceive the sensation of the music and also lacks the knowledge about what message is the song trying to give.
  
  Computer Science still needs much work in combining the existing achievement and make them a composite intelligence first before moving further.
• Defining AI: May be there is still not a concrete vision about AI and what sort of Intelligence are we expecting from a machine. Everyone seems to be applying intelligence in their machine. But I would love to call most of such machine are just solving problems by fetching the solutions(patters) stored in their memory by their programmer).
• We also fail to feed the knowledge about cognitive science in a machine.
• Human Brain is a mystery box to lean into and dig deep for understanding how it performs the computation in fraction of second. And having understood in detail about human brain scientists replicate neural networks. It works very efficiently than anything better, but still solving the mystery of human brain could lead the breakthrough in AI
• The architectural design of the microprocessor limits the computation speed when it comes to the billions of information processing to answer a basic query.
  (Read this point here somewhere in Quora)

Will advances in Artificial Intelligence lead to technological unemployment?

Some weekends are well spent exploring new ideas and news about something you love. This weekend I again read some of my bookmarked answers on +Quora all of them were about Artificial Intelligence, Artificial general intelligence , Cognitive thinking, human psychology etc. Link provided below is my answer on quora about "If Artificially Intelligent technologies will lead to technological Unemployment". Also there are some more interesting answers by rest of the enthusiasts. Do provide your feedback.

Read Sanjog Sigdel's answer to "Will advances in Artificial Intelligence lead to technological unemployment?" on Quora

PS:

1. Sharing the link about my own answer might seem unlikely. But I wanna mention that this sharing is done just in Curiosity to add new node to my Network of like minded people who like to share their comments about Artificial Intelligence. 
2. If sharing the links violates any legal terms of Quora, I will immediately delete this article.