Artificial Intelligence

All organizations can benefit from systems with intelligent behavior that perceives its environment and takes or recommends actions that maximize its chances of success. Artificial Intelligence (AI) concepts, such as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning and communication, are all brought together in the Cougaar Software, Inc.’s (CSI’s) signature product, ActiveEdge®.

AI is a hot topic in the media today, but not very well understood by many people. AI is a discipline of computer science focused on developing software techniques and software systems that emulate the intelligence of human beings. Many systems today use techniques from the field of AI, but that in itself does not make the system intelligent. Some techniques are so common most people do not think of them as AI, such as neural networks and expert systems.

AI is really about trying to make computer systems more capable of behaving in an intelligent manner – but utilizing all the power of a computer to process massive amounts of data, function optimally 24×7, and never makes mistakes due to stress or fatigue. As a decision support system, military planners and company managers want to have as much intelligence as possible to help them better understand, make decisions, and be successful.

Our approach is called a ‘hybrid architecture’ approach, which means that while we have a core cognitive computing framework, it is designed to support modular insertion of reasoning modules which can utilize anything: Operations Research (OR) optimization techniques, AI techniques, mathematical techniques, or anything else. As a result, we augment our core cognitive architecture with many techniques including AI planning, pattern recognition, learning, and many others. Our logistics applications utilize seamless integration of OR techniques with Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for resource allocation and scheduling.

AI systems are an empowering force, and while we are still years away from true ‘General Artificial Intelligence’, building systems that are specialized to domain or set of functions is here today and completely changing the game for many industries.

Read more about Cognitive Computing and other key concepts. Learn more