What are intelligent systems?

Intelligent systems are technologically advanced machines that perceive and respond to the world around them. Intelligent systems can take many forms, from automated vacuums such as the Roomba to facial recognition programs to Amazon’s personalized shopping suggestions.

Our department focuses on two main areas within intelligent systems: how machines perceive their environment and how those machines interact with that environment.

One way that such systems can perceive their environment is through vision. The study of how computers can understand and interpret visual information from static images and video sequences emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It has since grown into a powerful technology that is central to the country’s industrial, commercial, and government sectors. The key factors that have contributed to this growth are the exponential growth of processor speed and memory capacity as well as algorithmic advances.

The field of intelligent systems also focuses on how these systems interact with human users in changing and dynamic physical and social environments. Early robots possessed little autonomy in making decisions: they assumed a predictable world and perfumed the same action(s) repeatedly under the same conditions. Today, a robot is considered to be an autonomous system that can sense the environment and can act in a physical world in order to achieve some goals.