AI Contextual Reasoning Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has four seasons: hype, disappointment, funding drought, and renewed interest. I've been involved in AI research for quite some time -- I became a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993 -- and I've weathered several seasonal cycles. What I'm seeing now, however, is the most puzzling cycle yet; either I'm getting old and addled, or the current cycle is unique in its magnitude. In these Big Data days, the big talk about AI's potential reminds me of what happened at the peak of earlier cycles (see, for example, the recent Wall Street Journal article. Once again, the focus is on a single technical component -- deep learning -- and hopes seem to be building that it can solve many very hard problems easily and more or less magically.