Read "Continuing Innovation in Information Technology: Workshop Report" at NAP.edu

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages. For eons they have carried out a huge variety of tasks, from manufacturing goods, to transporting people around, to helping us decipher the natural world, to simply entertaining us. Machines can fight, protect, heal, and even teach us. But what they have not been able to do until quite recently is to learn, make decisions, and act on their own. Today, intelligent machines are everywhere. From the Netflix recommendation en- gine to Google Translate to Appleâ s Siri voice-recognition system, artificial intelligence has become sufficiently accurate, reliable, and useful to find its way into numerous devices and applications. These technologies have taken off in parallel with a dramatic expan- sion of the amount and complexity of data, which provides fertile teaching ground from which machines can learn to make intelligent decisions on their own.