Read "Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field" at NAP.edu

One of the great aspirations of computer science has been to understand and emulate capabilities that we recognize as expressive of intelligence in humans. Research has addressed tasks ranging from our sensory interactions with the world (vision, speech, locomotion) to the cognitive (analysis, game playing, problem solving). This quest to understand human intelligence in all its forms also stimulates research whose results propagate back into the rest of computer science--for example, lists, search, and machine learning. Going beyond simply retrieving information, machine learning draws inferences from available data. Mitchell describes the application of classifying text documents automatically and shows how this research exemplifies the experiment-analyze-generalize style of experimental research.