Artificial intelligence is permeating everybody's lives through the face recognition, voice recognition, image analysis and natural language processing capabilities built into their smartphones and consumer appliances. Over the next several years, most new consumer devices will run AI natively, locally and, to an increasing extent, autonomously. But there's a problem: Traditional processors in most mobile devices aren't optimized for AI, which tends to consume a lot of processing, memory, data and battery on these resource-constrained devices. As a result, AI has tended to execute slowly on mobile and "internet of things" endpoints, while draining their batteries rapidly, consuming inordinate wireless bandwidth and exposing sensitive local information as data makes roundtrips in the cloud. That's why mass-market mobile and IoT edge devices are increasingly coming equipped with systems-on-a-chip that are optimized for local AI processing.

To tackle my aunt's puzzle, the expert systems approach would need a human to squint at the first three rows and spot the following pattern: The human could then instruct the computer to follow the pattern x * (y 1) z. Even when machines teach themselves, the preferred patterns are chosen by humans: Should facial recognition software infer explicit if/then rules, or should it treat each feature as an incremental piece of evidence for/against each possible person? And so they designed deep neural networks, a machine learning technique most notable for its ability to infer higher-level features from more basic information. These questions have constrained efforts to apply neural networks to new problems; a network that's great at facial recognition is totally inept at automatic translation.

We note with sorrow the passing of Don Waterman, who died on January 4, 1987. Don was one of the pioneers of our field, whose early research built the foundation for the area that would later come to be labeled "knowledge based systems" (and still later "expert systems").