AI research trends continue to shift
Moving AI from a stand-alone component, to a component within other software systems
consider the original goal was to build intelligence
later, the goal became problem solving systems
Now the goal is autonomous (agents) or semi-autonomous (robots)
software systems or systems that work with humans (data mining, decision support tools)
Machine learning has similarly shifted
Originally the concept was vague with no ideas of how to approach it
early symbolic approaches dealt with acquiring knowledge or building on top of already present knowledge
neural networks focused on training how to solve a given task
Today, we often look at learning as improving performance through training