Artificial intelligence has emerged as the hottest buzzword in tech‚—despite the fact that it's been around since the dawn of computing. Countless startups are now grabbing onto AI to explain what they do and tech marketers are branding with AI to make simple things like algorithms and basic machine learning sound a lot smarter and more sophisticated.

"AI is a ridiculously broad umbrella these days," said Michael Karasick, IBM Research's vice president of cognitive computing (IBM's fancy terms for AI).

Karasick gave a presentation at IBM InterConnect 2017 this week in Las Vegas where he laid out IBM Research's roadmap for AI. The approach of Karasick's team is ridiculously practical, since their mandate is to incubate technologies that could be useful to businesses. As you'd expect, a lot of things they're working on boil down to automation and big data.

"The reason we use machine learning in these problems is because there's too much data," said Karasick, whose team at IBM Research contains a mashup of mathematicians and systems analysts. The team uses AI for three types of things:

  1. Develop industrial strength solutions

  2. Make more efficient use of people

  3. Improve time-to-value

SEE: Understanding the differences between AI, machine learning, and deep learning

Karasick's IBM InterConnect session "Looking Ahead: The Future of Artificial Intelligence" offered a window into the AI projects IBM is already working on. Here's a quick summary of 10 of them.

To read more, click here.