AI by Any Other Name [President's Message]

Hi all, To borrow from The Bard, what's in a name? The world is awash with the hype, the reality, the potential, and the concerns of Artificial Intelligence. But what constitutes AI? That depends on who, and when, you ask. When I was a kid (academically speaking), tasked with teaching a course on AI, I "knew" what it was: systems with propositions consisting of discrete symbols, manipulated through first order predicate calculus, sometimes with a helping of probability on the side. There were languages and hardware developed to assist in that enterprise. So, when the IEEE Neural Networks Council/Society changed its name to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, it made perfect sense to me that CI was different from AI since the underlying models were rooted in numeric and functional representations, producing a nice crisp partition of techniques.