Artificial intelligence, copyright and software licences, and ethics

Last time

Before we start: last time, in Validation and verification, you learned these points. Here they are again on one card. Keep them in mind, because today builds on them.

Who is responsible when software decides?

A camera reads a number plate. A program recognises a face at an airport. Software is making decisions that affect people. Who owns the program, who may copy it, and who is accountable when it goes wrong? Cambridge asks short, precise questions on this: describe, explain, give consequences. The marks go to the specific point, not the general wave.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a computer system to perform tasks normally needing human intelligence: learning, reasoning, recognising patterns, making decisions. It learns from data. A machine learning system is trained on many examples and adjusts itself to improve its results. Applications: facial recognition, number plate recognition, speech assistants, medical diagnosis, and recommendation systems.

A car park camera

A camera captures an image of the car at the barrier. The system finds the region of the image that holds the plate. It separates the characters, then compares each against patterns it has learned. A neural network gives a most likely character for each one. The registration is stored with the entry time, and on exit it is matched to calculate how long the car stayed.