Artificial intelligence: between innovation and emergency management

We are seeing it in these emergency days, a flourishing of news on the most disparate uses of new technologies to meet multiple new needs. Among these, probably, artificial intelligence is the wild card that is brought up most of all, from the diagnosis of the infection to the management of the traffic of citizens when the emergency enters phase 2. To better understand what it is really capable of doing artificial intelligence and how it is coming and will be used in emergency situations we spoke with Piero Poccianti, president of the Italian Association for artificial intelligence (AixiA), a reality that for more than 30 years, in Italy, has encouraged teaching and promotes the research of this discipline.

A discipline, in fact, not a technology, as Cristina Pozzi, CEO of Impactscool and moderator of the live meeting, underlines. Inside, what we call artificial intelligence is an umbrella of techniques, methods, technologies and practices ranging from mathematics to computer science, which aims to create a true artificial “intelligence” capable of thinking, a goal still far away but you are working towards. “Already in the 1950s Turing wonders, in an article, if a car can think – explains Poccianti – This is the fundamental objective of this discipline. Over time we have experienced many phenomena of enthusiasm and also many disappointments. AI springs and winters. In the same way, symbolic methods have followed one another that use formal reasoning that trying to make a machine reason and subsymbolic methods, that is, that try to emulate how the brain works. At the moment these methods are having success ”.