Minor specialization: Intelligent Systems (4IQ)

Intelligent systems are artificial systems capable of performing highly complex tasks based on analysis of methods how people solve these task by using their intelligence. Intelligent systems based on classical expert systems solve the problems using the knowledge expressed declaratively in the knowledge base, knowledge understandable to people, both designers and users. When an intelligent system uses a neural network to achieve its goals, then the “knowledge” of the area of ​​interest is scattered in the parameters of the neural networks and no one is able to understand. Intelligent behavior also can be found in a system whose operation is based on the mutual cooperation of a large number of simple (“non-intelligent”) elements, in which case we speak about distributed intelligent systems.

The intelligent systems are used in many areas, there is a rapidly expanding use in the economy: the prediction of foreign exchange rates or stock prices, credit rating of bank customers, the analysis of marketing studies, business strategy recommendations, firm support for audit or monitoring suspicious financial transactions.

The area of ​​interest for intelligent systems also includes potential sources of huge amount of knowledge, such as large data warehouses, collections of text documents or the Internet. In this context we speak about knowledge discovery in databases (data mining), texts (text mining) and the web (web mining). The vastness of the Internet eliminates the possibility of a thorough analysis of this network by other than automatic methods.

Intelligent systems for such purposes are currently studied by a number of research teams, both at university departments and commercial ones (e.g., Microsoft).

The aim of the “Intelligent Systems” minor is to give the students an opportunity to make themselves familiar with these modern and prospective methods of work with data and information.