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Pamela McCorduck

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103-496: Pamela Ann McCorduck (October 27, 1940 – October 18, 2021) was a British-born American author of books about the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence , the future of engineering, and the role of women and technology. She also wrote three novels. She contributed to Omni , The New York Times , Daedalus , and the Michigan Quarterly Review , and was a contributing editor of Wired . She

206-581: A loss function . Variants of gradient descent are commonly used to train neural networks. Another type of local search is evolutionary computation , which aims to iteratively improve a set of candidate solutions by "mutating" and "recombining" them, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation. Distributed search processes can coordinate via swarm intelligence algorithms. Two popular swarm algorithms used in search are particle swarm optimization (inspired by bird flocking ) and ant colony optimization (inspired by ant trails ). Formal logic

309-472: A "degree of truth" between 0 and 1. It can therefore handle propositions that are vague and partially true. Non-monotonic logics , including logic programming with negation as failure , are designed to handle default reasoning . Other specialized versions of logic have been developed to describe many complex domains. Many problems in AI (including in reasoning, planning, learning, perception, and robotics) require

412-459: A "full-blown crisis" over tensions stemming from a pro-Palestinian campus occupation . These protests at Columbia sparked similar pro-Palestinian protests at universities across the USA. As the protests expanded in scale and notoriety, students and faculty, including people of Jewish heritage, pushed back against the silencing of anti-Zionist voices and accusations of anti-semitism . This sentiment

515-607: A bachelor's degree in English literature from University of California, Berkeley , in 1960. Many years later, she obtained her master's degree in English literature from Columbia University . McCorduck started out supporting professors Edward Feigenbaum , who would later go on to be known as the father of expert systems , and Julian Feldman , at UC Berkeley in their book on artificial intelligence , entitled Computers & Thought (1963). She stayed on as an executive assistant to Feigenbaum as he moved to Stanford University to set up

618-460: A contradiction from premises that include the negation of the problem to be solved. Inference in both Horn clause logic and first-order logic is undecidable , and therefore intractable . However, backward reasoning with Horn clauses, which underpins computation in the logic programming language Prolog , is Turing complete . Moreover, its efficiency is competitive with computation in other symbolic programming languages. Fuzzy logic assigns

721-455: A diverse range of professional and inter-disciplinary fields. In the aftermath of World War II, the discipline of international relations became a major scholarly focus of the university, and in response, the School of International and Public Affairs was founded in 1946, drawing upon the resources of the faculties of political science, economics, and history. The Columbia University Bicentennial

824-412: A dominant vegetation type of Appalachian Oak ( 104 ) with a dominant vegetation form of Eastern Hardwood Forest ( 25 ). Columbia Transportation is the bus service of the university, operated by Academy Bus Lines . The buses are open to all Columbia faculty, students, Dodge Fitness Center members, and anyone else who holds a Columbia ID card. In addition, all TSC students can ride the buses. In

927-630: A joint investigation by the NYPD and Columbia, the school concluded that the chemical substance was a "non-toxic, legal, novelty item". On April 17, 2024, Columbia president Minouche Shafik was questioned by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on the topic of antisemitism on campus. While Shafik was in Washington, DC, student activists began renewed protests, leading to what CNN described as

1030-631: A major research university. For much of the 19th century, the university consisted of decentralized and separate faculties specializing in Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science. In 1979, these faculties were merged into the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences . In 1991, the faculties of Columbia College, the School of General Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of

1133-473: A neighborhood that contains a number of academic institutions. The university owns over 7,800 apartments in Morningside Heights, housing faculty, graduate students, and staff. Almost two dozen undergraduate dormitories (purpose-built or converted) are located on campus or in Morningside Heights. Columbia University has an extensive tunnel system , more than a century old, with the oldest portions predating

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1236-429: A path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis . Simple exhaustive searches are rarely sufficient for most real-world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers . The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. " Heuristics " or "rules of thumb" can help prioritize choices that are more likely to reach a goal. Adversarial search

1339-459: A primarily Gothic Revival campus on 49th Street and Madison Avenue , where it remained for the next forty years. During the last half of the 19th century, under the presidency of Frederick A. P. Barnard , for whom Barnard College is named, the institution rapidly assumed the shape of a modern university. Barnard College was created in 1889 as a response to the university's refusal to accept women. In 1896, university president Seth Low moved

1442-487: A school to prepare home economists and manual art teachers for the children of the poor, with philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge . Teachers College is currently affiliated as the university's Graduate School of Education. In the 1940s, faculty members, including John R. Dunning , I. I. Rabi , Enrico Fermi , and Polykarp Kusch , began what became the Manhattan Project , creating the first nuclear fission reactor in

1545-401: A siege ladder to access the second floor of Hamilton Hall and subsequently removed the demonstrators occupying it, dozens of whom were arrested. The actions taken against the demonstrators by the NYPD in riot armour while clearing Hamilton Hall inspired the rap song 'Hinds Hall' by Macklemore , who described the police as "actors in badges" in the song. In June, the charges against most of

1648-412: A student application process characterized by The New York Times as "the first modern college application". The application required a photograph of the applicant, the maiden name of the applicant's mother, and the applicant's religious background. Columbia University is an independent, privately supported, nonsectarian and not-for-profit institution of higher education. Its official corporate name

1751-721: A tool that can be used for reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm), learning (using the expectation–maximization algorithm ), planning (using decision networks ) and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks ). Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing, and finding explanations for streams of data, thus helping perception systems analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters ). The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (e.g., "if shiny then diamond"), on one hand, and controllers (e.g., "if diamond then pick up"), on

1854-573: A tribute of honor to the many alumni of the school who had been involved in the American Revolution . In November 1813, the college agreed to incorporate its medical school with The College of Physicians and Surgeons, a new school created by the Regents of New York, forming Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons . In 1857, the college moved from the King's College campus at Park Place to

1957-669: A wide range of techniques, including search and mathematical optimization , formal logic , artificial neural networks , and methods based on statistics , operations research , and economics . AI also draws upon psychology , linguistics , philosophy , neuroscience , and other fields. Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and the field went through multiple cycles of optimism, followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winter . Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques. This growth accelerated further after 2017 with

2060-487: A wide variety of techniques to accomplish the goals above. AI can solve many problems by intelligently searching through many possible solutions. There are two very different kinds of search used in AI: state space search and local search . State space search searches through a tree of possible states to try to find a goal state. For example, planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find

2163-402: Is $ 46,516. In 2015–2016, annual undergraduate tuition at Columbia was $ 50,526 with a total cost of attendance of $ 65,860 (including room and board). The college is need-blind for domestic applicants. On April 11, 2007, Columbia University announced a $ 400 million donation from media billionaire alumnus John Kluge to be used exclusively for undergraduate financial aid. The donation is among

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2266-641: Is a body of knowledge represented in a form that can be used by a program. An ontology is the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties used by a particular domain of knowledge. Knowledge bases need to represent things such as objects, properties, categories, and relations between objects; situations, events, states, and time; causes and effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know); default reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are told differently and will remain true even when other facts are changing); and many other aspects and domains of knowledge. Among

2369-607: Is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and was the first school in the United States to grant the MD degree . The university also administers and annually awards the Pulitzer Prize . Columbia scientists and scholars have played a pivotal role in scientific breakthroughs including brain–computer interface ; the laser and maser ; nuclear magnetic resonance ;

2472-739: Is a third campus on the west bank of the Hudson River , the 157-acre (64 ha) Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and Earth Institute in Palisades , New York. A fourth is the 60-acre (24 ha) Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York , for the study of particle and motion physics. A satellite site in Paris holds classes at Reid Hall . In 2006, the university established the Office of Environmental Stewardship to initiate, coordinate and implement programs to reduce

2575-459: Is an input, at least one hidden layer of nodes and an output. Each node applies a function and once the weight crosses its specified threshold, the data is transmitted to the next layer. A network is typically called a deep neural network if it has at least 2 hidden layers. Learning algorithms for neural networks use local search to choose the weights that will get the right output for each input during training. The most common training technique

2678-462: Is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems that recognize, interpret, process, or simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood . For example, some virtual assistants are programmed to speak conversationally or even to banter humorously; it makes them appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction, or to otherwise facilitate human–computer interaction . However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic conception of

2781-444: Is an unsolved problem. Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering allow AI programs to answer questions intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts. Formal knowledge representations are used in content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases ), and other areas. A knowledge base

2884-422: Is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals or preferences and takes actions to make them happen. In automated planning , the agent has a specific goal. In automated decision-making , the agent has preferences—there are some situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making agent assigns a number to each situation (called

2987-534: Is centered on the front steps of Low Memorial Library . The statue represents a personification of the traditional image of the university as an alma mater , or "nourishing mother", draped in an academic gown and seated on a throne. She wears a laurel wreath on her head and holds in her right hand a scepter capped by a King's Crown, a traditional symbol of the university. A book, representing learning, rests on her lap. The arms of her throne end in lamps, representing "Sapientia et Doctrina", or "Wisdom and Learning"; on

3090-413: Is classified based on previous experience. There are many kinds of classifiers in use. The decision tree is the simplest and most widely used symbolic machine learning algorithm. K-nearest neighbor algorithm was the most widely used analogical AI until the mid-1990s, and Kernel methods such as the support vector machine (SVM) displaced k-nearest neighbor in the 1990s. The naive Bayes classifier

3193-413: Is labelled by a solution of the problem and whose leaf nodes are labelled by premises or axioms . In the case of Horn clauses , problem-solving search can be performed by reasoning forwards from the premises or backwards from the problem. In the more general case of the clausal form of first-order logic , resolution is a single, axiom-free rule of inference, in which a problem is solved by proving

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3296-577: Is ranked fourth overall and second among university hospitals. Columbia's medical school has a strategic partnership with New York State Psychiatric Institute , and is affiliated with 19 other hospitals in the U.S. and four hospitals in other countries. Health-related schools are located at the Columbia University Medical Center , a 20-acre (8.1 ha) campus located in the neighborhood of Washington Heights , fifty blocks uptown. Other teaching hospitals affiliated with Columbia through

3399-400: Is reportedly the "most widely used learner" at Google, due in part to its scalability. Neural networks are also used as classifiers. An artificial neural network is based on a collection of nodes also known as artificial neurons , which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. It is trained to recognise patterns; once trained, it can recognise those patterns in fresh data. There

3502-707: Is the Henry Hudson Parkway ( NY 9A ) to the west of the campus. It is located 3.4 miles (5.5 km) south of the George Washington Bridge . Columbia University received 60,551 applications for the class of 2025 (entering 2021) and a total of around 2,218 were admitted to the two schools for an overall acceptance rate of 3.66%. Columbia is a racially diverse school, with approximately 52% of all students identifying themselves as persons of color. Additionally, 50% of all undergraduates received grants from Columbia. The average grant size awarded to these students

3605-529: Is the backpropagation algorithm. Neural networks learn to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs and find patterns in data. In theory, a neural network can learn any function. Columbia University Columbia University , officially Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private Ivy League research university in New York City . Established in 1754 as King's College on

3708-404: Is the process of proving a new statement ( conclusion ) from other statements that are given and assumed to be true (the premises ). Proofs can be structured as proof trees , in which nodes are labelled by sentences, and children nodes are connected to parent nodes by inference rules . Given a problem and a set of premises, problem-solving reduces to searching for a proof tree whose root node

3811-440: Is used for game-playing programs, such as chess or Go. It searches through a tree of possible moves and counter-moves, looking for a winning position. Local search uses mathematical optimization to find a solution to a problem. It begins with some form of guess and refines it incrementally. Gradient descent is a type of local search that optimizes a set of numerical parameters by incrementally adjusting them to minimize

3914-455: Is used for reasoning and knowledge representation . Formal logic comes in two main forms: propositional logic (which operates on statements that are true or false and uses logical connectives such as "and", "or", "not" and "implies") and predicate logic (which also operates on objects, predicates and relations and uses quantifiers such as " Every X is a Y " and "There are some X s that are Y s"). Deductive reasoning in logic

4017-436: Is used in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents. Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given task automatically. It has been a part of AI from the beginning. There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data and finds patterns and makes predictions without any other guidance. Supervised learning requires labeling

4120-905: Is when the knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new problem. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of learning. Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity , by sample complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization . Natural language processing (NLP) allows programs to read, write and communicate in human languages such as English . Specific problems include speech recognition , speech synthesis , machine translation , information extraction , information retrieval and question answering . Early work, based on Noam Chomsky 's generative grammar and semantic networks , had difficulty with word-sense disambiguation unless restricted to small domains called " micro-worlds " (due to

4223-512: The Americas and researching gaseous diffusion . In 1928, Seth Low Junior College was established by Columbia University in order to mitigate the number of Jewish applicants to Columbia College. The college was closed in 1936 due to the adverse effects of the Great Depression and its students were subsequently taught at Morningside Heights, although they did not belong to any college but to

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4326-571: The Common Application . The policy change made Columbia one of the last major academic institutions and the last Ivy League university to switch to the Common Application. Scholarships are also given to undergraduate students by the admissions committee. Designations include John W. Kluge Scholars, John Jay Scholars, C. Prescott Davis Scholars, Global Scholars, Egleston Scholars, and Science Research Fellows. Named scholars are selected by

4429-628: The Israel–Hamas war , with counter-protests from pro- Israel activists. The students were protesting against the alleged genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by the IDF , with significant faculty support for the protests. Protestors were reported to have yelled “October 7th is going to be every day for you,” toward Jewish students. In January 2024, students who were former IDF soldiers were accused of attacking pro-Palestine demonstrators with noxious chemicals in what

4532-541: The New York City Subway , the [REDACTED] train serves the university at 116th Street-Columbia University . The M4 , M104 and M60 buses stop on Broadway while the M11 stops on Amsterdam Avenue. The main campus is primarily boxed off by the streets of Amsterdam Avenue, Broadway , 114th street, and 120th street, with some buildings, including Barnard College, located just outside the area. The nearest major highway

4635-469: The Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights on Seth Low 's late-19th century vision of a university campus where all disciplines could be taught at one location. The campus was designed along Beaux-Arts planning principles by the architects McKim, Mead & White . Columbia's main campus occupies more than six city blocks , or 32 acres (13 ha), in Morningside Heights, New York City,

4738-520: The bar exam , SAT test, GRE test, and many other real-world applications. Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, wireless signals, active lidar , sonar, radar, and tactile sensors ) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input. The field includes speech recognition , image classification , facial recognition , object recognition , object tracking , and robotic perception . Affective computing

4841-416: The transformer architecture , and by the early 2020s hundreds of billions of dollars were being invested in AI (known as the " AI boom "). The widespread use of AI in the 21st century exposed several unintended consequences and harms in the present and raised concerns about its risks and long-term effects in the future, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and benefits of

4944-436: The " utility ") that measures how much the agent prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the " expected utility ": the utility of all possible outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then choose the action with the maximum expected utility. In classical planning , the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be. In most real-world problems, however,

5047-646: The "Urban Beach", are a popular meeting area for Columbia students. The term refers to the long series of granite steps leading from the lower part of campus (South Field) to its upper terrace. In April 2007, the university purchased more than two-thirds of a 17 acres (6.9 ha) site for a new campus in Manhattanville , an industrial neighborhood to the north of the Morningside Heights campus. Stretching from 125th Street to 133rd Street , Columbia Manhattanville houses buildings for Columbia's Business School, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia School of

5150-523: The Arts , and the School of Professional Studies were merged into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, leading to the academic integration and centralized governance of these schools. In 2010, the School of International and Public Affairs , which was previously a part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, became an independent faculty. In fall of 2023, pro-Palestine student activists organized protests in response to

5253-724: The Arts, and the Jerome L. Greene Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior, where research will occur on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. The $ 7 billion expansion plan included demolishing all buildings, except three that are historically significant (the Studebaker Building , Prentis Hall , and the Nash Building), eliminating the existing light industry and storage warehouses, and relocating tenants in 132 apartments. Replacing these buildings created 6.8 million square feet (630,000 m ) of space for

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5356-445: The English department, but was introduced to scientists working on artificial intelligence, including professor Herbert A. Simon , who championed the idea that computers could match human thinking by exhibiting artificial intelligence. She continued to interact with the scientists and researchers, including Raj Reddy and Allen Newell , many of whom she interviewed. During this time, she wrote Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into

5459-456: The History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (1979), which was funded by the university. The book ended up chronicling the early years of research in artificial intelligence. She wrote about researchers who were studying expert systems , robotics , problem solving , general game playing , and speech recognition , becoming one of the pre-eminent writers on the topic who were able to explain

5562-771: The NewYork-Presbyterian network include the Payne Whitney Clinic in Manhattan, and the Payne Whitney Westchester, a psychiatric institute located in White Plains, New York. On the northern tip of Manhattan island (in the neighborhood of Inwood ), Columbia owns the 26-acre (11 ha) Baker Field, which includes the Lawrence A. Wien Stadium as well as facilities for field sports, outdoor track, and tennis. There

5665-651: The United Nations; ten justices of the United States Supreme Court ; 103 Nobel laureates ; 125 National Academy of Sciences members; 53 living billionaires; 23 Olympic medalists ; 33 Academy Award winners ; and 125 Pulitzer Prize recipients. Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704. Classes were initially held in July 1754 and were presided over by

5768-526: The United States. Several buildings on the Morningside Heights campus are listed on the National Register of Historic Places . Low Memorial Library , a National Historic Landmark and the centerpiece of the campus, is listed for its architectural significance. Philosophy Hall is listed as the site of the invention of FM radio . Also listed is Pupin Hall , another National Historic Landmark , which houses

5871-411: The admission committee from first-year applicants. According to Columbia, the first four designated scholars "distinguish themselves for their remarkable academic and personal achievements, dynamism, intellectual curiosity, the originality and independence of their thinking, and the diversity that stems from their different cultures and their varied educational experiences". In 1919, Columbia established

5974-421: The agent can seek information to improve its preferences. Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of exploratory or experimental actions. The space of possible future actions and situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations while being uncertain of what the outcome will be. A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes

6077-510: The agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it is "unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic guess and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked. In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents or humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning ), or

6180-529: The agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory , decision analysis , and information value theory . These tools include models such as Markov decision processes , dynamic decision networks , game theory and mechanism design . Bayesian networks are

6283-469: The back of the throne is embossed an image of the seal of the university . The small hidden owl on the sculpture is also the subject of many Columbia legends, the main legend being that the first student in the freshmen class to find the hidden owl on the statue will be valedictorian, and that any subsequent Columbia male who finds it will marry a Barnard student, given that Barnard is a women's college . "The Steps", alternatively known as "Low Steps" or

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6386-472: The campus from 49th Street to its present location, a more spacious campus in the developing neighborhood of Morningside Heights . Under the leadership of Low's successor, Nicholas Murray Butler , who served for over four decades, Columbia rapidly became the nation's major institution for research, setting the multiversity model that later universities would adopt. Prior to becoming the president of Columbia University, Butler founded Teachers College , as

6489-618: The campus was moved to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University. Columbia is organized into twenty schools, including four undergraduate schools and 16 graduate schools. The university's research efforts include the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory , the Goddard Institute for Space Studies , and accelerator laboratories with Big Tech firms such as Amazon and IBM . Columbia

6592-465: The charged political climate of the American Revolution , his chief opponent in discussions at the college was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton . The Irish anatomist, Samuel Clossy , was appointed professor of natural philosophy in October 1765 and later the college's first professor of anatomy in 1767. The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, and was catastrophic for

6695-471: The college's first president, Samuel Johnson . The college was officially founded on October 31, 1754, as King's College by royal charter of George II , making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the State of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. In 1763, Johnson was succeeded in the presidency by Myles Cooper , a graduate of The Queen's College, Oxford , and an ardent Tory . In

6798-482: The college, and on May 1, 1784, it passed "an Act for granting certain privileges to the College heretofore called King's College". The Act created a board of regents to oversee the resuscitation of King's College, and, in an effort to demonstrate its support for the new Republic, the legislature stipulated that "the College within the City of New York heretofore called King's College be forever hereafter called and known by

6901-648: The common sense knowledge problem ). Margaret Masterman believed that it was meaning and not grammar that was the key to understanding languages, and that thesauri and not dictionaries should be the basis of computational language structure. Modern deep learning techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically as vectors encoding their meaning), transformers (a deep learning architecture using an attention mechanism), and others. In 2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate coherent text, and by 2023, these models were able to get human-level scores on

7004-400: The entire university community" and was carried out by both faculty and students. The task force on anti-semitism was criticised by a group of 24 Jewish faculty (as well as 16 non-Jewish faculty) and Jewish students for misrepresentations, omission of key context and equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The majority of Columbia's graduate and undergraduate studies are conducted in

7107-479: The fall of 1983, after a decade of failed negotiations with Barnard College , the all-female institution affiliated with the university, to merge the two schools. Barnard College still remains affiliated with Columbia, and all Barnard graduates are issued diplomas signed by the presidents of Columbia University and Barnard College. During the late 20th century, the university underwent significant academic, structural, and administrative changes as it developed into

7210-541: The first nuclear pile ; the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas ; the first evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift ; and much of the initial research and planning for the Manhattan Project during World War II . As of December 2021 , its alumni, faculty, and staff have included seven of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America; four U.S. presidents ; 34 foreign heads of state or government ; two secretaries-general of

7313-572: The grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan , it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States . Columbia was established as a colonial college by royal charter under George II of Great Britain . It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution , and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay . In 1896,

7416-695: The history of computing, including two enigma machines . In 2020, she was appointed a board member of the University of California Libraries . McCorduck married Joseph F. Traub , a professor at Stanford University in 1969, after her first marriage to Thomas Tellefsen ended in a divorce. In 2002, the couple bought a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico , and would split their time between the city and New York. She moved to California after her husband's death in 2015. McCorduck died on October 18, 2021, at her Walnut Creek, California , home, nine days before her 81st birthday. She

7519-440: The intelligence of existing computer agents. Moderate successes related to affective computing include textual sentiment analysis and, more recently, multimodal sentiment analysis , wherein AI classifies the affects displayed by a videotaped subject. A machine with artificial general intelligence should be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence . AI research uses

7622-473: The interim provost Dennis Mitchell said was “what appears to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes”. One of the students suspected in the attack was initially placed on interim suspension before later being suspended through May 2025. In April 2024, the suspended student sued Columbia, alleging that the school subjected him to "biased misconduct proceedings" and that he had used fart sprays such as " Liquid Ass " rather than harmful chemicals. Following

7725-463: The largest single gifts to higher education. However, this does not apply to international students, transfer students, visiting students, or students in the School of General Studies. In the fall of 2010, admission to Columbia's undergraduate colleges Columbia College and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (also known as SEAS or Columbia Engineering) began accepting

7828-537: The late 1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics . Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially slower as the problems grow. Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate and efficient reasoning

7931-457: The most difficult problems in knowledge representation are the breadth of commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is enormous); and the sub-symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could express verbally). There is also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition , the problem of obtaining knowledge for AI applications. An "agent"

8034-463: The name of Columbia College ", a reference to Columbia , an alternative name for America which in turn comes from the name of Christopher Columbus . The Regents finally became aware of the college's defective constitution in February 1787 and appointed a revision committee, which was headed by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. In April of that same year, a new charter was adopted for the college granted

8137-539: The one where her mother taught. She was the eldest of three siblings, with the younger two being twins. She moved to Stamford, Connecticut , in the United States, with her family, when she was 6. The family moved in the RMS Queen Elizabeth , an ocean liner that took them to Ellis Island in 1946. She lived in Rutherford, New Jersey , where she graduated from Rutherford High School before moving west and earning

8240-501: The operation of King's College, which suspended instruction for eight years beginning in 1776 with the arrival of the Continental Army . The suspension continued through the military occupation of New York City by British troops until their departure in 1783. The college's library was looted and its sole building requisitioned for use as a military hospital first by American and then British forces. The legislature agreed to assist

8343-405: The other hand. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine the closest match. They can be fine-tuned based on chosen examples using supervised learning . Each pattern (also called an " observation ") is labeled with a certain predefined class. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set . When a new observation is received, that observation

8446-428: The participants in the occupation of Hamilton Hall were dropped. In mid-August 2024, three deans and Minouche Shafik , the 20th president of the university, resigned in the wake of the campus protests. In late August, the university's antisemitism task force reported that the university had failed to prevent violence and hate or protect Jews in the university . According to the report, antisemitism has "affected

8549-598: The physics and astronomy departments. Here the first experiments on the fission of uranium were conducted by Enrico Fermi . The uranium atom was split there ten days after the world's first atom-splitting in Copenhagen , Denmark. Other buildings listed include Casa Italiana , the Delta Psi, Alpha Chapter building of St. Anthony Hall , Earl Hall , and the buildings of the affiliated Union Theological Seminary . A statue by sculptor Daniel Chester French called Alma Mater

8652-437: The power to a separate board of 24 trustees . For a period in the 1790s, with New York City as the federal and state capital and the country under successive Federalist governments, a revived Columbia thrived under the auspices of Federalists such as Hamilton and Jay. President George Washington and Vice President John Adams , in addition to both houses of Congress attended the college's commencement on May 6, 1789, as

8755-536: The present campus. Some of these remain accessible to the public, while others have been cordoned off. Butler Library is the largest in the Columbia University Libraries system and one of the largest buildings on the campus. It was completed in 1934 and renamed to Butler Library in 1946. As of 2020 , Columbia's library system includes over 15.0 million volumes, making it the eighth largest library system and fifth largest collegiate library system in

8858-411: The probability that a particular action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that supplies the utility of each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state. The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration ), be heuristic , or it can be learned. Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and

8961-574: The right to appropriate private property for public use. On May 20, 2009, the New York State Public Authorities Control Board approved the Manhanttanville expansion plan. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is affiliated with the medical schools of both Columbia University and Cornell University . According to U.S. News & World Report ' s "2020–21 Best Hospitals Honor Roll and Medical Specialties Rankings", it

9064-471: The technology . The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into subproblems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention and cover the scope of AI research. Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions . By

9167-512: The topics to a broad audience. Her conversational tone of writing as well as observational skills were credited with distinguishing her writings from other works on these topics. Her book, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence had its twenty-fifth year edition with updates capturing progress in the field of artificial intelligence through 2004. McCorduck moved to Columbia University in 1979, teaching creative writing , when her husband Traub

9270-451: The training data with the expected answers, and comes in two main varieties: classification (where the program must learn to predict what category the input belongs in) and regression (where the program must deduce a numeric function based on numeric input). In reinforcement learning , the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent learns to choose responses that are classified as "good". Transfer learning

9373-547: The university at large. There was an evening school called University Extension, which taught night classes, for a fee, to anyone willing to attend. In 1947, the program was reorganized as an undergraduate college and designated the School of General Studies in response to the return of GIs after World War II . In 1995, the School of General Studies was again reorganized as a full-fledged liberal arts college for non-traditional students (those who have had an academic break of one year or more, or are pursuing dual-degrees) and

9476-603: The university's computer science department in 1965. She moved to Seattle, with her husband Joseph F. Traub , whom she had met in Stanford, when he moved to the University of Washington ; she later moved to Pittsburgh , where she taught at Carnegie Mellon University . During these years, she wrote two of her novels, Familiar Relations (1971; about a family in Liverpool) and Working to the End (1972). While at Carnegie Mellon she taught in

9579-564: The university's environmental footprint. The U.S. Green Building Council selected the university's Manhattanville plan for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Neighborhood Design pilot program. Columbia has been rated "B+" by the 2011 College Sustainability Report Card for its environmental and sustainability initiatives. According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, Columbia University would have

9682-547: The university. Community activist groups in West Harlem fought the expansion for reasons ranging from property protection and fair exchange for land, to residents' rights. Subsequent public hearings drew neighborhood opposition. As of December 2008 , the State of New York's Empire State Development Corporation approved use of eminent domain, which, through declaration of Manhattanville's "blighted" status, gives governmental bodies

9785-420: The use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning , knowledge representation , planning , learning , natural language processing , perception, and support for robotics . General intelligence —the ability to complete any task performable by a human on an at least equal level—is among the field's long-term goals. To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated

9888-594: Was a former vice president of the PEN American Center . She was married to computer scientist and academic Joseph F. Traub . McCorduck was born on October 27, 1940, in Liverpool , United Kingdom, to Hilda (née Bond) and William J. "Jack" McCorduck. The city was being bombed by the German Luftwaffe at the time of her birth. Her mother was a beautician and teacher, while her father owned beauty colleges, including

9991-476: Was a memoir, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times With the Artificial Intelligentsia (2019), in which she regretted not calling attention to the potential misuse of artificial intelligence earlier. Throughout her career, she wrote eleven books, including three novels, which were all published. McCorduck served as a board member and later as the vice president of the PEN American Center . She

10094-571: Was appointed the first chairman of the computer science department at Columbia. She continued to write on artificial intelligence and related topics, including books such as The Universal Machine (1985), The Rise of the Expert Company (1988), and Aaron's Code (1990). Her book, Futures of Women (1996), used scenario planning to study potential trajectories for the economic and social futures of women. She also wrote two novels, The Edge of Chaos (2007) and Bounded Rationality (2012). Her last book

10197-474: Was celebrated in 1954. During the 1960s, student activism reached a climax with protests in the spring of 1968 , when hundreds of students occupied buildings on campus. The incident forced the resignation of Columbia's president, Grayson Kirk , and the establishment of the University Senate. Though several schools in the university had admitted women for years, Columbia College first admitted women in

10300-559: Was chairperson of a committee that studied the long-range reorganization of the PEN America . She was a contributor to Omni , The New York Times , Daedalus , Michigan Quarterly Review and was a contributing editor of Wired . The Carnegie Mellon University library hosts the Traub-McCorduck collection set up in 2018, based on her contributions, which included early counting machines, manuscripts, books and artifacts documenting

10403-516: Was fully integrated into Columbia's traditional undergraduate curriculum. The same year, the Division of Special Programs, later called the School of Continuing Education and now the School of Professional Studies , was established to reprise the former role of University Extension. While the School of Professional Studies only offered non-degree programs for lifelong learners and high school students in its earliest stages, it now offers degree programs in

10506-667: Was later repeated in an open letter by Columbia faculty that criticized the findings of the university's antisemitism task force. On April 22, 2024 the university moved all in-person classes online, with President Shafik saying that this decision would "deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps". In late April, several participants in the campus encampment occupied Hamilton Hall . While inside, these protestors overturned furniture, broke windows, and erected barricades. On April 30, Columbia University called New York Police Department to clear Hamilton Hall. Around 9 PM that night, NYPD officers in riot gear used

10609-1375: Was survived by her sister, Mrs. Sandra Marona, and her brother, John McCorduck, as well as three nephews, four nieces and two step-daughters. Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence ( AI ), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines , particularly computer systems . It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs. Some high-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search ); recommendation systems (used by YouTube , Amazon , and Netflix ); interacting via human speech (e.g., Google Assistant , Siri , and Alexa ); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo ); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT , and AI art ); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go ). However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore ." The various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and

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