Indeed, the past five years have seen an explosion of AI and robotics applications not only in the lab, where they are used for clinical and biopharmaceutical research, but also throughout the business and consumer marketplaces. AI has been making critical contributions in a number of fields, delivering products for the Internet, voice response, drug discovery, design reuse, and decision support systems. It is considered an interdisciplinary field in which computer science intersects with engineering, linguistics, mathematics, neuroscience, and psychology. Although AI is generally associated with tasks that involve high-level problem solving, human intelligence also involves interaction with the physical environment. The senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight provide information that is intimately coupled to action in a fashion that goes beyond reasoning and introspection.
Language is also closely interrelated to the emotional and sensory interpretation of information.
Defining such issues in computational terms has proved to be extremely difficult. This is why AI involves several fields of study and why AI has splintered into several application areas. Each area addresses a different set of questions to provide specific AI solutions. For instance, linguistics plays a significant role in the use of natural language for the extraction and manipulation of information from databases. As is evident, a good understanding of how humans perform tasks, and the different ways in which those tasks are approached, is a key element in designing intelligent computer systems.