Artificial Intelligence Research and Development

There was a time when AI was seen by many as science fiction, i.e., the healthy endeavor of speculating about the future. Now the future is here. AI has passed from being a visionary discipline to lying at the core of many commercial enterprises. AI programs scattered through the web influence nowadays our lives: by extracting profiles and offering tailored advertisement, helping us in our searches, establishing social networks, providing entertainment...and not just in the net, but also in the physical world. In Japan there are robots that guide customers through marketplaces advising them where to find the product matching their needs, and realistic replicas of university professors allow them to teach their lectures a hundred kilometers away from the classroom. Not to speak about intelligent prostheses and remote high-precision surgery. In the Catalan-speaking world there are no robots in marketplaces yet, but it is coming. Recently, the first commercial humanoid robot was built. Since AI technology is becoming reasonably mature, companies are progressively relying on it.The Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) tries to promote synergies within the research community and also between the different actors playing a role in the development of AI: from universities to industry, from governmental departments to the information society, from entertainment enterprises to citizen services.