Blog 7 — Robots

When you think about robots, two things probably come to mind: artificial intelligence and automation.  The way I think of it is that computer programs operate in a virtual world, manipulating objects and data in some world that doesn’t exist.  Robots are actually interacting with and manipulating the physical world around us.  In this sense, what we saw in the robotics lab does not really apply to the Itunes music store.  However, artifical intelligence and automation can.  Automation is necessary for such a store to exist and work.  It would be painfully taxing on human resources to have an individual sitting in an office process each and every transaction that occurs in the store.  However, this is not in any way related to our project.  Artificial intelligence is a big deal when it comes to recommending music to customers.  Apple’s Itunes Genius is a very intelligent (if you can say such a thing about a robot) that is able to recommend purchases to users.  This is something our group could look at and see if we could think of ways to improve the way that the artificial intelligence found in Genius could be easier to interact with and improve the way it displays its information to users.