Overview of AITopics

AITopics > Project Notes > Overview of AITopics

AAAI's AITopics site has been providing accurate information about AI to the general public and the AI community since 1998.

The goals of the project are outlined in the 2002 article in the AI Magazine:
Bruce G. Buchanan and Jonathan Glick. AITopics: A Responsibility to Celebrate AI Responsibly. AI Magazine, 23(1): 87-94, Spring 2002.

A more recent article is:
B.G. Buchanan, J. Glick and R.G. Smith. The AAAI Video Archive. AI Magazine, 29(1): 91-94, Spring 2008.

Summary of Design Considerations (2/13/10)

We believe that a central, mediated portal is part of the solution, and not part of the perceived problem of people growing up in the digital age having so many distractions that they do not take time to think. Both content and form are relevant in providing a useful service.

Some overall goals have guided content development to date (any of which can be debated, of course):
1. AITopics should provide fair, accurate, and readable descriptions of concepts and issues in AI.
2. The descriptions should, with few exceptions, be previously reviewed and published, and thus stable, with known authorship, and citable in scholarly publications.
3. The sources should be credible.
The form into which we put the content is much more open to experiment. The overall design goals for the structure of the site have been:
4. Information should be easy to find, with clearly marked entry points for each concept; we gain more by simplicity than by completeness.
5. The site should be easy to navigate, with some uniformity in look & feel.
6. The categories should seem natural.
7. The presentation should be dignified, as suits the subject matter, but still engaging.

Additional Explanation (7/19/10)

We want to link to previously published articles so that everything on the site (except a few introductory and interstitial paragraphs we write) can be used by researchers and referenced in scholarly articles, as opposed to blogs, opinion pieces, and other material on the web that changes frequently. The value-added in AITopics is two-fold: (a) selecting well-written, reliable articles about the topics covered, and (b) organizing them so people with different kinds of questions can find what they need. For example, high school students usually only want introductory overviews of a topic; instructors and advanced students will be looking for readable descriptions of advanced sub-topics. We know we can't try to have a complete collection that organizes every article written on each topic but we hope that the first & second levels of detail that we offer will be starting places from which the cascading references will cover most of what students and instructors want to know. PhD students and seasoned researchers will need much more, of course, but even they may find useful information here. We hope that everyone will use AITopics as a source of reliable information about AI.

We want to start with a small number (half-dozen or so) of well-written overviews, and then offer readings on subtopics, some overviews and some more technical. The section on General Readings is somewhat of a catch-all and includes some items from newspapers & magazines. We've been including references to articles that are not online if they are good enough for someone to search out in a library and are accessible by most librarians (perhaps through inter-library loan). The section "Related Resources" includes pointers to other web sites that offer collections of articles and other material that they have organized. Additional subtopics are included under each topic when there is a significant collection of articles about them. E.g., "decision trees" under "machine learning", or "chess" under "games".