The field of artificial intelligence is massive and ever-changing. For those of us who are interested in the overall field itself, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything nor to specialize in all the niches that interest us. A good, quick overview can easily be found on Wikipedia.

How does a Cross Trained Mind define artificial intelligence? The field of AI studies how to create a mind in a holistic manner. Someone specializing in a subfield of AI will look at a specific aspect of intelligence to focus on replicating. For instance, a computer vision engineer will create an AI-based application that handles one minor (though difficult) vision task. Or a cognitive psychologist might focus on how the brain handles very old memories and translates that into a programmable cognitive architecture. Or a computational linguist might create a generative grammar to be used for a natural language processing application.

The Cross Trained Mind approach is to avoid focusing too narrowly on a single part of AI, though we do study these areas. We take the long road and get a much higher view. We take the time to study a wider variety of fields that all contribute to AI. We learn math as well as neuroscience, programming as well as business skills. In all that, we’ll have our strong areas and weak areas, but we’ll at least be knowledgeable in each.

Now let’s move on to other very useful resources in learning about AI.