Abstract
In 1934 Alan M. Turing argued that machines could imitate thought and, in the essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, he proposed what is now known as the Turing test. A computer and a human are compared by a panel of judges, who address the same questions to both and review their answers. If the judges cannot make distinctions between the two answers, the machine may be considered intelligent.
The Turing test for decades has represented the best calling card for popu-larizing Artificial Intelligence worldwide. Nowadays, ideas, theories, techniques developed in the research area of Artificial Intelligence are widely applied for producing games, satellite navigators, human-computer interfaces, web applica-tions, automated voice responders, etc.
For celebrating the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) organizes the workshop Popularize Artificial Intelligence (PAI), which is aimed at divulging the practical uses of Artificial Intelligence. The workshop PAI 2012 is organized in the context of the 12th AI*IA Symposium on Artificial Intelligence.
The papers included in these proceedings present demonstrators, demos, pro-posals, systems exploiting AI theories and techniques, which are written in such a way to make them accessible to a broad public. In particular, they are orga-nized in three categories of contribution: (1) industrial experiences, (2) research and academic experiences, (3) student experiences inside AI courses.
This edition of PAI received seventeen submissions, sixteen of which have been selected by the Programme Committee and are included in this volume. Each paper received at least three reviews in order to supply the authors with helpful feedback. In particular, the Programme Committee and the Workshop Organisers have selected the following papers, one for each category, as the best papers:
- Industrial experiences: “Miglioramento di algoritmi di elaborazione di im-magini da scanner 3D tramite Simulated Annealing”, by Marco Derboni, Evelina Lamma and Antonio Zaccaro;
- Research and academic experiences: “TrentinoMedia: Exploiting NLP and Background Knowledge to Browse a Large Multimedia News Store”, by Roldano Cattoni, Francesco Corcoglioniti, Christian Girardi, Bernardo Magnini, Lu-ciano Serafini and Roberto Zanoli;
- Student experiences inside AI courses: “DALI Logical Agents into Play”, by Stefania Costantini, Niva Florio, Giovanni De Gasperis, Annalisa D’Andrea and Arianna Tocchio.
We would like to thank all authors for their contributions and the members of the Programme Committee for their excellent work during the reviewing phase. Finally, we would like to thank also the organizers of the 12th AI*IA Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for hosting the workshop and the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence for providing the prizes and the grants for the authors of the best papers and students.