A couple of years ago at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), as I walked the exhibit floor I was amused by how many EDA vendors had jumped on the marketing bandwagon for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Many company slogans, booth posters, and demonstrations claimed that AI/ML techniques had been incorporated into their products. Doubtless some of these claims were true, but for certain companies and product categories it was hard to believe. In this post, I’ll discuss a real use of AI/ML technology at Agnisys, already implemented and available to users now.
Let’s start by defining a few terms. AI is a broad description referring to any computer program that automatically does something that would traditionally have required human intelligence. AI works at its best by combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms. ML is a subset of AI using advanced techniques and models that enable computers to figure out interesting things from the datasets and deliver AI applications. Along with the algorithms, what is most important for AI/ML is the quality and quantity of the data used to train the model for these algorithms.
