How an Electrical Engineer Became an Artificial Intelligence Researcher, a Multiphase Active Contours Analysis

This essay examines how what is considered to be artificial intelligence (AI) has changed over time and come to intersect with the expertise of the author. Initially, AI developed on a separate trajectory, both topically and institutionally, from pattern recognition, neural information processing, decision and control systems, and allied topics by focusing on symbolic systems within computer science departments rather than on continuous systems in electrical engineering departments. The separate evolutions continued throughout the author's lifetime, with some crossover in reinforcement learning and graphical models, but were shocked into converging by the virality of deep learning, thus making an electrical engineer into an AI researcher. Now that this convergence has happened, opportunity exists to pursue an agenda that combines learning and reasoning bridged by interpretable machine learning models.