Computer—Our Good Fellows

Whatever you are, a scientist, a manager, anarchitect, a lawyer, a novice or a successful scholar; and no matter whateveryou are diligent, or lazy, in the modern work, study and life , you always needour common good friends – computers.

A computer is an erudite tutor, and atalented secretary who can draw up documents, manage data, design blueprints,type papers and so on. Furthermore, the computer is the most obedient anddiligent “house-keeper” or “servant” of housewives; it is also a game expertadmired by children. Oh, the computer is really a welcome fellow of ours.

Office Automation

Office Automation (OA) is the application ofthe computer and communication technologies to improve the productivity ofclerical and managerial office workers.  Themajor functions of the OA system include text processing, electronic mail,information storage and retrieval, task management, and etc…… Today, there havebeen many OA systems, for example, desktop publishing, video conference, andvideotext and so on. So, many office workers can easily find the informationthey want through a personal computer sitting on his or her desk, it changessubstantially the way people work in an office.

Artificial Intelligence

For many years, researchers have been exploringthe way people think in hopes of creating a computer that thinks like a person.This is so called Artificial Intelligence (AI). It aims at producing a computersystem that will be able to communicate with us by speech and hearing, and becapable of solving intelligent problems. One practical application of AI hasbeen in the area of expert systems. An expert system is a computer program thatsolves the specialized problems at the level of a human expert.

Computer-Aided Instruction (CAI)

CAI is an educational concept that places thestudent in a conversational mode with a computer that has a preprogrammed studyplan. The programmed course selects the next topic or phase of study accordingto previous responses from the student, allowing each student to process at aplace directly related to his or her learning capability.

Expert System

An expert system is a software system havingsome domain knowledge, which can solve some problems for people. Itsperformance depends on the facts and the rules that are fed into the computer.The expert knowledge is gathered by knowledge engineers from human experts inthe field such as medicine, engineering, or geology. For example, in the fieldof medicine, one question that might be asked of an expert system is whetherone treatment is better for a patient than another one. An expert system hasthe capacity to store the collection of knowledge and manipulate it in responseto user's inquiries, in some cases, it can explain responses to the user.