Quo Vadis, Artificial Intelligence?

Since its conception in the mid 1950s, artificial intelligence with its great ambition to understand and emulate intelligence in natural and artificial environments alike is now a truly multidisciplinary field that reaches out and is inspired by a great diversity of other fields. Rapid advances in research and technology in various fields have created environments into which artificial intelligence could embed itself naturally and comfortably. Neuroscience with its desire to understand nervous systems of biological organisms and systems biology with its longing to comprehend, holistically, the multitude of complex interactions in biological systems are two such fields. They target ideals artificial intelligence has dreamt about for a long time including the computer simulation of an entire biological brain or the creation of new life forms from manipulations of cellular and genetic information in the laboratory. The scope for artificial intelligence in neuroscience and systems biology is extremely wide. This article investigates the standing of artificial intelligence in relation to neuroscience and systems biology and provides an outlook at new and exciting challenges for artificial intelligence in these fields. These challenges include, but are not necessarily limited to, the ability to learn from other projects and to be inventive, to understand the potential and exploit novel computing paradigms and environments, to specify and adhere to stringent standards and robust statistical frameworks, to be integrative, and to embrace openness principles.