A decade of modern Artificial Intelligence | Deeper Insights™

The world has seen over a decade of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used in multiple ways from detection, prediction, matching and recommending and it continues to be one of the most talked about topics on the technological landscape.

Despite being perceived as futuristic some years ago, AI and associated tools have reached our lives whether we are fully aware of it or not. Examples of these types of everyday AI usage are self-driven cars, high-end robotics, AI-driven traffic management, Smart grid maintenance, digital assistants (Alexa), facial recognition and more.

AI as we know it today started and slowly entered our lives and inside our homes over the last ten years and was powered by the introduction of hardware with new computational capabilities never seen before.

The introduction of AI can be roughly split into two significant periods, one from 1950’s to 2010, the robot’s period, and from 2010 to the current date, which can be defined as the big-data period.

From its origins, most AI technology was used for the development of robots and humanoid robots (i.e) and game-playing machines (Deep Blue by IBM). On very scientific grounds, from 2010 onwards, AI has become a tool used in our day-to-day life.

One of the major events for the end of the AI winter was the launch of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), a dataset of images annotated by Fei Fei Li and colleagues.

The introduction of this large dataset, and subsequent datasets in the most various AI fields, namely, Computer Vision (image data), Natural Language Processing (NLP – text data), and Automatic Speech Recognition (audio data), allowed for the fast development of AI-based solutions, among which are body tracking games (i.e Xbox360), natural language question-answering computers (ie Watson), virtual assistants (ie. Siri, Cortana and Alexa), image recognition systems (DistBelief by Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng) and DeepMind’s AlphaGo and “Starcraft II.”(which defeated various human champions).

Developments and introduction of AI in our lives owe their large expansion due to the introduction of the internet-of-things which allows the acquisition of gargantuan amounts of data “for free” from almost any conceivable device, being it a smart-device, a medical scan, a surveillance camera, voice interactions with devices and others.

The latest trends in AI can be divided into Computer Vision, NLP, and Speech fields.