Intelligent Machines Part 1: Big Data, Machine Learning and the Future

by Rebecca Merret,  CIO Australia

Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted in 1990 that a computer would beat a human world champion chess player by 1998. In 1997, that actually happened with IBM’s Deep Blue. Since then, artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to advance rapidly, making now a good time to brush up on what is considered the next wave of highly disruptive technology.

AI consists of many sub disciplines such as natural language processing, computer vision, knowledge representation and reasoning. The technology is making its way into a broad range of industries from marketing with behavioural targeting, to healthcare with accurate and early detection of complex diseases, to infrastructure with smarter urban planning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, especially the latest innovations in machine learning, are being used by major players across the tech industry, defense sector, and others to tackle a broad array of challenges.

At Facebook, AI technology underlies many of the social network’s most basic features, such as automatically tagging people in photos and identifying content that could be relevant to each user’s interests. The company also is working to make its AI technology smarter; this year it announced it was able to train an AI network to read a short version of “Lord of the Rings” and answer questions about the narrative.

Meanwhile, Baidu is working to improve the AI technology underlying its search engine’s speech-recognition capabilities, with the goal of enabling users to easily “talk” to their smartphones and other devices.

Australia’s Defense Science and Technology Organization is using AI to control autonomous drones operating on land, sea, and air, and to process intelligence materials such as satellite-based mapping data.

National ICT Australia is using computer-vision AI to improve the quality of a “bionic eye” it is developing to help people suffering from macular degeneration. Finally, IBM is teaching its Watson supercomputer to ask questions of human experts to help it learn how to carry out tasks such as sorting drug discovery documents.  Read the article