AI Technology Poised to Spread Far and Wide
April 3, 2015
Artificial intelligence is having a moment; the second half of last year saw about half a billion dollars invested in the AI industry. Wired asks and answers, “The AI Resurgence: Why Now?” Writer Babak Hodjat observes that advances in hardware and cloud services have allowed more contenders to afford to enter the arena. Open source tools like Hadoop also help. Then there’s public perception; with the proliferation of Siri and her ilk, people are more comfortable with the whole concept of AI (Steve Wozniak aside, apparently). It seems to help that these natural-language personal assistants have a sense of humor. Hodjat continues:
“But there’s more substance to this resurgence than the impression of intelligence that Siri’s jocularity gives its users. The recent advances in Machine Learning are truly groundbreaking. Artificial Neural Networks (deep learning computer systems that mimic the human brain) are now scaled to several tens of hidden layer nodes, increasing their abstraction power. They can be trained on tens of thousands of cores, speeding up the process of developing generalizing learning models. Other mainstream classification approaches, such as Random Forest classification, have been scaled to run on very large numbers of compute nodes, enabling the tackling of ever more ambitious problems on larger and larger data-sets (e.g., Wise.io).”
The investment boom has produced a surge of start-ups offering AI solutions to companies in a wide range of industries. Organizations in fields as diverse as medicine and oil production seem eager to incorporate these tools; it remains to be seen whether the tech is a good investment for every type of enterprise. For his part, Hodjat has high hopes for its use in fraud detection, medical diagnostics, and online commerce. And for ever-improving personal assistants, of course.
Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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