The AI Chronicles: Combining Statistical Analysis And Computing From Hollerith To Zuckerberg

Today is the first day of CES 2019 and artificial intelligence (AI) "will pervade the show," says Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association. One hundred and thirty years ago today (January 8, 1889), Herman Hollerith was granted a patent titled "Art of Compiling Statistics." The patent described a punched card tabulating machine which heralded the fruitful marriage of statistics and computer engineering--called "machine learning" since the late 1950s, and reincarnated today as "deep learning," or more popularly as "artificial intelligence." Commemorating IBM's 100th anniversary in 2011, The Economist wrote: In 1886, Herman Hollerith, a statistician, started a business to rent out the tabulating machines he had originally invented for America's census. Taking a page from train conductors, who then punched holes in tickets to denote passengers' observable traits (e.g., that they were tall, or female) to prevent fraud, he developed a punch card that held a person's data and an electric contraption to read it.