Bone & Joint Research

First proposed by Professor John McCarthy at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956,1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) – human intelligence exhibited by machines – has occupied the lexicon of successive generations of computer scientists, science fiction fans, and medical researchers. The aim of countless careers has been to build intelligent machines that can interpret the world as humans do, understand language, and learn from real-world examples. In the early part of this century, two events coincided that transformed the field of AI. The advent of widely available Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) meant that parallel processing was faster, cheaper, and more powerful. At the same time, the era of'Big Data' – images, text, bioinformatics, medical records, and financial transactions, among others – was moving firmly into the mainstream, along with almost limitless data storage.