New algorithm may help people store more pictures, share videos faster

The world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Storing and transferring all of this enormous--and constantly growing--number of images, videos, Tweets, and other forms of data is becoming a significant challenge, one that threatens to undermine the growth of the internet and thwart the introduction of new technologies, such as the Internet of Things. Now, a team of researchers reports that an algorithm that uses a machine learning technique based on the human brain could ease that data clog by reducing the size of multimedia files, such as videos and images, and restoring them without losing much quality or information. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, or AI. In a study, the researchers developed an algorithm that features a recurrent neural network to compress and restore data, according to C. Lee Giles, David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State, and an Institute for CyberScience associate.