When Machine Learning Started To Sense The World

This week's milestone in the history of technology is the patent that launched the ongoing quest to get machines to help us and them know more about our world, from tabulating machines to machine learning to deep learning (or today's "artificial intelligence"). On January 8, 1889, Herman Hollerith was granted a patent titled the "Art of Compiling Statistics." The patent described a punched card tabulating machine which launched a new industry and the fruitful marriage of statistics and computer engineering--called "machine learning" since the late 1950s, and reincarnated today as "deep learning" (also popularly known today 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.