12 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Milestones: 3. Computer Graphics Give Birth To Big Data

The explosion of breakthroughs, investments, and entrepreneurial activity around artificial intelligence over the last decade has been driven exclusively by deep learning, a sophisticated statistical analysis technique for finding hidden patterns in large quantities of data. A term coined in 1955--artificial intelligence--was applied (or mis-applied) to deep learning, a more advanced version of an approach to training computers to perform certain tasks--machine learning--a term coined in 1959. The recent success of deep learning is the result of the increased availability of lots of data (big data) and the advent of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), significantly increasing the breadth and depth of the data used for training computers and reducing the time required for training deep learning algorithms. The technology that animated movies like "Toy Story" and enabled a variety of special effects is the ... [ ] focus of this year's Turing Award, the technology industry's version of the Nobel Prize. The term "big data" first appeared in computer science literature in an October 1997 article by Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, "Application-controlled demand paging for out-of-core visualization," published in the Proceedings of the IEEE 8th conference on Visualization.