Science in the 2010s: Artificial Intelligence

While the foundations for deep learning sate to the 1980s, researchers George Dahl and Abdel-rahman Mohamed broke new ground in 2010 when they developed advanced deep learning speech recognition tools. This paved the way for more deep learning advances focusing on anything from facial recognition to machine translation. In 2011 a question-answering computer system developed by IBM's DeepQA project made headlines when it outplayed Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, two of the most successful contestants to take part in the popular American game show Jeopardy! Artificial intelligence took another stride forward in October 2011 when Apple launched Siri, it's signature personal assistant. From reciting the weather forecast to plotting a route on Google Maps, Siri is now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.