How AI is disrupting everything and where geospatial fit in?

Can machines think?" asked Alan Turing, known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), in a seminal paper on the topic of computing machinery and intelligence in 1950. Turing did not coin the term'Artificial Intelligence' but his work laid the foundations for a new research area to be termed'Artificial Intelligence' by John McCarthy, one of the organizers of the 1956 conference held at Dartmouth College, UK to delve into the fundamental task of developing an electronic brain. However, by 1973, disappointed by the progress of work, funding dried up in the UK and USA and AI plunged into a long'winter'. In the 20th century, AI was an idea for the future. It needed much more computing power and a greater variety of digital data sources than was available at that time. Today, the picture has changed. Computing power has reached petaflops levels, distributed on the Cloud and accessible to personal devices like smartphones. As much as 90% of the existing data has been created in the last two years; 2.5 quintillion of data is generated per day from sensors, mobiles, online transactions and social media. The challenge is how to harness this huge data flow to return actionable information without storing this data for future analysis because the growth of storage capacity has long been surpassed by the growth of data volume and there is no possibility of the gap being covered. This is why AI has again gained prominence. Big Data Analytics enables the analysis of data as it streams and stores only the intelligence gathered for future reference. Big Data Analytics is one of the applications of Artificial Intelligence. Atanu Sinha, Director – India and SAARC, Hexagon Geospatial, says: "Big Data Analytics is more to do with past analysis and future trends based on which an organization can make informed decisions.