Every technology revolution has a unique inflection point. The spark that ignited the artificial intelligence movement was a statistical data analysis system developed by Jim Goodnight when he was a statistics professor at North Carolina State University 45 years ago. He never imagined that the technology he created to improve crop yields would evolve into sophisticated data analytics software, a precursor to modern day AI. Back then computers could only compute 300 instructions a second and had 8K of memory. Today they can execute 3 billion instructions a second and contain multiple terabytes of memory.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are considered the new new thing but Jim Goodnight sets the record straight: "That's exactly what we have been doing in statistics for years and years. We just call it building a model where these computer people call it machine learning. It's a model, it ain't nothing the machine learned." What Goodnight has been doing for 50 years is developing computer software that applies statistical methods to data to help people make better decisions. Automating these decisions is what AI is all about: "Once you have created software to make decisions and humans don't have to make them, you are allowed to call it artificial intelligence."

Maggie also asked him whether or not he gambles when he visits Las Vegas. SUBSCRIBE TO THE SAS SOFTWARE YOUTUBE CHANNEL http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... ABOUT SAS SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 75,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW .