12 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Milestones: 3. Computer Graphics Give Birth To Big Data Posted on : Mar 30 - 2020

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 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. They wrote that “Visualization provides an interesting challenge for computer systems: data sets are generally quite large, taxing the capacities of main memory, local disk, and even remote disk. We call this the problem of big data. When data sets do not fit in main memory (in core), or when they do not fit even on local disk, the most common solution is to acquire more resources.”

The term was in use at the time outside of academia, as well. For example, John R. Mashey, Chief Scientist at SGI, gave a presentation titled “Big Data… and the Next Wave of Infrastress” at an April 1998 USENIX meeting. SGI, founded in 1981 as Silicon Graphics, Inc., focused on developing hardware and software for processing 3D images.

SGI’s founder Jim Clark completed his PhD dissertation in 1974 at the University of Utah under the supervision of Ivan Sutherland, the “father of computer graphics.” Clark later founded Netscape Communications whose successful Web browser and 1995 IPO launched the “Internet boom.” The invention of the Web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and its success in making billions of people around the world consumers and creators of digital data, facilitated the annotation of billions of widely shared digital images (e.g., identifying a photo of a cat as a “cat”). View More