AI & Big Data — Making Sense of Information Overload Posted on : May 22 - 2017

Big Data has an indispensable role in the accelerated progress of AI & need for clean big data only seems to increase with time.

IBM suggests that Big Data can be characterized by any or all of three “V” words to investigate situations, events, and so on: volume, variety, and velocity. Michael Cox and David Ellsworth were among the first to use the term big data literally, referring to using larger volumes of scientific data for visualization (the term large data also has been used).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. From robotics to hospitality to medicine, AI is slowly making inroads into almost every industry.

But how is AI progressing so rapidly? How are scientists & engineers rapidly making such progress in this field of computing which once was limited to the fantasy of Hollywood story writers? The answer lies in one word: Data.

The advent of the internet & its penetration over the past couple of decades has enabled for a large volume of information being generated, stored & available for analysis. Engineers slowly realised that rather than teaching computers how to do everything, writing code enabling computers to mimic human behaviour, pattern recognition, data sifting & then providing them access to the data for analysis would be much more efficient. This has led to the progress of “machine learning”, arguably the most successful approach to AI.

Machine Learning models are designed to make statements, decisions, predictions & deductions (outcomes) with a certain degree of certainty. Add to that a certain “feedback loop” — where the machines are informed if their results were right or wrong & enabling the model to modify its approach to be more accurate. So as a result, the more data that a system processes, the more accurate it will become at predicting outcomes.  View More