Major Milestones of Artificial Intelligence from 1949 to 2018

Major Milestones of Artificial Intelligence 1949 to 2018

I recently asked some of the leading experts in Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning for their opinion on the most important developments of AI from 1949 and the key trends in 2018. Here are my unbiased list:

• 1949 Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think in which he writes: “Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill….These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.”
• 1950 — Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Alan Turing creates his Turing Test to determine whether or not a computer has human-like intelligence.
• 1950 Isaac Asimov published his Three Laws of Robotics.
• 1951 Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmunds build SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), the first artificial neural network, using 3000 vacuum tubes to simulate a network of 40 neurons.
• 1952 — Arthur Samuel writes the first computer learning application
• 1955 — John McCarthy, the computer scientist coined the term “artificial intelligence”
• 1957 — Frank Rosenblatt designs the first artificial neural network
• 1967 — Computer-based pattern recognition begins with the nearest neighbor algorithm
• 1979 — Stanford University students invent the self-navigating Stanford Cart
• 1981 — Explanation Based Learning (EBL) is introduced by Gerald Dejong, allowing a computer to create a set of rules based on training data
• 1985 — Terry Sejnowski creates NetTalk, which learns to pronounce words
• The 1990s — Machine learning work shifts from a knowledge-driven approach to a data-driven approach, extracting patterns from large amounts of data
• 1993, Vernor Vinge publishes “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he predicts that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
• 1997 — IBM’s Deep Blue system defeats the world champion of chess
• 2005 — Ray Kurzweil, the issue is computer power and, using Moore’s Law, he predicted that machines with human-level intelligence will appear by 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.
• 2006 — Geoffrey Hinton coins the term “deep learning,“ to explain new algorithms that empower computers to distinguish objects and images and video
• 2010 — Microsoft’s Kinect is released, tracking 20 human features to allow people to interact with the computer through movements and gestures
• 2011 — IBM’s Watson beats two of Jeopardy’s greatest champions
• 2011 — Nevada becomes the first jurisdiction in the world where autonomous vehicles can be legally operated on public roads.
• June 2012 Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng report on an experiment in which they showed a very large neural network 10 million unlabeled images randomly taken from YouTube videos, and “to our amusement, one of our artificial neurons learned to respond strongly to pictures of… cats.”
• October 2012 A convolutional neural network designed by researchers at the University of Toronto achieve an error rate of only 16% in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, a significant improvement over the 25% error rate achieved by the best entry the year before.
• 2015 Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo (version: Fan) defeated 3 time European Go champion 2 dan professional Fan Hui by 5 games to 0.
• 2016 — The biggest success story of the year was probably AlphaGo (Nature paper), a Reinforcement Learning agent that beat the world’s best Go players.
• 2017 — Stephen Hawking warns emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization”. This is also the year in which China starts looking like a major player in the field of AI. Facebook made a big splash with PyTorch. Tensorflow 1.0 of Google with a stable and backwards-compatible API was released in February. Facebook and Microsoft announced the ONNX open format to share deep learning models across frameworks.
• 2018 Year of explosion on AI. Artificial Intelligence impacts multiple fields. Tesla was one of the first auto makers to launch a self-driving vehicle. In their effort to keep pace with Tesla, traditional automakers like Audi are poised to release their own self-driving cars in 2018.
• 2018 AI scientist, Amit Ray Published the seminal book, Compassionate Artificial Intelligence, AI -5.0.
• 2018 — Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk warns A.I. could create an “immortal dictator -it would live forever -from which we can never escape.”
• 2018 Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “one of the most important things that humanity is working on. It’s more profound than, I don’t know, electricity or fire”
• 2018 Nvidia, has recently introduced their GPU cloud, which promises to be another interesting alternative to train Deep Learning models. Success of TensorFlow, Self-driving cars, AlphaGo Zero will continue this year. AI with IOT, Big Data, Data Science are the top trends of artificial intelligence.

Please comment regarding notable omissions and inaccuracies.