Introduction
Welcome again! Today, we’re having a little chat about “Cloud Computing and its relation to both AI and Ubiquitous Computing”, a very interesting topic to me!
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing simply means that the programs you run and the data you store, are somewhere in a server around the world. You won’t bother yourself by storing any information on your personal computer or even use it to run a complicated program that requires sophisticated computers. Your personal computer will barely do nothing but upload the information to be processed or download the information you need to access. All the programs you will use will be web-based via the internet. Cloud computing is considered the paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server in the early 1980s.
If you look around you, you will figure out that cloud computing is taking over. Many of the desktop applications are turning to be web applications, as well as current Web Applications are getting more powerful. What really make good use of cloud computing nowadays are mobile cell phones, since they have relatively small processing powers and thus favor a lot from processing on the cloud instead. To understand more about the pros and cons of cloud computing visit this link.
Figure Illustrating Cloud Computing - Source : http://www.briankeithmay.com
The Effect of Cloud Computing on Computer Hardware Industry
I think that, Cloud Computing will lead to polarizing the computer hardware industry to 2 distinct poles: one pole is the giant servers that contain all the data and programs and work out all the processing of the clouds, and the other pole is the simple computer terminals with relatively minimal storage and processing power which use the clouds as their main storage and computation resource. This means that the hardware industry will not care about advancing personal computers’ hardware like it did before (as everything is done in the cloud)
AI as cloud-based services
Google has launched the cloud-based service Google Predication API that provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for “complaints” and “praise” using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly. (Technology Review Reference)
On the other hand, AI Solver Studios said they will be rolling out cloud computing services to allow instant access beside their desktop application AI Solver Studio. AI Solver Studio is a unique pattern recognition application that deals with finding optimal solutions to classification problems and uses several powerful and proven artificial intelligence techniques including neural networks, genetic programming and genetic algorithms.
How can Cloud Computing improve AI
Since Cloud Computing emphasizes that all the data as well as the programs running are stored somewhere in a cloud, this means that a large amount of data can be used for analysis and use by AI programs in order to perform data mining or other AI-related techniques to deduce useful information.
For example, consider the WordPress.com application, in which you have your own capacity to store on it what you need of posts and multimedia. If the data and the behavior of users – such as you – weren’t all stored in the cloud of WordPress.com, not enough data will be available to be used for AI purposes.
Thus I consider Cloud Computing to enhance the performance of AI by providing a lot of Data to be used by AI techniques.
Cloud Computing and Ubiquitous Computing
Cloud Computing is essential for Ubiquitous Computing (see my previous post to know more about it) to flourish. This is because most Ubiquitous computers will suffer from relatively limited hardware resources (due to their ubiquitous nature), this will make them really favor from the resources on a cloud in the internet.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that merging the 2 trends (Ubiquitous and Cloud Computing) and supporting them with AI will result in tremendous technological advances. I think I will be talking about them more in the future!
Omar's Brain 