History of computing |
---|
Hardware |
Software |
Computer science |
Modern concepts |
By country |
Timeline of computing |
Glossary of computer science |
This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing from 2020 to the present. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see the history of computing.
2025 in science |
---|
Fields |
Technology |
Social sciences |
Paleontology |
Extraterrestrial environment |
Terrestrial environment |
Other/related |
Significant events in computing include events relating directly or indirectly to software, hardware and wetware. Excluded (except in instances of significant functional overlap) are:
Currently excluded are:
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2025) |
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (April 2021) |
To display all pages, subcategories and images click on the "►": |
---|
Award / challenge | Year | Recipient/s / winner/s | Description |
---|---|---|---|
FSF Free Software Awards – Advancement of Free Software award | 2020 | Bradley M. Kuhn | For his work in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and promoting copyleft through his position at Software Freedom Conservancy. [455] [456] |
FSF Free Software Awards – Advancement of Free Software award | 2021 | Paul Eggert | A computer scientist who teaches in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, contributor to the GNU operating system for over thirty years and current maintainer of the Time Zone Database. [457] [458] [459] |
FSF Free Software Awards – Social benefit award | 2020 | CiviCRM | Free program that nonprofit organizations around the world use to manage their mailings and contact databases [455] [456] |
FSF Free Software Awards – Social benefit award | 2021 | SecuRepairs | An association of information security experts who support the right to repair [457] [458] [459] |
FSF Free Software Awards – Award for outstanding new Free Software contributor | 2020 | Alyssa Rosenzweig | Leads the Panfrost project, [460] a project to reverse engineer and implement a free driver for the Mali series of graphics processing units (GPUs) used on a wide variety of single-board computers and mobile phones. [455] [456] |
FSF Free Software Awards – Award for outstanding new Free Software contributor | 2021 | Protesilaos Stavrou | A philosopher who since 2019 has become a mainstay of the GNU Emacs community through his blog posts, conference talks, livestreams, and code contributions. [457] [458] [459] |
This section needs expansionwith: Deaths since March 2022 (for automated updating, a version of Template:Transclude selected current events for articles like Deaths in 2022 is needed). You can help by adding to it. (September 2022) |
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2025) |
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2024) |
Very broad outlines of topic domains and topics with substantial progress during the decade not yet included above with a Further information: link:
To display all pages, subcategories and images click on the "►": |
---|
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations. In recent times, the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems. Recent advances have even discovered ways to mimic the human nervous system through liquid solutions of chemical systems.
Stuart Jonathan Russell is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the authoritative textbook of the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks. Artificial superintelligence (ASI), on the other hand, refers to AGI that greatly exceeds human cognitive capabilities. AGI is considered one of the definitions of strong AI.
A wetware computer is an organic computer composed of organic material "wetware" such as "living" neurons. Wetware computers composed of neurons are different than conventional computers because they use biological materials, and offer the possibility of substantially more energy-efficient computing. While a wetware computer is still largely conceptual, there has been limited success with construction and prototyping, which has acted as a proof of the concept's realistic application to computing in the future. The most notable prototypes have stemmed from the research completed by biological engineer William Ditto during his time at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work constructing a simple neurocomputer capable of basic addition from leech neurons in 1999 was a significant discovery for the concept. This research was a primary example driving interest in creating these artificially constructed, but still organic brains.
The historical application of biotechnology throughout time is provided below in chronological order.
This is a timeline of artificial intelligence, sometimes alternatively called synthetic intelligence.
The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within the field that are considered to have particular ethical stakes. This includes algorithmic biases, fairness, automated decision-making, accountability, privacy, and regulation. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics, lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status, artificial superintelligence and existential risks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in applications throughout industry and academia. In a manner analogous to electricity or computers, AI serves as a general-purpose technology. AI programs are designed to simulate human perception and understanding. These systems are capable of adapting to new information and responding to changing situations. Machine learning has been used for various scientific and commercial purposes including language translation, image recognition, decision-making, credit scoring, and e-commerce.
Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the advances, milestones, and breakthroughs that have been achieved in the field of artificial intelligence over time. AI is a multidisciplinary branch of computer science that aims to create machines and systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI applications have been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, finance, robotics, law, video games, agriculture, and scientific discovery. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." "Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry." In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AI technology became widely used as elements of larger systems, but the field was rarely credited for these successes at the time.
A cognitive computer is a computer that hardwires artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms into an integrated circuit that closely reproduces the behavior of the human brain. It generally adopts a neuromorphic engineering approach. Synonyms include neuromorphic chip and cognitive chip.
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, it combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. It created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow neural networks to be used by the public, and multiple internal AI research projects, and aimed to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. It was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023.
DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, Germany, and the United States.
Existential risk from artificial intelligence refers to the idea that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe.
Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives.
An AI accelerator, deep learning processor or neural processing unit (NPU) is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and computer vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024, a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains tens of billions of MOSFETs.
Artificial intelligence in healthcare is the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and understand complex medical and healthcare data. In some cases, it can exceed or augment human capabilities by providing better or faster ways to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease.
Open-source artificial intelligence is an AI system that is freely available to use, study, modify, and share. These attributes extend to each of the system's components, including datasets, code, and model parameters, promoting a collaborative and transparent approach to AI development. Free and open-source software (FOSS) licenses, such as the Apache License, MIT License, and GNU General Public License, outline the terms under which open-source artificial intelligence can be accessed, modified, and redistributed.
If you've ever wanted to try out OpenAI's vaunted machine learning toolset, it just got a lot easier. The company has released an API that lets developers call its AI tools in on "virtually any English language task."