Artificial intelligence applications in
genealogy
Artificial intelligence comes to the real world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for over 30 years,
but has only recently started to have widespread commercial
applications. Not sure where this fits in? Think Amazons
Alexa or Google Translate. Applications like these grew out of
research in Academia and became commercially viable
products with the dramatic increases in technology over the
past 10 years.
In the world of Genealogy, AI can be used for:
•
Natural Language Processing: This can range from
translations to searching for names of towns or people
with different spellings
•
Machine Learning: Access to the Internet allows
computer programs to conduct online searches for you
saving your hours of research. Examples of this being
applied include the automatic generation of very large
family trees with the computer program learning on its
own about family relationships.
•
Computer Vision: Recognizing what is in a picture. Is it
of a grave? What does the text say? Is it of people?
Who are they? This technology is still in its infancy,
but is maturing quite a bit. This started with technology
that recognizes text in scanned in documents (OCR -
Optical Character Recognition) and has evolved into
uses for driver less cars (i.e. reading road signs).
There are quite a few benefits to this technology. Computers
can search more data faster than humans. Your ancestors may
come from countries where you don’t speak the language.
When they immigrated to the country you are now living in,
their immigration records may have alternate spellings of their
names or the towns they came from.
Natural language processing is already being used in a number
of popular Genealogy products. Ancestry.com and
Jewishgen.org already have functionality to help you search
for relatives and towns that will search name variations for
you. Google.com and Ancestry.com both also offer
translations of text from one language to another.
GenSmarts.com uses machine learning to search the Internet
for information for your family tree.
Look for advances in technology to continue to bring advances
Artificial Intelligence to commercially available Genealogy
products. The advent of the Internet in the 1990s led to
significant advances in technology and products. Research and
development being done now for driver less cars will lead to a
similar boom for AI. These advances will carry over into other
industries, including Genealogy introducing new opportunities
to learn more about your family. One such potential growth
area is with DNA testing. While this has grown quite a bit in
recent years, look for this to grow even more with advances in
the underlying data and AI applications take advantage of it.
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