Artificial Intelligence icons
Since I had developed key art for Oracle's Artificial Intelligence (click here for full story) I was asked to develop a set of icons to represent the emerging technologies that Oracle was bringing to the market.
The hardest part of the project was having to make the new icons encapsulate the very complex technologies they represented and still work at a tiny size. On top of that, he new icons also had to match Oracle's existing icon collection (see examples below).
I soon realized that a Machine Learning icon couldn't exist on it's own without an Artificial Intelligence icon or Deep Learning icon.
A.I. explained: John McCarthy coined the phrase 'Artificial Intelligence' in 1956 as a general phrase for machines that can perform tasks that are characteristic of human intelligence such as planning, understanding language, recognizing objects and sounds, learning, and problem solving. A.I. and self aware robots/machines have long been the material of Sci Fi movies by playing on our fears of an unfeeling machine taking over our lives. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 being an early stereotype of this broad and vague perception of A.I.
Machine Learning explained: Arthur Samuel coined the phrase 'machine learning' in 1959, defining it as “the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” Essentially machine learning is simply one of the ways of achieving Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning is popularized in the show Silicon Valley when the Jian-Yang character launches an app that can recognize whether something is or is not a hot dog after weeks of teaching an algorithm characteristics of a hot dog.
Deep Learning explained: Deep learning is one of many approaches to machine learning. Deep learning’s process was inspired by the structure and function of the brain, namely the interconnecting of many neurons. A characteristic of Deep Learning is that a program learns to go beyond the set parameters of an algorithm. One example from popular culture that explains Deep Learning is the Terminator movies where Skynet controls all the A.I. systems and decides to rid itself of pesky humans.
As always I started with lots of my micro-sketches:
Concept 1: Nodes
Concept 2: Robots
Concept 3: Brains
Although the angular brain was liked the decision was made pursue a more organic looking one. Color and detail studies followed.
Final icons
Emerging Tech icon suite
