  Technological progress has led to powerful computers and communication
technologies that penetrate nowadays all areas of science, industry and our
private lives. As a consequence, all these areas are generating digital traces
of data amounting to big data resources. This opens unprecedented opportunities
but also challenges toward the analysis, management, interpretation and
utilization of these data. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs in deep learning
algorithms complement now machine learning and statistics methods for an
efficient analysis of such data. Furthermore, advances in text mining and
natural language processing, e.g., word-embedding methods, enable also the
processing of large amounts of text data from diverse sources as governmental
reports, blog entries in social media or clinical health records of patients.
In this paper, we present a perspective on the role of artificial intelligence
in these developments and discuss also potential problems we are facing in a
digital society.
