Towards Unlocking the Hidden Potentials of the Data-Centric AI Paradigm in the Modern Era

Abstract

Data-centric artificial intelligence (DC-AI) is a modern paradigm that gives more priority to data quality enhancement, rather than only optimizing the complex codes of AI models. The DC-AI paradigm is expected to substantially advance the status of AI research and developments, which has been solely based on model-centric AI (MC-AI) over the past 30 years. Until present, there exists very little knowledge about DC-AI, and its significance in terms of solving real-world problems remains unexplored in the recent literature. In this technical note, we present the core aspects of DC-AI and MC-AI and discuss their interplay when used to solve some real-world problems. We discuss the potential scenarios/situations that require the integration of DC-AI with MC-AI to solve challenging problems in AI. We performed a case study on a real-world dataset to corroborate the potential of DC-AI in realistic scenarios and to prove its significance over MC-AI when either data are limited or their quality is poor. Afterward, we comprehensively discuss the challenges that currently hinder the realization of DC-AI, and we list promising avenues for future research and development concerning DC-AI. Lastly, we discuss the next-generation computing for DC-AI that can foster DC-AI-related developments and can help transition DC-AI from theory to practice. Our detailed analysis can guide AI practitioners toward exploring the undisclosed potential of DC-AI in the current AI-driven era.