Technology and Information: Data Augmentation Applied to Industry in Modern Times

Technology has had a close connection with industrial activities since the mechanization of the steam power machine in the 18th century and, over time, its importance and contribution have grown exponentially. Following the timeline of industrial revolutions, we are currently going through the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, and just like in the previous industrial revolutions, current technological tools are defying managers and revolutionizing the labor market, so that new business models are being developed, especially nowadays, when subjects, such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Deep Learning, and Intelligent Information Systems, among others, are widely discussed. In this respect, this piece of work aims to demonstrate that the aforementioned techniques are not part of a plan for the future, but an in-progress implementation that reaches new fields with each passing year, focuses on the improvement of industrial processes, and benefits industries. Since this work aims to show the historical setting of Data Augmentation, which is closely related to Big Data and Deep Learning, a range of ten years (2010–2019) was adopted to perform an academic review on this subject.