On AI and hype

Machine Learning Miller by
Bastian Greshake
When I wrote about AI and the Future last year I was reasonably excited, as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) graduate, of the possibilities and jealous of those beginning their careers in AI. Since now they have the luxury of extreme computer power and storage, 3D printing and the other abundant pieces of technology needed to create the future bounded only by our imaginations!

 The past couple of months though and I am noticing a bit of a trend in conference presentations (and tweets coming out of conferences) that seem to have moved a lot of the hope and hype around big data onto AI. Or more specifically machine learning. I am not going to single out any specific examples, but I feel this covers two basic areas:
  1. I don't need to know about my data or structure it to get useful information and 
  2. I won't need to configure things. because machine learning.

(Lack of) Data structure

I am not sure what is driving this need but I guess it has something to do with the falling price of storage and the rise of world wide data collection via the web. So lots of business now have lots of data sitting there. There is also hype about the businesses that do data analytics well - e.g. Amazon or Uber - that leads people to think "They make money from their data. I have data. I should be able to make money out of it".There are also lots of blog posts and talks about this tool or that (e.g. Hadoop or Map Reduce) has enabled the data analytics, which usually gloss over the basics like linear regression because everyone does that...right? 

In the Computerworld article Machine learning: Demystifying linear regression and feature selection they make this very good point
Much of the art in data science is understanding the problem domain well enough to build up a clean set of features that are likely related to what you want to model.
 and show how using training data that has been modelled with clean features outperforms using all the data without any domain insight. So yes, machine learning probably can be useful just be prepared to understand the data and be able to run your own regression analysis on any training sets needed.

Configuring things

Again, the hype seems to have come from wanting to copy successful market leaders and I can almost hear people thinking "Netflix adapt the recommendations without configuring it, can I configure my users menu structure? (or whatever)". Adapting to changing usage or conditions that your software operates in is a perfectly reasonable desire. But here it's worth asking how much "adaptability" to we really require? and how much of the conditions of this can I realistically foresee? For example adaptive polling of mailboxes may not require a vast neural net to see traffic cycles and usage behaviour to tweak the likely poll time. We might just be able to write much less code that has enough adaptability based on what it found last time and a simple heuristic.

Final Thought


So please, do explore the potential that machine learning has to offer but don't expect it to be a silver bullet or replace understanding your domain. I think that AI surrounds us to much now for another AI winter to set in, but too much hype isn't good for any tool or approach.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CONFERENCE: TTI Summer Forum 2017 – Getting to Grips with GDPR

Image
T his week I was at the Travel Technology Initiative's Summer Forum . The subject was the new EU (and UK!) data protection laws. These are due to come into force in May 2018. It's a large topic where the individual member state's laws and guidance are evolving. There were three main points that I picked up from the presentations. First from Dai Davis , GDPR expert at Percy Crow Davis & Co. His lively presentation talked about how a large part of the change is in how rights communicated. Before this was by "fairness" through registration of usage with a central body. The shift is to transparency by informing individuals directly. This means that the consumer mindset could then shift to match how legislation is framed. For example, with the repetition of many companies holding personally identifiable information now having to inform what they are collecting and how they are processing it. Currently, awareness isn't high and the compensation not high eno
Read more

On HBX and online education

Image
I have written this blog post as a reflection on what has occupied me a lot in the past 3 months. After finishing my Post graduate Certificate in Technol ogy Manage ment with the O pen U niversity I was looking at what to do next in continuing my education - being a life long learner! I was looking at different online plat forms for interesting courses.  I was looking at sites like Coursera and  Future Learn , when I came across a new extension to Harvard Business School and a course they run called HBX CORe. This one paragraph pitch they provide sums it up pretty well: HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) is a 120-150 hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business from Harvard Business School. CORe is comprised of three courses - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning model. Sinc
Read more

On performance and environment

Image
Hobbies are a great way to relax and unwind from work. They are also an excellent opportunity to practice some skills and learn about yourself.  Photography shows a clear visual representation of how practice with tools can improve output . Running I have found has taught me a couple of lessons about performance and motivation. Here are my top four Goals are important   An arbitrary goal, doesn't fit in any plan but I feel good Yes, even arbitrary goals . As long as they have a narrative that you can use as a guide. They provide a sense of progress and small achievements to celebrate.  For example as an individual runner, it makes no real difference to my life running 10km just under an hour. Or a bit faster at 51 minutes. But the difference in the sense of pride and achievement in my progress was real.  Your environment matters Periodically I pause from running then have to restart. Sometimes this also involved a house move and I need to find a new route. On one of
Read more