Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Notes from "AI: Beyond the Hype" panel discussion Oct 26, 2017 - Boston

Notes:  "AI: Beyond the Hype" meeting
Oct 26, 2017.  Sponsored by Lewis, a PR firm at The District in Boston

Speakers

  • Forrester VP.  Mike Gualtier Editor XCO Mag/Northeastern:
  • Mike Farrell Sam Whitmore Media surve
  • AI prof/Tech writer at Boston U:  Joelle Renstom
  • Canvas Ventures partner - Paul Hsiao. First capital in Siri, multiple investments in ML 

Meeting Summary

  • Full people like robots are years away but narrow, pragmatic AI
  • “Augmented AI” is most promising
  • DATA IS NEEDED to get a good model
  • So many examples of applications where there is insufficient data to train the model and a feedback look
  • Speakers/crowd generally agreed that adoption will increase next 5 years and jobs will be displaced, especially low wage jobs
  • Automated Intelligence most promising hear term
  • Truck driving autopilot
  • Robots in burning buildings



Notes by Speaker

Forrester  - Mike Gulatieri

  • Pure AI: sci fi; human like
  • Pragmatic AI: very narrow in scope but beats technical human
  • Google: develop app to beat Go cham
  • Watson beat chess champion
  • AI comprised 9 building blocks
  • ML, 
  • Okay to use one ML and call it AI
  • “Automated intelligence” per Forrester, low skilled workers working with a robot
  • Why is the ONLY home robot the Roomba for sweeping; but no robot for folding laundry
  • Lots of discussion and credit are given to algorithms, but it’s all about the data.
  • There is NO magic in the algorithm
  • Laundry automated with perception learning. We are NOT close. We are many, many years away for this
  • Deep learning in 2012 breakthrough
  • Invideo
  • Deep learning uses neural networks
  • It’s very difficult to test the model to know where it worked
  • All these models are based on probabilities
  • Decision tree can be traced, but neural networks cannot be traced
  • Guardrails or circuit breakers
  • Google has guard rails. When model says “I think someone died, let’s show an add for caskets” and guardrails
  • NO company TRUSTS their ML solely by itself without guardrails
  • CIA and others ask “can we use AI to prevent cyberattacks”.  Forrester says “you need A LOT more breaches” because there is enough data to look
  • Anomaly detection is typically now used instead for security detections but challenge is that there is false positives
  • Alexa is providing Amazon SO MUCH data because of the there are so many people using these  
  • HLMI - high level machine intelligence
  • Survey of 200



VC landscape Paul Hsaio 

  • Must include AI in slide desk to get funding these days
  • commoditization
  • VC focus on proprietary data since so many tools are giving away tools
  • The biggest challenge is lack of engineers coming into this space.  Multiple acquires
  • Very few engineers actually know the AI space
  • Most things have become possible in the 5 years because of CPU, 
  • We are VERY far from AI like person that destroys job
  • Robot advisors has been around 10 years in financials
  • On board of Elance, paid $2B to contractors
  • Automation of trucking
  • Level 1 and level 2: trucks turn on autopilot once on the highway, but off highway is then human.  Like autopilot for plane
  • Uber IA on panel said, 
  • Google puts it’s own cell phones in truck to track them. 99.9% of 
  • Video 4 Berkely PH students trying to figure out how program a robot to fold t-shirt but still not successful.  Automation is hard
  • We’ve seen several startups automated medical records
  • Traction for upcoding; reading the records to figure how to charge the government MORE
  • Maybe we need to start re-evaluating teaching. Some human subjects and others subjects are AI based [I think he means online courses) as part of “Augmented Intelligence” rather than Artifical 
  • Amazon (closed system) vs Google Home (more open)
  • Rapid eco system; innovation happening a RAPID pace
  • What is my bank balance (683 different ways to ask for bank balance.  Machine learning
  • We are at the state today for AI where AOL was 56kp dialup modem
  • We are beginning of a 20-25 year run