Category: AI

Specialized hardware for deep learning will unleash innovation

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Andrew Feldman on why deep learning is ushering a golden age for compute architecture.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, a startup in the blossoming area of specialized hardware for machine learning. Since the release of AlexNet in 2012, we have seen an explosion in activity in machine learning, particularly in deep learning. A lot of the work to date happened primarily on general purpose hardware (CPU, GPU). But now that we’re six years into the resurgence in interest in machine learning and AI, these new workloads have attracted technologists and entrepreneurs who are building specialized hardware for both model training and inference, in the data center or on edge devices.

In fact, companies with enough volume have already begun building specialized processors for machine learning. But you have to either use specific cloud computing platforms or work at specific companies to have access to such hardware. A new wave of startups (including Cerebras) will make specialized hardware affordable and broadly available. Over the next 12-24 months architects and engineers will need to revisit their infrastructure and decide between general purpose or specialized hardware, and cloud or on-premise gear.

In light of the training durationand cost they face using current (general purpose) hardware, some experiments might be hard to justify. Upcoming specialized hardware will enable data scientists to try out ideas that they previously would have hesitated to pursue. This will surely lead to more research papers and interesting products as data scientists are able to run many more experiments (on even bigger models) and iterate faster.

As founder of one of the most anticipated hardware startups in the deep learning space, I wanted get Feldman’s views on the challenges and opportunities faced by engineers and entrepreneurs building hardware for machine learning workloads.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:
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Data collection and data markets in the age of privacy and machine learning

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

While models and algorithms garner most of the media coverage, this is a great time to be thinking about building tools in data.

In this post I share slides and notes from a keynote I gave at the Strata Data Conference in London at the end of May. My goal was to remind the data community about the many interesting opportunities and challenges in data itself. Much of the focus of recent press coverage has been on algorithms and models, specifically the expanding utility of deep learning. Because large deep learning architectures are quite data hungry, the importance of data has grown even more. In this short talk, I describe some interesting trends in how data is valued, collected, and shared.

Economic value of data

It’s no secret that companies place a lot of value on data and the data pipelines that produce key features. In the early phases of adopting machine learning (ML), companies focus on making sure they have sufficient amount of labeled (training) data for the applications they want to tackle. They then investigate additional data sources that they can use to augment their existing data. In fact, among many practitioners, data remains more valuable than models (many talk openly about what models they use, but are reticent to discuss the features they feed into those models).

But if data is precious, how do we go about estimating its value? For those among us who build machine learning models, we can estimate the value of data by examining the cost of acquiring training data:
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What machine learning means for software development

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

“Human in the loop” software development will be a big part of the future.

By Ben Lorica and Mike Loukides

Machine learning is poised to change the nature of software development in fundamental ways, perhaps for the first time since the invention of FORTRAN and LISP. It presents the first real challenge to our decades-old paradigms for programming. What will these changes mean for the millions of people who are now practicing software development? Will we see job losses and layoffs, or will see programming evolve into something different—perhaps even something more focused on satisfying users?

We’ve built software more or less the same way since the 1970s. We’ve had high-level languages, low-level languages, scripting languages, and tools for building and testing software, but what those tools let us do hasn’t changed much. Our languages and tools are much better than they were 50 years ago, but they’re essentially the same. We still have editors. They’re fancier: they have color highlighting, name completion, and they can sometimes help with tasks like refactoring, but they’re still the descendants of emacs and vi. Object orientation represents a different programming style, rather than anything fundamentally new—and, of course, functional programming goes all the way back to the 50s (except we didn’t know it was called that). Can we do better?

We will focus on machine learning rather than artificial intelligence. Machine learning has been called “the part of AI that works,” but more important, the label “machine learning” steers clear of notions like general intelligence. We’re not discussing systems that can find a problem to be solved, design a solution, and implement that solution on their own. Such systems don’t exist, and may never exist. Humans are needed for that. Machine learning may be little more than pattern recognition, but we’ve already seen that pattern recognition can accomplish a lot. Indeed, hand-coded pattern recognition is at the heart of our current toolset: that’s really all a modern optimizing compiler is doing.

We also need to set expectations. McKinsey estimates that “fewer than 5% of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their constituent activities automated.” Software development and data science aren’t going to be among the occupations that are completely automated. But good software developers have always sought to automate tedious, repetitive tasks; that’s what computers are for. It should be no surprise that software development itself will increasingly be automated.
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Data regulations and privacy discussions are still in the early stages

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Aurélie Pols on GDPR, ethics, and ePrivacy.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Aurélie Pols of Mind Your Privacy, one of my go-to resources when it comes to data privacy and data ethics. This interview took place at Strata Data London, a couple of days before the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect. I wanted her perspective on this landmark regulation, as well as her take on trends in data privacy and growing interest in ethics among data professionals.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

GDPR is just the starting point

GDPR is not an end point. It’s a starting point for a journey where a balance between companies and society and users of data needs to be redefined. Because when I look at my children, I look at how they use technology, I look at how smart my house might become or my car or my fridge, I know that in the long run this idea of giving consent to my fridge to share data is not totally viable. What are we going to be build for the next generations?
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Managing risk in machine learning models

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Andrew Burt and Steven Touw on how companies can manage models they cannot fully explain.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer at Immuta, and Steven Touw, co-founder and CTO of Immuta. Burt recently co-authored a white paper on managing risk in machine learning models, and I wanted to sit down with them to discuss some of the proposals they put forward to organizations that are deploying machine learning.

Some high-profile examples of models gone awry have raised awareness among companies for the need for better risk management tools and processes. There is now a growing interest in ethics among data scientists, specifically in tools for monitoring bias in machine learning models. In a previous post, I listed some of the key considerations organization should keep in mind as they move models to production, but the report co-authored by Burt goes far beyond and recommends lines of defense, including a description of key roles that are needed.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Privacy and compliance meet data science

Andrew Burt:I would say the big takeaway from our paper is that lawyers and compliance and privacy folks live in one world and data scientists live in another with competing objectives. And that can no longer be the case. They need to talk to each other. They need to have a shared process and some shared terminology so that everybody can communicate.

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Understanding automation

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

An overview and framework, including tools that can be used to enable automation.

In this post, I share slides and notes from a talk Roger Chen and I gave in May 2018 at the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York. Most companies are beginning to explore how to use machine learning and AI, and we wanted to give an overview and framework for how to think about these technologies and their roles in automation. Along the way, we describe the machine learning and AI tools that can be used to enable automation.

Let me begin by citing a recent survey we conducted: among other things, we found that a majority (54%) consider deep learning an important part of their future projects. Deep learning is a specific machine learning technique, and its success in a variety of domains has led to the renewed interest in AI.

Much of the current media coverage about AI revolves around deep learning. The reality is that many AI systems will use many different machine learning methods and techniques. For example, recent prominent examples of AI systems—systems that excelled at Go and Poker—used deep learning and other methods. In the case of AlphaGo, Monte Carlo Tree Search played a role, whereas DeepStack’s poker playing system combines neural networks with counterfactual regret minimization and heuristic search.

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The real value of data requires a holistic view of the end-to-end data pipeline

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Ashok Srivastava on the emergence of machine learning and AI for enterprise applications.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Ashok Srivastava, senior vice president and chief data officer at Intuit. He has a strong science and engineering background, combined with years of applying machine learning and data science in industry. Prior to joining Intuit, he led the teams responsible for data and artificial intelligence products at Verizon. I wanted his perspective on a range of issues, including the role of the chief data officer, ethics in machine learning, and the emergence of AI technologies for enterprise products and applications.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Chief data officer

A chief data officer, in my opinion, is a person who thinks about the end-to-end process of obtaining data, data governance, and transforming that data for a useful purpose. His or her purview is relatively large. I view my purview at Intuit to be exactly that, thinking about the entire data pipeline, proper stewardship, proper governance principles, and proper application of data. I think that as the public learns more about the opportunities that can come from data, there’s a lot of excitement about the potential value that can be unlocked from it from the consumer standpoint, and also many businesses and scientific organizations are excited about the same thing. I think the CDO plays a role as a catalyst in making those things happen with the right principles applied.

I would say if you look back into history a little bit, you’ll find the need for the chief data officer started to come into play when people saw a huge amount of data coming in at high speeds with high variety and variability—but then also the opportunity to marry that data with real algorithms that can have a transformational property to them. While it’s true that CIOs, CTOs, and people who are in lines of business can and should think about this, it’s a complex enough process that I think it merits having a person and an organization think about that end-to-end pipeline.

Ethics

We’re actually right now in the process of launching a unified training program in data science that includes ethics as well as many other technical topics. I should say that I joined Intuit only about six months ago. They already had training programs happening worldwide in the area of data science and acquainting people with the principles necessary to use data properly as well as the technical aspects of doing it.
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