Category: AI

How machine learning impacts information security

~ Ben Lorica

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

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Andrew Burt on the need to modernize data protection tools and strategies.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer at Immuta, a company building data management tools tuned for data science. Burt and cybersecurity pioneer Daniel Geer recently released a must-read white paper (“Flat Light”) that provides a great framework for how to think about information security in the age of big data and AI. They list important changes to the information landscape and offer suggestions on how to alleviate some of the new risks introduced by the rise of machine learning and AI.

We discussed their new white paper, cybersecurity (Burt was previously a special advisor at the FBI), and an exciting new Strata Data tutorial that Burt will be co-teaching in March.
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9 AI trends on our radar

~ Ben Lorica

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

How new developments in automation, machine deception, hardware, and more will shape AI.

Here are key AI trends business leaders and practitioners should watch in the months ahead.

We will start to see technologies enable partial automation of a variety of tasks.

Automation occurs in stages. While full automation might still be a ways off, there are many workflows and tasks that lend themselves to partial automation. In fact, 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.”

We have already seen some interesting products and services that rely on computer vision and speech technologies, and we expect to see even more in 2019. Look for additional improvements in language models and robotics that will result in solutions that target text and physical tasks. Rather than waiting for a complete automation model, competition will drive organizations to implement partial automation solutions—and the success of those partial automation projects will spur further development.
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Deep automation in machine learning

~ Ben Lorica

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

We need to do more than automate model building with autoML; we need to automate tasks at every stage of the data pipeline.

By Ben Lorica and Mike Loukides

In a previous post, we talked about applications of machine learning (ML) to software development, which included a tour through sample tools in data science and for managing data infrastructure. Since that time, Andrej Karpathy has made some more predictions about the fate of software development: he envisions a Software 2.0, in which the nature of software development has fundamentally changed. Humans no longer implement code that solves business problems; instead, they define desired behaviors and train algorithms to solve their problems. As he writes, “a neural network is a better piece of code than anything you or I can come up with in a large fraction of valuable verticals.” We won’t be writing code to optimize scheduling in a manufacturing plant; we’ll be training ML algorithms to find optimum performance based on historical data.

If humans are no longer needed to write enterprise applications, what do we do? Humans are still needed to write software, but that software is of a different type. Developers of Software 1.0 have a large body of tools to choose from: IDEs, CI/CD tools, automated testing tools, and so on. The tools for Software 2.0 are only starting to exist; one big task over the next two years is developing the IDEs for machine learning, plus other tools for data management, pipeline management, data cleaning, data provenance, and data lineage.
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Assessing progress in automation technologies

~ Ben Lorica

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

When it comes to automation of existing tasks and workflows, you need not adopt an “all or nothing” attitude.

In this post, I share slides and notes from a keynote Roger Chen and I gave at the Artificial Intelligence conference in London in October 2018. We presented an overview of the state of automation technologies: we tried to highlight the state of the key building block technologies and we described how these tools might evolve in the near future.

To assess the state of adoption of machine learning (ML) and AI, we recently conducted a survey that garnered more than 11,000 respondents. As I pointed out in previous posts, we learned many companies are still in the early stages of deploying machine learning:

Companies cite “lack of data” and “lack of skilled people” as the main factors holding back adoption. In many instances, “lack of data” is literally the state of affairs: companies have yet to collect and store the data needed to train the ML models they desire. The “skills gap” is real and persistent. Developers have taken heed of this growth in demand. In our own online learning platform, we are seeing strong growth in usage of content across AI topics, including 77% growth in consumption of content pertaining to deep learning:
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Tools for generating deep neural networks with efficient network architectures

~ Ben Lorica

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

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Alex Wong on building human-in-the-loop automation solutions for enterprise machine learning.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Alex Wong, associate professor at the University of Waterloo, and co-founder of DarwinAI, a startup that uses AI to address foundational challenges with deep learning in the enterprise. As the use of machine learning and analytics become more widespread, we’re beginning to see tools that enable data scientists and data engineers to scale and tackle many more problems and maintain more systems. This includes automation tools for the many stages involved in data science, including data preparation, feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning, as well as tools for data engineering and data operations.

Wong and his collaborators are building solutions for enterprises, including tools for generating efficient neural networks and for the performance analysis of networks deployed to edge devices.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Using AI to democratize deep learning

Having worked in machine learning and deep learning for more than a decade, both in academia as well as industry, it really became very evident to me that there’s a significant barrier to widespread adoption. One of the main things is that it is very difficult to design, build, and explain deep neural networks. I especially wanted to meet operational requirements. The process just involves way too much guesswork, trial and error, so it’s hard to build systems that work in real-world industrial systems.
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Managing risk in machine learning

~ Ben Lorica

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

Considerations for a world where ML models are becoming mission critical.

In this post, I share slides and notes from a keynote I gave at the Strata Data Conference in New York last September. As the data community begins to deploy more machine learning (ML) models, I wanted to review some important considerations.

Let’s begin by looking at the state of adoption. We recently conducted a surveywhich garnered more than 11,000 respondents—our main goal was to ascertain how enterprises were using machine learning. One of the things we learned was that many companies are still in the early stages of deploying machine learning (ML):

As far as reasons for companies holding back, we found from a survey we conducted earlier this year that companies cited lack of skilled people, a “skills gap,” as the main challenge holding back adoption.

Interest on the part of companies means the demand side for “machine learning talent” is healthy. Developers have taken notice and are beginning to learn about ML. In our own online training platform (which has more than 2.1 million users), we’re finding strong interest in machine learning topics. Below are the top search topics on our training platform:
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How social science research can inform the design of AI systems

~ Ben Lorica

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

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Jacob Ward on the interplay between psychology, decision-making, and AI systems.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Jacob Ward, a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University. Ward has an extensive background in journalism, mainly covering topics in science and technology, at National Geographic, Al Jazeera, Discovery Channel, BBC, Popular Science, and many other outlets. Most recently, he’s become interested in the interplay between research in psychology, decision-making, and AI systems. He’s in the process of writing a book on these topics, and was gracious enough to give an informal preview by way of this podcast conversation.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Psychology and AI

I began to realize there was a disconnect between what is a totally revolutionary set of innovations coming through in psychology right now that are really just beginning to scratch the surface of how human beings make decisions; at the same time, we are beginning to automate human decision-making in a really fundamental way. I had a number of different people say, ‘Wow, what you’re describing in psychology really reminds me of this piece of AI that I’m building right now,’ to change how expectant mothers see their doctors or change how we hire somebody for a job or whatever it is.

Transparency and designing systems that are fair

I was talking to somebody the other day who was trying to build a loan company that was using machine learning to present loans to people. He and his company did everything they possibly could to not redline the people they were loaning to. They were trying very hard not to make unfair loans that would give preference to white people over people of color.

They went to extraordinary lengths to make that happen. They cut addresses out of the process. They did all of this stuff to try to basically neutralize the process, and the machine learning model still would pick white people at a disproportionate rate over everybody else. They can’t explain why. They don’t know why that is. There’s some variable that’s mapping to race that they just don’t know about.

But that sort of opacity—this is somebody explaining it to me who just happened to have been inside the company, but it’s not as if that’s on display for everybody to check out. These kinds of closed systems are picking up patterns we can’t explain, and that their creators can’t explain. They are also making really, really important decisions based on them. I think it is going to be very important to change how we inspect these systems before we begin trusting them.

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