Hello hello! So, after 4 years of my personal blog,
and 50,000 followers later, I been asked by quite a few of you (thanks Mum!),
to share my thoughts on the wonderful world of Analytics that I’ve been living
in for the last 25 years, with a focus on where the industry is going, and
explaining in ‘Min Language’ all those techie phases that you might may have
heard in that last meeting you had with the data scientist you’ve just hired
(as that’s what your competitors did), or you overheard the topic being
discussed by the youngsters on the H12 to Harrow on your way home when they
weren’t on Snapchat.
Let’s tick them off: AI, EI, Machine Learning, Neural Nets,
NLP, NLG, RPA, VR, AR, MFI, that kind of thing. Ok, I made the last one up, but
you get the gist. “EI”…didn’t get that one? That’s Emotional Intelligence. More
about that later…
I believe we are entering the most exciting times of mankind right now, as we finally are at a stage where the stars have aligned around us having the necessary raw computing power, access to large amounts of storage in the shape of that fluffy cloud and finally access to data.
I thought I’d kick off a topic that Hollywood and Bollywood
has been bringing to our screens since the invention of the silver screen. That
topic is ‘Robots: Friend or Foe’. I’m sure you will all have a view as if you
are in the Terminator camp (the first one when he was a bit naughty) or iRobot
where our silver friendly humanoid was on the side of Will Smith. There is a
great debate by leaders such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk (my hero!) and Steven
Hawking who say we need to be really careful that the current AI path we are on
could lead to the biggest risk, that we face as a civilisation, where
Skynet is a reality and we are ruled by computers. Yes folks, a bigger risk for
mankind than the effect on our brains of us all secretly watching that last
season of Love Island, though we would never really admit it to our
friends. As homework for this blog, I watched a BBC programme that
was on last week called Hyper Evolution: Rise of the Robots.
It was a fascinating watch to see how over the last 100
years the robots have got much more intelligent, having taken over many of the
tasks we used to do like making cars, walking up steps, and playing the
piano…For me, I was most interested in how through the use of Artificial
Intelligence, robots have started to learn all by themselves, by using previous
conversations and continuous feedback to improve, whereby they know the
difference between a tea cup and an orange. (hint, you can’t dunk your biscuit
in the latter).
So what do we actually mean by the phrase Artificial
Intelligence, and is that different to Machine Learning and what about Deep
Learning? How deep is deep? Well, I’m glad you’ve asked.
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to create
intelligent machines that work and react like humans. For example, the computer
has certain traits such as Knowledge, Reasoning, Problem Solving, Perception,
Learning and Planning. All the lovely things we do without really thinking
about, like that time when the driver of the Met Line tells you the tube is now
terminating at Wembley Park as he’s going on strike and you now have to work
out how to get to Moorgate!
So a subset of AI is Machine Learning. (It’s not something
to use interchangeably, unless you want the geeks at the next Hackathon you
attend to roll their eyes at you). In essence, Machine Learning is a technique
where the machine is ‘trained’ using large amounts of data and algorithms that
gives it the ability to learn how to perform the task. They do this by
detecting patterns in existing data, identify similar patterns in future data
and then make data driven predictions. Still don’t know what I’m talking about?
Let’s try bringing it to life. The next time you are on Google and you misspell
a word (very likely these days thanks to reliance on autocorrect), and you type
‘Ficebook’ as it’s lunchtime and so that’s fine as you are covered under Human
Rights legislation. The machine learning algorithm, will suggest that you
probably meant ‘Facebook’. It even works if you type ‘FB’. Smart huh.
Ready for another example? This time let’s have a look at
one of my favourite sites that I love to show to our clients when they come and
visit our lab, here at Concentra (www.concentra.co.uk).
https://www.captionbot.ai/
Here, it’s using some more powers within the AI family, specifically computer
vision and natural language to describe what’s in a picture. Now for humans,
that’s easy peasy, but up until now, really hard for a computer to do. The
website uses an image library from all the pictures stored on Bing as it’s
frame of reference as well as a super smart emotion algorithm to describe if a
human in a picture is laughing because they are still remembering that MFI
joke. The site has some sample photos like the one below, and what’s
really impressive is that by using these natural language generation
techniques, it stiches a sentence together like a human would by understanding the
different objects in the picture to work out what the context could be.
What’s great is that the system is continually getting better by the
users giving a ‘how did I do’ score. I remember last year, I
tried testing the system with a picture of Donald Trump (before he was
President), and at the time it thought it was Louis van Gaal, the Ex Man United
football manager. So I gave the machine one star and no dinner and now as you
can see below, it’s much more accurate…
Woah, I’ve just realised that I’ve written quite a bit
already today on this super topic and as it’s probably time for you to get off
the tube now, or go to that meeting, why don’t we leave it there, and we can
pick up again next week to continue this topic.
Please let me know if there are
any other topics that you would like me to demystify like ‘Are we really living
in the matrix’, or ‘Will my kids need to bother how to drive’ or ‘Is your name
really Min or is that some kind of geeky statistical inside joke’…that kind of
thing.
Right, let’s leave it there, and I wish you a lovely sleep,
A small man called Min