... I like the fact that 15 places above this post, currently, is this one:
Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow! Way to undermine the contributions of the AI community. Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing have already made great sides. Search, recommendation engines and automated translations are all AI. Disease prediction/diagnosis has been pretty hot for a while now. Market for predictions in Analytics is picking up rapidly and there's a lot of focus there. Reinforcement Learning is playing huge role in mode…
> Way to undermine the contributions of the AI community. Apparently. I think I know a fair amount about research in general, but not, it appears, much about the current state of A.I. research.
The truth is that a lot of the sites that you use on a regular basis -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, last.fm, your bank, your webmail provider, etc. etc. etc. -- all rely on different kinds of AI for parts of their functionality.
You are exposed to and using AI all the time.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#33Well I think for one, the field of AI is massive and spans enormous amounts of research over 60-70 years. You wouldn't know about any breakthroughs unless you studied in the field. From my brief exposure, here are some big algorithms and some applications in roughly chronological order. Definitely not exhaustive. Those in the know...feel free to correct me: - Least squares regression (prediction- used everywhere) - F…
Gauss invented least squares. Before 1800 IIRC. Also, I had no idea svm predated em. Cool. As for the gpus... I'm dubious. Most optimization problems I'm aware of are poorly suited for gpu style parallelism. More's the pity.
Genetic algorithms work pretty well for obvious reasons.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's true that it's no longer used; I certainly still consider my primary research field to be "AI", and the main journals and conferences I publish in have "AI" in the title. I do agree that some subfields have split off more, especially machine-learning, robotics, and vision, but there's plenty of stuff that still goes on under the rubric of AI. Even the more split-off fields are still very present in…
The skills and techniques required are very very different between the fields though; my PhD was in natural language processing but I don't have the first clue about machine vision, for example. Hell, I was working on parsing biomedical text -- meaning I don't really have much of a clue about speech processing, machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering or most of the other subfields of linguistic co…
I guess taking a mostly integrated-systems, applications-focused view, I see AI as a useful organizing concept for what to build, what the issues are in building it, etc. For example, I'm not sure what field Alan Newell's "knowledge level" talk would go in if not into AI.
I do agree there are lots of areas of research that are maybe more "algorithms" than "AI" (e.g. improving SAT-solving), but I disagree that that sort of specialization is the only way to research. From my perspective, those areas of algorithms provide the raw-material research that can be used to build AI systems. Even building AI systems is often specialized to some extent as well, but I think it's useful to have a semi-coherent body of knowledge and shared community around "AI" when doing so, rather than just the domain-specific algorithms and approaches.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#35Well I think for one, the field of AI is massive and spans enormous amounts of research over 60-70 years. You wouldn't know about any breakthroughs unless you studied in the field. From my brief exposure, here are some big algorithms and some applications in roughly chronological order. Definitely not exhaustive. Those in the know...feel free to correct me: - Least squares regression (prediction- used everywhere) - F…
Gauss invented least squares. Before 1800 IIRC. Also, I had no idea svm predated em. Cool. As for the gpus... I'm dubious. Most optimization problems I'm aware of are poorly suited for gpu style parallelism. More's the pity.
An obvious choice would be ridiculously large Neural Networks. However, any problem where you start with a random seed and converge on a solution benefits from starting at several different random seeds to avoid local minima. Also search algorithms (chess programs etc) often paralyze vary well.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#36I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…
I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I.
When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innovation going on, it simply isn't making news, and it doesn't appear to be getting the kind of investment attention it should.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#37I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…
I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I. When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innov…
What about saying "Hamburger shopping basket"? That'd find you an online store selling hamburgers.
Or use Google's Froogle.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#38I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general. But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com . Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some…
I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The skills and techniques required are very very different between the fields though; my PhD was in natural language processing but I don't have the first clue about machine vision, for example. Hell, I was working on parsing biomedical text -- meaning I don't really have much of a clue about speech processing, machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering or most of the other subfields of linguistic co…
I guess taking a mostly integrated-systems, applications-focused view, I see AI as a useful organizing concept for what to build, what the issues are in building it, etc. For example, I'm not sure what field Alan Newell's "knowledge level" talk would go in if not into AI. I do agree there are lots of areas of research that are maybe more "algorithms" than "AI" (e.g. improving SAT-solving), but I disagree that that so…
... and as someone whose research involves both SAT and statistical learning, I'd agree: putting a variety of specialties under the AI umbrella can make it easier to connect different areas in useful ways.
Re: Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only commercially viable idea to come out of A.I., that I know of, is the expert system. And that turned out to be a pretty small market. Oh come on, you're baiting AI people (like me) here. :P * Spam Filters (Bayesian networks) * Video Game AI (game trees, fuzzy logic, etc) * Natural Language Processing (Markov networks) * Computational Finance (pattern recognition) The list goes on, but the thing about AI is…
Amen. Stuff that doesn't work is "AI". Stuff that does work is "math". An algorithm to predict which humans are trustworthy enough to keep their promises to their creditors, which murders the performance of human beings, enabling billions of dollars of commerce which was previously economically unfeasible? AI. FICO? Oh, that is just some number crunching on a big source of data. Big deal. Come back when you get a cha…
Hofstadter said in GEB that "intelligence" is almost always defined implicitly as "whatever we currently think computers can't do," and that goalpost gets moved with astonishing regularity. The fact that a machine can do something means that it must not take intelligence, right? Thus, computers are able to do more and more that would have been thought impossible just 5 years ago, and we still convince ourselves that A.I. lies far beyond the horizon.