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Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#81

I work in manufacturing. We have an acoustic microscope that scans parts with the goal of identifying internal defects (typically particulate trapped in epoxy bonds). It's pretty hard to define what size/shape/position/number of particles is worthy of failing the device. Our final product test can tell us what product is "good" and "bad" based on electrical measurements, but that test can't be applied at the stage of…

So this is a prototype and not really added value yet.

I don't understand why this comment is unpopular since the GP is phrased in such a fashion that you only notice that they talking hypothetically if you read it carefully.

I don't think there's anything wrong the GP's achievement or post (it's all interesting stuff) but if something has not yet been implemented, it's worth nothing since there is "many a slip 'tween cup and the lip"

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is this like the Amazon "feature" where I buy a coffee table on Amazon, then I get suggested to buy a coffee table EVERY DAY for 3 months. Literally row after row of coffee table? Because there must be a big pool of people who buy 1 coffee table buying more coffee tables immediately after?

Theory is that the recommendation engine is built for books. So if you buy a specific type of book, it recommends other books in the similar category. I guess they never got a chance to update it to reflect the fact that Amazon sells more than just books.

And if you buy a lot of coffee table books, you need more coffee tables.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#83
Machine learning is great for helping you understand a new dataset quickly. I often train a basic logistic regression classifier and introspect the coefficients to learn what features are important, which are unimportant, and how they are correlated.

There are a number of other statistical techniques you can use for this but scikit-learn makes this very very easy to do.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#84
post #6

At Sumo Logic we do "grep in cloud as a service". We use machine learning to do pattern clustering. Using lines of text to learn printfs they came from. The primary advantage for customer is easier to use and troubleshoot faster. https://www.sumologic.com/resource/featured-videos/demo-sumo...

just a happy Sumologic user, saying hello and Thanks! Most of your product is great (I am ex splunk user)... The biggest complaint is that I can't cmd+click to open anything in new tabs as everything is so JS crazy front end.

overall the pattern matching stuff is pretty cool. Also, would like a see raw logs around this for when I am trying to debug event grouping errors based on the starting regex.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#86
One of my coworkers used basic reinforcement learning to automate a task someone used to have to do manually. We have two data ingestion pipelines. One that we ingest immediately, and a second for our larger customers which is throttled during the day and ingested at night. For the throttled pipeline, we initially had hard coded rate limits, but as we made changes to our infrastructure, the throttle was processing a different amount than it should have been. Sometimes it would process too much, and we would start to see latency build up in our normal pipeline, and other times it processed too little. For a short period of time, we had the hard coded throttle with a Slack command to override the default. This allowed an enginneer to change the rate limit if they saw we were ingesting to little or too much. While this worked, it was common that an engineer wasn't paying attention, and we would process the wrong amount for a period of time. One of my coworkers used extremely basic reinforcement learning to make the throttle dynamic. It looks at the latency of the normal ingestion pipeline, and based on that, decides how high to set the rate limit on the throttled pipeline. Thanks to him, the throttle will automatically process as much as it can, and no one needs to watch it.

The same coworker also used decision trees to analyze query performance. He trained a decision tree on the words contained in the raw SQL query and the query plan. Anyone could then read the decision tree to understand what properties of a query made that query slow. There's been times we're we've noticed some queries having odd behavior going on, such as some queries having unusually high planning time. When something like this happens, we are able to train a decision tree based on the odd behavior we've noticed. We can then read the decision tree to see what queries have the weird behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#87

I work in manufacturing. We have an acoustic microscope that scans parts with the goal of identifying internal defects (typically particulate trapped in epoxy bonds). It's pretty hard to define what size/shape/position/number of particles is worthy of failing the device. Our final product test can tell us what product is "good" and "bad" based on electrical measurements, but that test can't be applied at the stage of…

This sounds like a pretty standard use of ML to me. No need to feel guilty, this stuff just isn't very difficult from a user's perspective, especially if you use the right libraries. It helps if you maintain a good bookkeeping of your experiments, so you have a good picture of what works and what doesn't.

By the way, control engineering for industry used to be very difficult (but is paid very well), and requires knowledge of systems theory, differential equations, and physics. But with the advent of ML, I suspect that might change; things may get a lot easier.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#88
I run a deep learning company focused on a lot of banking and telco fraud workloads like [1]. We have also done dl to predict failing services to auto migrate workloads before server failure.

The bulk of what we do is anomaly detection.

[1] https://skymind.io/case-studies [2] insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/25/making-deep-learning-accessible-on-openstack/

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#89

We're a computer vision company, we do a lot of product detection + recognition + search, primarily for retailers, but we've also got revenue in other verticals with large volumes of imagery. My co-founder and I both did our thesis' on computer vision. In our space, the recent AI / ML advances have made things possible that were simply not realistic before. That being said, the hype around Deep Learning is getting pr…

Bingo.

There's a lot of "DL allows us to do X so we should make a product / service using DL to do X", rather than "We think there's value in something doing Y, what allows us to do Y? DL allows us to do Y better than anything else, lets use DL"

You gave the example of Slyce. Their products are cool, but I can't help but think "is DL the best way to get that end result?" for lots of the things they do.

Re: Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?

#90
Here at Matterport, our research team is using deep learning to understand the 3D spaces scanned by our customers. Deep learning is great for a company like ours, where so much of our data is visual in nature and extracting that information in a high-throughput way would have been impossible before the advent of deep learning.

One way we're applying this is automatic creation of panoramic tours. Real estate is a big market for us, and a key differentiator of our product is the ability to create a tour of a home that will play automatically as either a slideshow or a 3D fly-through. The problem is, creating these tours manually takes time, as it requires navigating a 3D model to find the best views of each room. We know these tours add significant value when selling a home, but many of our customers don't have the time to create them. In our research lab we're using deep learning to create tours automatically by identifying different rooms of the house and what views of them tend to be appealing. We are drawing from a training set of roughly a million user-generated views from manually created guided tours, a decent portion of which are labelled with room type.

It's less far along, but we're also looking at semantic segmentation for 3D geometry estimation, deep learning for improved depth data quality, and other applications of deep learning to 3D data. Our customers have scanned about 370,000 buildings, which works out to around 300 million RGBD images of real places.

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