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Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
11–20 of 119 posts
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#12This is suspiciously close "data science" and "machine learning" experts. Can't we just be honest and say that most of these are applied statistics jobs with a specialty in large volumes of data? Or is "statistics" just not fashionable enough nowadays?
I imagine the "AI experts" will be paid significantly more than data scientists and machine learning experts, just like "software engineers" are paid more than "software developers" and "programmers".
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there would still need to be a fizzbuzz style filter for AI jobs to keep out the people who overstate their abilities. Is there a good test for basic AI job capability?
You just interview people. Ask them to explain what a SVM is. Ask them to explain how training a linear perceptron works. This kind of stuff.
That tests book knowledge, not actual understanding of how to think about AI, and leaves itself open to interviewer bias, the very things fizzbuzz avoids.
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#14However, with the abysmal standards of hiring, I'm sure a lot of companies would pass on very good candidates because they won't write FizzBuzz on the board for you, or companies would pass on Peter Norvig because his code is not Pep8 compliant
Not sure if you're being serious but are you sure they would even care whether these kinds of candidates could program? I am skeptical they hired them to code; I imagine they mostly spend their time doing research and then have the SDEs implement things.
It happens all the time, and it comes from a mix of things.
One way it happens is that you get a PhD in astrophysics with years of data analysis experience in for a data science job. Have a software engineer interview her and he might find that she doesn't know a number of basic computer sciences concepts [traversing a linked list, tail recursion, implement breadth-first-search]. His knowledge background says these basic ideas are fundamental, there are therefore serious questions about the technical ability of the interviewee.
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just interview people. Ask them to explain what a SVM is. Ask them to explain how training a linear perceptron works. This kind of stuff.
That tests book knowledge, not actual understanding of how to think about AI, and leaves itself open to interviewer bias, the very things fizzbuzz avoids.
The idea that FizzBuzz has no interviewer bias is laughable at best.
I can guarantee some will pick and reject people because they did things in a way they didn't like
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if you're being serious but are you sure they would even care whether these kinds of candidates could program? I am skeptical they hired them to code; I imagine they mostly spend their time doing research and then have the SDEs implement things.
It happens all the time, and it comes from a mix of things. One way it happens is that you get a PhD in astrophysics with years of data analysis experience in for a data science job. Have a software engineer interview her and he might find that she doesn't know a number of basic computer sciences concepts [traversing a linked list, tail recursion, implement breadth-first-search]. His knowledge background says these b…
This is a good example. At the same time this CS interviewer may not know what's the second central moment of a probability density function.
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just interview people. Ask them to explain what a SVM is. Ask them to explain how training a linear perceptron works. This kind of stuff.
That tests book knowledge, not actual understanding of how to think about AI, and leaves itself open to interviewer bias, the very things fizzbuzz avoids.
No it does not. Without practical experience one just cannot discuss these things freely, and pure-book knowledge is clearly visible instantly.
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#18AI is very interesting but not very accessible because it's so specialized. I have a fairly strong programming background but feel like I'd need to study theory for a significant amount of time to even get my feet wet with AI. If you have (condensed, especially) AI resources that you think would help bridge that gap, please share! Toy-scale project ideas would also be appreciated.
Buy and work through "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It's a huge book and the de facto standard for pretty much every AI 101+ course. Some of the stuff may not interest you some might but it covers a broad range (from logic based agents to Bayesian networks). It's systematic and has excellent references and further reading notes for each chapter.
The focus is not on the currently sexy "data science" aspects though (however you will find plenty of material that is relevant).
The edX class from Berkeley is pretty fun and hands on. It uses Pacman as a running example and essentially teaches the agents stuff from AIAMA:
https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkel...
The Stanford class by Thrun and Norvig himself (one of the authors of AIAMA) is also good but I prefer the edX one:
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-artificial-intellige...
Edit: changed to direct links for the courses
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#19AI is very interesting but not very accessible because it's so specialized. I have a fairly strong programming background but feel like I'd need to study theory for a significant amount of time to even get my feet wet with AI. If you have (condensed, especially) AI resources that you think would help bridge that gap, please share! Toy-scale project ideas would also be appreciated.
Buy and work through "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It's a huge book and the de facto standard for pretty much every AI 101+ course. Some of the stuff may not interest you some might but it covers a broad range (from logic based agents to Bayesian networks). It's systematic and has excellent references and further reading notes for each chapter. The focus is not on the currently sexy "data science" asp…
The AIMA book is sort of a Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) book that focuses a lot on agents and planning. The jobs this article is talking about are really machine learning ones-- taking large volumes of data and extracting knowledge, so as to build recommender systems and such. For that, Kevin Murphy's book, "Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Approach" is without a doubt the best book out there, both in terms of explaining things from the ground up and being the most comprehensive/up-to-date source.
Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand
#20How can there be experts on a subject that doesn't yet exist?
What do you mean it doesn't exist? I work in that field, it exists.