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Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

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Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#31

Post by tansey »

Daishiman wrote: post #4

This 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?

Perhaps more precisely, they're "statistical engineering" jobs. A machine learning PhD can derive an algorithm and provide you with a reassuring bound or guarantee regarding performance in terms of runtime, convergence, etc. They have to be able to understand not just the volume of the data but also how to trade off accuracy for speed, and myriad other constraints.

IMO, the "data science" label is too broad to properly differentiate statistical engineers. A fine definition for a data scientist is someone who runs experiments on user/company data and can assess the results. It's important work, but you don't need a PhD in stats or ML to do basic hypothesis testing.

You could simply call them "machine learning" experts, but that could be a bit too academic. People who are focused narrowly on theory or niche areas may be experts in ML, but they may also never do anything outside of running matlab simulations. It's unlikely that those people will make very good statistical engineers since they may never have had to think about the challenges involved in scaling algorithms.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#32

Post by Nvn »

jkbyc wrote: post #26
Nvn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in the article, AI is the broader field that encompasses Machine Learning, and to a large extent also Data science (and Computer vision, NLP, Pattern recognition, etc.). And while data science might utilize a lot of statistical techniques, it is a huge stretch to consider the whole AI field to be 'statistics'. In general, AI borrows many more techniques from mathematics than it does from statistics. Howe…

I believe the OP's point is that the demand is for applied statisticians and not for AI experts (in the sense exactly as defined by you).

The article is about tech firms and universities stocking up on research centers of AI experts, with the claim in its title that there is a high demand for those AI experts.

There might also be a demand for applied statisticians, but that doesn't make AI experts statisticians. I understand the confusion, as the term AI is often misused, but when you see the names mentioned in the article it's clear they're talking about actual AI researchers.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#34

Post by netcan »

julianpye wrote: post #30

This trend is in most companies business-driven, in others it is technical-driven. Few companies have technical leadership that can manage true AI resources. If you remember the ML courses from Uni and experts in that field, you can imagine why. In many universities AI departments are assigned to schools of psychology and philosophy. Only companies with a deep engineering culture as those mentioned here can build up…

What's the potential path forward (say projecting 10 years ahead) from the current growth in demand for data mining centric people?

I mean people go and study in response to demand. They learn data mining and AI at Universities. I think it's often people with backgrounds or aptitude in maths. What will the 22 year old with an aptitude for maths that is learning R, SQL, AI-for-business and such be doing in 10 years?

I don't know if the starting point matters much. "Results Driven," even if its optimising inventory or making ad purchasing decisions or data mining old DBs is not a bad place to "search" for advancements. Not everything needs to be fundamental research.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#35

Post by [deleted] »

netcan wrote: post #34
julianpye wrote: post #30

This trend is in most companies business-driven, in others it is technical-driven. Few companies have technical leadership that can manage true AI resources. If you remember the ML courses from Uni and experts in that field, you can imagine why. In many universities AI departments are assigned to schools of psychology and philosophy. Only companies with a deep engineering culture as those mentioned here can build up…

What's the potential path forward (say projecting 10 years ahead) from the current growth in demand for data mining centric people? I mean people go and study in response to demand. They learn data mining and AI at Universities. I think it's often people with backgrounds or aptitude in maths. What will the 22 year old with an aptitude for maths that is learning R, SQL, AI-for-business and such be doing in 10 years? I…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#37

Post by kriro »

tansey wrote: post #19
kriro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expl…

There's still quite a bit of material on Bayesian networks (with the dreadfull dentist example :D), neural networks and support vector machines but overall you're right the focus is on agents. The relevant chapters are great staring points though and as always filled with great reference material for further reading.

+ I'm pretty sure if you apply for an AI job somewhere and it's labaled AI and not "data science" they'll expect that you know the material in AIAMA.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#38

Post by aajtechmail »

julianpye wrote: post #30

This trend is in most companies business-driven, in others it is technical-driven. Few companies have technical leadership that can manage true AI resources. If you remember the ML courses from Uni and experts in that field, you can imagine why. In many universities AI departments are assigned to schools of psychology and philosophy. Only companies with a deep engineering culture as those mentioned here can build up…

YO

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#39

Post by jacquesm »

SilasX wrote: post #8
raverbashing wrote: post #3

However, 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

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?

The Chinese room?

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#40

Post by kriro »

rifung wrote: post #7
raverbashing wrote: post #3

However, 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.

I have no idea how hiring in this field works but I'd expect a data scientist to have a pretty good (algorithmic) programming background in this day and age. You pretty much have to "play with the data" and get a good intuition for it when it comes to gigantic data sets and programming is how you accomplish that.

Or in other words...I'd be skeptical if a candidate hadn't learned programming on their own even if it wasn't required because it's pretty much impossible to get any practical experience otherwise.

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