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Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

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Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#51

Post by etiam »

zerr wrote: post #43
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?

Fully agree. I mostly lost interest in AI because modern AI goes toward statistics. Unfortunately, symbolic AI doesn't get much traction nowadays, and that is understandable.

Did you take notice of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432601 a while ago?

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#52

Post by walshemj »

est wrote: post #49
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?

I often heard the Big Data guys hype that there's no sampling in Big Data, you have the whole data, so it's not exactly statistics.

from my distant memory if you sample size is the pollution its still statistics

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#53

Post by afshin »

roel_v wrote: post #50
nerdy wrote: post #2

AI 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.

'AI' is not programming, it's mathematics (well the current 'flavor' of statistics-based AI, that is - the 1980's style AI people I used to work with were philosophers, legal scholars and the like). Anyway, there is no 'bridging the gap' - you need to start from a good foundation of statistics (and the 'prerequisites' - algebra, calculus, linear algebra) and in the end, the technicalities of the software and the theo…

This is exactly my experience as well. I'm an alright programmer, but it is insufficient, because machine learning and AI are a table resting on four legs: linear algebra, calculus, statistics, and programming. I've also found myself going back to build up those foundations.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#54

Post by hans_mueller »

walshemj wrote: post #52
est wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often heard the Big Data guys hype that there's no sampling in Big Data, you have the whole data, so it's not exactly statistics.

from my distant memory if you sample size is the pollution its still statistics

you mean Pig Data?

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#55

Post by musername »

kriro wrote: post #18
nerdy wrote: post #2

AI 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…

reading the book still requires a significant amount of time

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#56

Post by jules »

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?

There is quite a big difference between statistics and machine learning. A lot of the most successful machine learning algorithms do not have a statistical grounding or did not when they were invented. E.g. neural networks, SVM, low rank matrix approximation, k-means, decision trees/forests. Statistics is one of the tools in the machine learning toolbox.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#58

Post by blumkvist »

myrryr wrote: post #20
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #5

How 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.

What do you mean it exists? How do you definite AI? Can your project reason with you? Or is it simply an Input-Output type of program? Just because you use natural language with it instead of punch cards doesn't mean it is intelligent.

People tried to do AI in the 60s to 90s era. It is dubbed symbolic AI. It didn't work out. A good chance that it never will. Today machine learning algos and a bunch of automated statistics is called "Artificial Intelligence". It's not intelligence at all. Intelligence implies something more than I/O computation.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#59

Post by mjw »

est wrote: post #49
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?

I often heard the Big Data guys hype that there's no sampling in Big Data, you have the whole data, so it's not exactly statistics.

I've heard this too and it's a great way to demonstrate you don't really know what statistics is :)

Statistics is not (just) opinion polling, there's a lot more to it than estimating observable properties of a population.

If you're trying to make decisions, predictions or estimates which involve any uncertainty at all (and in my experience big data almost always is), then it's definitely within the purview of statistics even if you have data for the whole population.

Sources of uncertainty include trying to say anything at all about the future (do you have data on the future population? no didn't think so...), trying to make predictions which generalise to new data in general, trying to uncover underlying trends or patterns behind the data you see which aren't directly or fully observed.

Often people expect big data to be able to answer big numbers of questions, estimate big numbers of quantities, or fit big, powerful predictive models with lots of parameters. In these cases statistics can be particularly important to avoid reporting false positives and to make sure you can quantify how certain you are about your results and your predictions. (Amongst other reasons).

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> The other driver is business-driven. And this is where management demands 'AI experts', when what they really want is data-miners. And in many cases management prides themselves on 'AI algorithms', but we know that this is a term for anything that gets the results that management wants and may be far from intelligent and in most corporate cases a bunch of SQL scripts.

I wonder if this is a case where managers end up believing their own bullshit. "AI driven" is basically the marketing-speak for "a bunch of SQL scripts".

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