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Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

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Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#21

Post by fit2rule »

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?

These subjects (plural) are all plagued by the same problem: definitions of terms. One mans intelligence is another mans dire stupidity, and so on and on it goes, chasing its tail.

The most value I got from this article was in the realization that, every few years or so, the academic globes align well enough (some paper de joure becomes well-read I suppose) that .. for a brief instant .. terms are defined well enough, and gain enough agreement, that progress is made .. which progress attracts more eyeballs, who tend to want to break off a chunk for themselves, and the terms begin to differ again and we have a whole new 'sub-sub-sub-' variety of the subject.

So its all about globes aligning, basically. I will now go off and implement an AI technique based entirely on the description of globes, alignment, and little chunks breaking off every now and then .. see you at the top of the AI heap in a year or ten.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#22

Post by Nvn »

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?

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. However, the field of AI has been quite established since the 1960's, and many techniques have been developed within that field as AI techniques, it's more about being accurate than about being fashionable as AI simply isn't 'just' statistics.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#24

Post by [deleted] »

raverbashing wrote: post #16
jsweojtj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#25

Post by CHY872 »

raverbashing wrote: post #10
SilasX wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

Sketchy, but in the other direction. In high school I did a project that involved a support vector machine, and over the course of this I learnt how they worked to a reasonable level of detail.

Two years later, I interviewed at a large SV company, and they asked what projects I'd been working on. I gave a description of this project (2 years prior) and my explanation was phenomenal; in order to understand SVMs two years prior (without the 'necessary' mathematical background) I needed to develop all of the intuition (up to 'is kinda a high pass filter' etc) (which you might not ordinarily do at a time-pressured university course).

The interviewer was correspondingly impressed, and the SV company gave me an internship almost directly off the back of this interview.

The kicker is that at this point, I had a rudimentary knowledge of linear algebra, and absolutely no knowledge of any other machine learning; I had no business interning in their data science team.

My point being that even as a first pass, the bookwork questions don't work fantastically. FizzBuzz is no better, but a data science alternative would have weeded me out pretty quickly.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#26

Post by jkbyc »

Nvn wrote: post #22
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?

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).

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#27

Post by aangjie »

wimagguc wrote: post #23

I wonder what all the AI is going to be used for. Is everyone working on their own Siri and recommendation engine now? (Is anyone building an AI that can come up with its own agenda?)

I think (not sure, as I don't closely follow the work) AGI people and MIRI work along the lines. (i.e: how to make sure a super AI doesn't go wrong, but comes with Objective functions beneficial to humans. https://intelligence.org/)

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#29

Post by wimagguc »

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…

+1 for the Stanford course. Great intro to AI and super easy to follow - I've done it after my uni class elsewhere, and it helped to internalise what I've learned there.

Re: Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

#30

Post by julianpye »

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 true AI departments.

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.

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