Mediaboss Marketing

Joel T. McKelvey

Joel is vice president of product and partner marketing at Sisu, the AI and ML-powered decision intelligence engine that analyzes data at machine scale. A former product manager at Google and leader of product marketing at Looker, he has an extensive background in data and analytics, including business intelligence, database and data storage, and analytics deployment models.

If youre a data analyst, youve probably been approached by company stakeholders asking you questions like: Why is revenue down? Which customers are most likely to churn? What are my top channels to acquire new customers? Why is my business losing more orders in rural areas?

Data analysts know the answers to these questions lie somewhere within their ever-growing troves of company data. However, stakeholders often dont understand the complexity inherent in answering these questions, particularly when dealing with data at cloud scale. In many cases, answers to important business questions are revealed days or weeks later, slowing down decision-making processes and affecting the businesss bottom line.

According to a recent report from McKinsey:

Many business problems still get solved through traditional approaches and take months or years to resolve. By 2025, nearly all employees [will] naturally and regularly leverage data to support their work. Rather than defaulting to solving problems by developing lengthy, sometimes multiyear, road maps, theyre empowered to ask how innovative data techniques could resolve challenges in hours, days or weeks.

As the modern data stack continues to evolve, the amount of data companies collect continues to increase. This progression in data volume, variety and velocity ushers in a new challenge: combing through all of the available data to generate business value.

A recent Gartner report revealed, The volume and velocity of data and increased complexities in decision-making have become too much for a human being to handle without assistance.

So what is the answer? Putting the power of automation in the hands of data teams.

Data teams are starting to understand that operationalized machine learning-powered analytics can increase efficiency and eliminate rote data science work. The ability to rapidly process cloud-scale data, separating signal from the noise with pre-built and operationalized artificial intelligence/machine learning tools, is a necessity for analysts in todays complicated data-rich era.

Analysts today are bottlenecked by tools that mandate the time-consuming manual analysis of data. Analysts spend days or weeks manually defining and testing hypotheses to identify the causal factors behind changing business performance. But its not the analyst who is at fault. Most analytics tools allow analysts to pivot dimensions against each other and to explore data and are very useful, but even as a seasoned analyst, youre probably only able to test one or two hypotheses per minute.

When comprehensive, accurate analysis requires testing millions or billions of hypotheses, analysts often cant respond in time to business needs. Further, analyst teams are forced by limited resources to prioritize the questions they answer, as they simply dont have the resources to support all the decision-makers who require support.

Despite the challenges of scale and complexity, most organizations are able to understand changes that are happening within their data through traditional BI tools. However, most dont realize manually tracking what happens to metrics is only the first step in the decision-making process.

Strong data-backed decision-making doesnt stop after learning business status (what is going on) because what doesnt tell us why it is happening or how to go about addressing it (what next). Understanding and communicating why and what next is the sweet spot where human input and machine automation come together to drive value from data. Effectively answering what, why and what next relies on new ways of tying together people, processes and advanced technology into a single system: decision intelligence.

People are the keystone in the puzzle of getting value from data, particularly complex cloud-scale data. Machine learning and automated delivery of important facts are also only one part of the puzzle. A human has to take these facts and explore them against what is currently happening in the business.

Putting the power of machine learning in the hands of analysts by deploying decision intelligence tools allows them to quickly, proactively and automatically iterate upon the what, why, and what next to quickly and efficiently determine how to prevent issues like customer churn or take advantage of opportunities like the best channels to acquire new customers.

Tools like the Sisu Decision Intelligence Engine help companies wherever their data is housed, whether it be a warehouse or metrics store, and answer those tough questions on what, why, and what next to optimize business performance.

If your organization is looking for a more efficient way to leverage its data to drive business impact, it is important to remember that adding a decision intelligence tool to your tech stack does not replace your BI tools or data science team. In fact, decision intelligence helps data science teams by making them more efficient and helps data scientists focus on the most relevant areas of their data.

By automating the combing through all of a companys trillions of data points to surface insights, data scientists are freed up for more strategic, less repetitive work. A decision intelligence tool is meant to supplement data efforts by performing hypothesis testing at a massive scale and at a fraction of the time of humans alone.

Decision intelligence augments existing BI and data science processes to improve efficiency and feed teams with insights that matter the most to present what, why, and what next through existing interfaces.

Decision intelligence helps organizations drive business outcomes by augmenting people with advanced analytics capabilities integrated directly into decision-making and operational processes. At Sisu, we believe that decision intelligence is what marries people, process and technology together, extracts the most value from data and drives transformational business change.

Feature image via Nappy.

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Combining Analyst and Machine Power to Drive Business Results - thenewstack.io

SEATTLE, Aug. 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The 15th annual Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Conference opens today at Seattle's Crocodile Venue. Running from August 19-22, the AGI conference event includes in-person events, live streaming, and fee-based video accessand features a diverse set of presentations from accomplished leaders in AI research.

As the AGI community convenes, it continues to promote efforts to democratize AI access and benefits. To that end, several AGI-22 presentations will officially launch DRLearneran open source project to broaden AI access and innovation by distributing AI/Machine Learning code that rivals or exceeds human intelligence across a diverse set of widely acknowledged benchmarks. (Within the AI research community these Arcade Learning Environment [ALE] benchmark tests are widely accepted as a proxy for situational intelligence.)

"Until now, tools at this level in 'Deep Reinforcement Learning' have been available only to the largest corporations and R&D labs," said project lead Chris Poulin. "But with the open-source release of the DRLearner code, we are helping democratize access to state-of-the-art machine learning tools of high-performance reinforcement learning," continued Poulin.

Ben Goertzel, Chairman of the AGI Society and AGI Conference Series, contextualized DRLearner as well-aligned with the goals of the AGI conference. "Democratizing AI has long been a central mission, both for me and for many colleagues. With AGI-22 we push this mission forward by fostering diversity in AGI architectures and approaches, beyond the narrower scope currently getting most of the focus in the Big Tech world," Goertzel said.

DRLearner project presentations include:

"Open Source Deep Reinforcement Learning" General Interest Keynote presented by Chris Poulin, Project Lead. (Journalists Note: Poulin's initial keynote is scheduled for Sunday, August 21. On this day the AGI-22 Conference is open to the general public.)

"Open Source Deep Reinforcement Learning: Deep Dive" Technical Keynote by Chris Poulin and co-principal author Phil Tabor. (Monday, August 22)

"Demo of Open Source DRLearner Tool" Code Demo by co-author Dzvinka Yarish (Monday, August 22)

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Poulin also noted the importance of managing expectations on the benefits on what DRLearner will, and will not, provide in its initial Beta release: "Fully implementing this state-of-the-art ML capability requires considerable computational power on the cloud, so we advise implementors to maintain realistic expectations regarding any deployment". DRLearner's benefits could be substantial, however, for the numerous organizations who have substantial computing budgets: analytical insights, expanded research capability, and perhaps a competitive advantage. "And for those whose professional lives are focused on AGI, this is an exciting time, as DRLearner can enhance their neural network training efforts" Poulin said.

Drawing on his working experience with both US and Ukrainian computer scientists and software developers, Poulin assembled an international team of expert developers to complete the open-source project. (See more about 'DRLearner's International Dev Team' below.)

A final noteworthy addition, is that the work of Poulin et al was advised by Adria Puigdomenech Badia of DeepMind. "DRLearner provides a great implementation of reinforcement learning algorithms, specifically including the curiosity approach that we had pioneered at DeepMind," said Puigdomenech Badia. Poulin likewise had high praise for the DeepMind's prior "Agent 57" achievement: "Agent 57 was one of a limited number of implementations (at Deep Mind) that consistently beat human benchmarks. And due to the elegant simplicity of its particular design, and help of Adria, it was the best candidate to inspire our software implementation," Poulin said.

ON ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE & THE AGI CONFERENCE GOALS

The original goal of the AI field was the construction of "thinking machines"computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Given the difficulty of that challenge, however, AI researchers in recent decades have focused instead on "narrow AI"systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. But the AGI conference series never gave up on this field's ambitious vision; and throughout its fifteen-year existence AGI has promoted the resurgence of broader research on "artificial intelligence"in the original sense of that term.

And in recent years more and more researchers have recognized the necessity and feasibility of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of "human level intelligence" and "artificial general intelligence (AGI)." AGI leaders are committed to continuing the organization's longstanding leadership roleby encouraging and exploring interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence.

Today, the AGI conference remains the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level, and ultimately beyond. By convening AI/ML researchers for presentations and discussions, AGI conferences accelerate progress toward our common general intelligence goal.

About the AGI-22 Conference: visit https://agi-conf.org/2022/

About the DRLearner Project: visit http://www.drlearner.org

About Chris Poulin: Poulin specializes in real-time prediction frameworks at Patterns and Predictions, a leading firm in predictive analytics and scalable machine learning. Poulin is also an Advisor at Singularity NET & Singularity DAO. Previously at Microsoft, Poulin was a subject-matter-expert (senior director) in machine learning and data science. He also served as Director & Principal Investigator of the Durkheim Project, a DARPA-sponsored nonprofit collaboration with the U.S. Veterans Administration. At Dartmouth College, Poulin was co-director of the Dartmouth Meta-learning Working Group, and IARPA-sponsored project focused on large-scale machine learning. He also has lectured on artificial intelligence and big data at the U.S. Naval War College. Poulin is co-author of the book Artificial Intelligence in Behavioral and Mental Health (Elsevier, 2015). Chris Poulin's LinkedIn Profile

About Ben Goertzel: Chairman of the AGI Society and AGI Conference Series, Goetzel is CEO of SingularityNET, which brings AI and blockchain together to create a decentralized open market for AIs. SingularityNET is a medium for AGI creation and emergence, a way to roll out superior AI-as-a-service to vertical markets, and a vehicle for enabling public contributions toand benefits fromartificial intelligence. In addition to AGI, Goetzel's passions include life extension biology, philosophy of mind, psi, consciousness, complex systems, improvisational music, experimental fiction, theoretical physics, and metaphysics. For general links to various of his pursuits present and past, see the Goetzel.org website. Ben Goetzel's LinkedIn Profile

About Adria Puigdomenech Badia: For the past seven years Badia has been at DeepMind, where he has specialized in the development of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Examples of this include 'Asynchronous Methods for reinforcement learning' where he and Vlad Mnih (DeepMind) proposed A3C - 'Neural episodic control'. Badia's recent projects include 'Never Give Up' and 'Agent57' algorithms, addressing one of the most challenging problems of RL: the exploration problem.

DRLearner's International Dev Team:

Chris Poulin (Project Lead-US)Phil Tabor (Co-Lead-US)Dzvinka Yarish (Ukraine)Ostap Viniavskyi (Ukraine)Oleksandr Buiko (Ukraine)Yuriy Pryyma (Ukraine)Mariana Temnyk (Ukraine)Volodymyr Karpiv (Ukraine) Mykola Maksymenko (Advisor-Ukraine)Iurii Milovanov (Advisor-Ukraine)

For media inquiries about the DRLearner project, please contact:

Gregory PetersonArchetype Communicationsgpeterson@archetypecommunications.com

For general inquiries about the AGI-22 Conference, please contact:

Jenny CorlettApril Sixsingularitynet@aprilsix.com

SOURCE drlearner.org

Read more:
At Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Conference, DRLearner is Released as Open-Source Code -- Democratizing Public Access to State-of-the-Art...

The average U.S. high school class has 30 students, according to research from theNational Council on Teacher Quality, and while each student learns in their own way, practice and specific feedback are repeatedly shown to be effective in modern classrooms. With interactive tools likepractice sets, students can receive one-to-one feedback and support without ever leaving an assignment. This saves the educators time, while also providing insight into students learning processes and patterns.

Achieving both aims at once sounds like a tall order, but adaptive learning technologies helpto do just that. Adaptive learning, a model where students are given customized resources and activities to support their unique learning needs, has been around for decades. However, applying advancing artificial intelligence technology opens up a new set of possibilities to transform the future of school into a personal learning experience.

Google for Educationrecently expanded its suite of adaptive learning tools using artificial intelligence, machine learning and user-friendly design to bring robust capabilities into the classroom.

For educators, adaptive learning technologies help boost instruction, reduce administrative burdens and deliver actionable insights into students progress. More time for planning and catch-up work would help alleviate teachers stress, according to anEdWeek Research Center survey.

For students, adaptive learning tech can deepen comprehension of instructional concepts and help them achieve their personal potential. Through interactive lessons and assignments, real-time feedback and just-in-time support, students can advance through lessons in ways that help increase the likelihood of success.

LEARN MORE:Discover how Google for Education supports students and teachers with CDWG.

When a student grasps a new concept, it can create a magical moment where they suddenly get it, says Shantanu Sinha, vice president and general manager of Google for Education. Ensuring that students get access to the right content or material at the right time is a critical part of making this happen.

By prioritizing students individual learning needs and adapting instruction accordingly, personal learning delivers various benefits, from a well-rounded learning experience to increased productivity, according toeducational publisher Pearson.

Practice setsoffer immediate, personal feedback, which is one of the best ways to keep students engaged. When students are on the right track, fast feedback helps them build confidence and celebrate small wins. When students struggle, real-time feedback helps to ensure they truly understand the material before advancing through a lesson.

Making these experiences interactive can dramatically improve the feedback loop for the student, says Sinha. The ability to see their progress and accuracy when working on an assignment, as well as helpful additional content, can guide students and help them learn.

For instance, Google for Education practice sets use AI to deliver encouragement and support the moment students need them. This includes hints, pop-up messages, video lessons and other resources.

Click the bannerbelow to find resources from CDW to digitally transform your classroom.

With practice sets, teachers can build interactive assignments from existing content, and the software automatically customizes support for students. Practice sets also grade assignments automatically, with the AI recognizing equivalent answers and identifying where students go off track. All these capabilities help teachers extend their reach and maximize their time.

Practice sets also leverage AI to provide an overview of class performance and indicate trends. If several students are having trouble with a concept, teachers can see patterns and adjust quickly without manually sorting through students results.

AI-driven technology opens new opportunities for flexible teaching and learning options. OnChromebooks, for instance, teachers can use Screencast to record video lessons. AI transcribes the spoken lessons into text, allowing students to translate those transcripts into dozens of languages.

Googles adaptive learning tools have built-in, best-in-class security and privacy to protect students and educators personal information. Transparency, multilayered safeguards and continuous updates to ensure compliance with new legislation and best practices are central to delivering adaptive instruction that is secure.

Educators can see and manage security settings on Chromebooks andGoogle Workspacefor Education. IT administrators have visibility via Google for Educations Admin Console.

LEARN MORE:How can a Google Workspace for Education audit benefit your K12 district?

Screencast onChrome OSand practice sets inGoogle Classroomare Googles newest offerings in adaptive learning. Other useful tools include:

As adaptive learning technology continues to evolve, it has the potential to transform the learning experience and help teachers better meet students where they are in the learning journey. When the right technology is applied to teaching and learning, teachers and students can go further, faster.

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Google's Adaptive Learning Technologies Help Amplify Educators' Instruction - EdTech Magazine: Focus on K-12

Mon, Aug 22nd 2022 11:20 am

New book co-written by UB philosopher claims AI will never rule the world

AI that would match the general intelligence of humans is impossible, says SUNY Distinguished Professor Barry Smith

By the University at Buffalo

Elon Musk in 2020 said that artificial intelligence (AI) within five years would surpass human intelligence on its way to becoming an immortal dictator over humanity. But a new book co-written by a University at Buffalo philosophy professor argues that wont happen not by 2025, not ever!

Barry Smith, Ph.D., SUNY Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy in UBs College of Arts and Sciences, and Jobst Landgrebe, Ph.D., founder of Cognotekt, a German AI company, have co-authored Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.

Their book presents a powerful argument against the possibility of engineering machines that can surpass human intelligence. Machine learning and all other working software applications the proud accomplishments of those involved in AI research are for Smith and Landgrebe far from anything resembling the capacity of humans. Further, they argue that any incremental progress thats unfolding in the field of AI research will in practical terms bring it no closer to the full functioning possibility of the human brain.

Smith and Landgrebe offer a critical examination of AIs unjustifiable projections, such as machines detaching themselves from humanity, self-replicating, and becoming full ethical agents. There cannot be a machine will, they say. Every single AI application rests on the intentions of human beings including intentions to produce random outputs. This means the Singularity, a point when AI becomes uncontrollable and irreversible (like a Skynet moment from the Terminator movie franchise) is not going to occur. Wild claims to the contrary serve only to inflate AIs potential and distort public understanding of the technologys nature, possibilities and limits.

Reaching across the borders of several scientific disciplines, Smith and Landgrebe argue that the idea of a general artificial intelligence (AGI) the ability of computers to emulate and go beyond the general intelligence of humans rests on fundamental mathematical impossibilities that are analogous in physics to the impossibility of building a perpetual motion machine. AI that would match the general intelligence of humans is impossible because of the mathematical limits on what can be modeled and is computable. These limits are accepted by practically everyone working in the field; yet they have thus far failed to appreciate their consequences for what an AI can achieve.

To overcome these barriers would require a revolution in mathematics that would be of greater significance than the invention of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz more than 350 years ago, says Smith, one of the worlds most cited contemporary philosophers. We are not holding our breath.

Landgrebe points out that, As can be verified by talking to mathematicians and physicists working at the limits of their respective disciplines, there is nothing even on the horizon which would suggest that a revolution of this sort might one day be achievable. Mathematics cannot fully model the behaviors of complex systems like the human organism, he says.

AI has many highly impressive success stories, and considerable funding has been dedicated toward advancing its frontier beyond the achievements in narrow, well-defined fields such as text translation and image recognition. Much of the investment to push the technology forward into areas requiring the machine counterpart of general intelligence may, the authors say, be money down the drain.

The text generator GPT-3 has shown itself capable of producing different sorts of convincing outputs across many divergent fields, Smith says. Unfortunately, its users soon recognize that mixed in with these outputs there are also embarrassing errors, so that the convincing outputs themselves began to appear as nothing more than clever parlor tricks.

AIs role in sequencing the human genome led to suggestions for how it might help find cures for many human diseases; yet, after 20 years of additional research (in which both Smith and Landgrebe have participated), little has been produced to support optimism of this sort.

In certain completely rule-determined confined settings, machine learning can be used to create algorithms that outperform humans, Smith says. But this does not mean that they can discover the rules governing just any activity taking place in an open environment, which is what the human brain achieves every day.

Technology skeptics do not, of course, have a perfect record. Theyve been wrong in regard to breakthroughs ranging from space flight to nanotechnology. But Smith and Landgrebe say their arguments are based on the mathematical implications of the theory of complex systems. For mathematical reasons, AI cannot mimic the way the human brain functions. In fact, the authors say that its impossible to engineer a machine that would rival the cognitive performance of a crow.

An AGI is impossible, says Smith. As our book shows, there can be no general artificial intelligence because it is beyond the boundary of what is even in principle achievable by means of a machine.

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Terminator? Skynet? No way. Machines will never rule the world, according to book by UB philosopher - Niagara Frontier Publications

Advanced computer programs influence, and can even dictate, meaningful parts of our lives. Think of streaming services, credit scores, facial recognition software.

As this technology becomes more sophisticated and more pervasive, its important to understand the basic terminology.

People often use algorithm, machine learning and artificial intelligence interchangeably. There is some overlap, but theyre not the same things.

We decided to call up a few experts to help us get a firm grasp on these concepts, starting with a basic definition of algorithm. The following is an edited transcript of the episode.

Melanie Mitchell, Davis professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, offered a simple explanation of a computer algorithm.

An algorithm is a set of steps for solving a problem or accomplishing a goal, she said.

The next step up is machine learning, which uses algorithms.

Rather than a person programming in the rules, the system itself has learned, Mitchell said.

For example, speech recognition software, which uses data to learn which sounds combine to become words and sentences. And this kind of machine learning is a key component of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is basically capabilities of computers to mimic human cognitive functions, said Anjana Susarla, who teaches responsible AI at Michigan State Universitys Broad College of Business.

She said we should think of AI as an umbrella term.

AI is much more broader, all-encompassing, compared to only machine learning or algorithms, Susarla said.

Thats why you might hear AI as a loose description for a range of things that show some level of intelligence. Like software that examines the photos on your phone to sort out the ones with cats to advanced spelunking robots that explore caves.

Heres another way to think of the differences among these tools: cooking.

Bethany Edmunds, professor and director of computing programs at Northeastern University, compares it to cooking.

She says an algorithm is basically a recipe step-by-step instructions on how to prepare something to solve the problem of being hungry.

If you took the machine learning approach, you would show a computer the ingredients you have and what you want for the end result. Lets say, a cake.

So maybe it would take every combination of every type of food and put them all together to try and replicate the cake that was provided for it, she said.

AI would turn the whole problem of being hungry over to the computer program, determining or even buying ingredients, choosing a recipe or creating a new one. Just like a human would.

So why do these distinctions matter? Well, for one thing, these tools sometimes produce results with biased outcomes.

Its really important to be able to articulate what those concerns are, Edmunds said. So that you can really dissect where the problem is and how we go about solving it.

Because algorithms, machine learning and AI are pretty much baked into our lives at this point.

Columbia Universitys engineering school has a further explanation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and it lists other tools besides machine learning that can be part of AI. Like deep learning, neural networks, computer vision and natural language processing.

Over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they point out that machine learning and AI are often used interchangeably because these days, most AI includes some amount of machine learning. A piece from MITs Sloan School of Management also gets into the different subcategories of machine learning. Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement, like trial and error with kind of digital rewards. For example, teaching an autonomous vehicle to drive by letting the system know when it made the right decision like not hitting a pedestrian, for instance.

That piece also points to a 2020 survey from Deloitte, which found that 67% of companies are already using machine learning, and 97% were planning to in the future.

IBM has a helpful graphic to explain the relationship among AI, machine learning, neural networks and deep learning, presenting them as Russian nesting dolls with the broad category of AI as the biggest one.

And finally, with so many businesses using these tools, the Federal Trade Commission has a blog laying out some of the consumer risks associated with AI and the agencys expectations of how companies should deploy it.

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The ABCs of AI, algorithms and machine learning - Marketplace