Do You Know What Artificial Intelligence Really Is?

Learn Artificial Intelligence from credible sources - your future depends on it!

by Christian Guttmann Executive Director, Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute, Sweden

NAII Article Series #3 - Artificial Intelligence insights from the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute (www.nordicAIinstitute.com).

If someone did a 2-week online course in medicine and told you they are ready to perform a complex brain surgery on you, would you take their offer? Or imagine you boarded a Boeing 747, and hear the pilot announcing "Welcome onboard, I read a book on flying last weekend, you are my first passengers - enjoy the journey!" - would you feel comfortable staying on board? Let me guess - your answer is most likely no to both questions.

Closing the gap of "real versus fake understanding" of Artificial Intelligence

We recognise that practising medicine and flying passenger planes is complex, and requires education and real world practice acquired over decades. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is possibly even more complex - including each of the many subfields, such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Robotics, Planning, Reasoning and Distributed AI. AI has been an established area for over 70 years. I find it increasingly concerning when so many people and businesses shape their view on AI based on weak and questionable sources with little to no background in AI. This increases the chasm of "real vs. fake understanding". You can be truly misinformed and misguided about AI when you engage with weak partners that have no education and experience in the subject matter -- regrettably, I keep seeing this too many times.

With suitable partners and knowledgeable people in Artificial Intelligence, you will better understand the potential and limitations of AI, where to head, and where not to head. From a social and economic perspective, you can compete with companies globally. Several countries and companies are advancing quickly as they are rigorous in choosing their AI partners. As explained in the section below, look for partners with two qualities: strong industry expertise, and scientific/technological depth in AI (Check these qualities thoroughly! Check them at the next panel, interview, seminar and business meeting!).

The main message is this:

Choose and evaluate your sources of information about Artificial Intelligence carefully, and find the best partner in improving your understanding and exploring possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in your business and daily life. Particularly for businesses, as you need to be increasingly effective in making AI and ML part of your products and services to stay competitive, I recommend strongly: listen and learn from people that have a substantial background in the area of AI. And don't be guided by articles where an author is not an expert on the subject matter, and start questioning the depth of people's expertise in panels, seminars and interviews that are now broadcasted so widely. Reduce your risks and invest time and money based on sound and substantial advice.

Do you know what Artificial Intelligence really is and what AI means to you and your organisation?

Clearly, Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most significant driver in your business and organization today and for decades to come, and it has been a well established area for over 70 years. As a business, you need to offer quality products and services in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive landscape, it is more important than ever to find a trusted and leading AI partner that enables you to unleash the full potential of AI in your context. This partner can effectively address 1) increase sales and product quality, 2) reduce costs and 3) most importantly reduce business risks.

With AI, you can often achieve all these three outcomes concurrently. Here is a good example for AI augmentation (not automation, mind you): for identifying abnormalities in retinal images, we know that AI is able to deliver results with much greater accuracy and speed than highly trained medical experts with decades of medical education and clinical training. Medical experts can focus on the really important issues regarding health and patients, while the AI deals with "Tedious Complexities", frees up resources and delivers better and quicker outcomes to patients than could be done by human teams alone.

What are the benefits?

Find partners with deep industrial, scientific, technological, and ethical experience in AI.

Two of the most important combined qualities of a strong AI partner are as follows. First, your AI partner has decades of genuine industrial experience in designing, building and deploying AI products and services in various industry areas. This includes having understood and developed viable business models around AI and ML. These business models are challenging as they have different qualities than traditional business models in IT. It also includes to have practical experience with real-world deployment of AI, mastering complex data sets, sensory systems, robotic systems, and distributed AI models, just to name a few. It does not include knowledge and expertise in Business Intelligence or Descriptive Analytics.

Second, you want your AI and machine learning partner to have a substantial technological, scientific and ethical understanding of the state of the art in AI and machine learning. This partner creates novel and high impact IP (eg patents and publications) demonstrating that they understand your business and what is feasible today with AI and constantly co-evolving with the latest state of the art.

These partners need to have, at a minimum, teams with PhDs in Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning and a significant tech and science track record. This also includes that the AI leadership have a very good understanding about the current global AI regulation, ethics, and quality standards. To point this out more clearly: A 2-week online course on machine learning is great to have, but the knowledge obtained from these short courses just won’t cut it for your ambition to seize serious AI opportunities forward. As mentioned above, this is similar to attempting to plan and execute brain surgeries after doing a 2-week course in medicine. Noone in their right mind would proceed with such an absurd proposition.

If you interact solely with people that lack the right background and expertise, you run a substantial risk of misaligning your business and organizational objectives. An AI leader with the above two qualities can comprehensively assess the AI capabilities that you need in your business and organizational environment, and will also enhance any panel, seminar or workshop that you run or attend.

Here is a list of some of my international colleagues that are also global AI leaders with both industrial experience and substantial technological expertise:

Anand Rao, Eric Horvitz, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, Katia Walsh, Nick Jennings, Michael Wooldridge, Stuart Russell, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Wolfgang Wahlster, Simon Thompson, Nader Azarmi, Michael Georgeff, Geoff Webb (just to name a few). Be prepared to set aside an appropriate budget and focus for developing an AI strategy and execution, and involve experts early. Move confidently and quickly forward as otherwise your competitors are likely ahead of the game and secure these critical resources in AI. In some cases you may also consider to improve your internal expertise on the topic (which is sometimes possible). My recommendation: Ensure that you act confidently today with a partner in the room that gives you the right advice on AI strategy, innovation, products, and services.

Do you agree? Do you have comments? Please let us know, and reach out, also on Twitter.

Christian Guttmann (PhD) has 20+ years of expertise in leading international Artificial Intelligence projects in the intersection of research, innovation & industry. He is in committees of global AI events, e.g. Joint International Conference on AI (IJCAI). His current roles: Exec. Director, Nordic AI Institute, Prof (Adj. Assoc.), University of New South Wales, Research Fellow (Adj.), Karolinska Institute, VP & Global Head of AI at Tieto. His PhD and degrees are in AI and Psychology.

Artificial Intelligence Is Essential For Our Ecosystem

Allow me to start this article with a slightly provocative statement. If you believe that you and your organisation can have a future without Artificial Intelligence (AI), then you might be similar to those who thought that there is a future without the Internet in 1996 and without Electricity in 1882.

The main points of this article is that:

- AI is the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years.

- AI is an essential tech layer to create high quality & competitive services and products

NAII Article Series #2 - Artificial Intelligence insights from the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute (www.nordicAIinstitute.com).

by Christian Guttmann Executive Director of the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute

Just as the Internet and Electricity were becoming essential technologies at these times, Artificial Intelligence is becoming essential to our personal lives, business organisations and society at large. Without AI, your organisation will not continue to do competitive business and create meaningful products and services at scale. Similar to having an email and a website for improved communication today, you will use (directly or indirectly) AI when driving your car and receiving better health care.

Figure 1: “Artificial Intelligence: the most Disruptive Class of Technologies” -- Source Gartner (July 2017)

In line with our own observations, Figure 1 shows a few remarkable insights on the AI development by Gartner (July 2017). According to Mike J. Walker (Research Director, Gartner):

"Artificial intelligence technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years due to radical computational power, near-endless amounts of data and so on... these will enable organizations with AI technologies to solve problems that no one has ever encountered previously."

A substantial projection by Gartner is that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is identified as one of the most important technologies over the coming decades (Figure 1: AGI is the third yellow triangle from the left). This is interesting due to AGI (also referred to as Strong AI) being one of the most ambitious goals of Artificial Intelligence. An AGI system is a combined system capable of performing many complex tasks normally performed by narrow AIs. A narrow AI system is very good in performing one task (e.g. driving a car or detecting a tumor in an MRI), but they are not integrated or connected. AGI combines many of the narrow AI technologies on the right side of Figure 1, including Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Augmented Data Discoveries, and Smart robots. In short, AGI is a big idea! 

To exemplify AGI in a more practical context: you will have one AGI that can influences many aspects in your life. Your AGI will self-drive your car, monitor your health while you are in your car, and also at home and work, the AGI will have a dialogue with you, and it can cook, be aware what is in the frige, and clean up the kitchen. In the background the AGI will work with those entities that you allow it to work with, e.g. your medical facility, your bank, and your retailer. Please read here about how narrow AIs are used in health care.

Figure 2 shows several layers of technologies that have been essential to create current and future services and products. Artificial Intelligence is one of these essential business layers that more recently has been added to the stack.

Figure 2: Artificial Intelligence is an essential tech layer for developing Services and Products, just as essential as Smart Phones, Internet, Computers, and Electricity (there are more layers, but omitted here for sake of clarity).

As you are looking at Figure 2, ask yourself this question: What type of services and products could be developed today by removing any of the essential technology layers?

Only a few products and services will be advanced and you will also not be broadly roll them out. Even the development of the simplest of products often require the use of many (indirect and direct) essential technologies -- consider a very simply example: producing and selling a loaf of bread relies on advanced communication (e.g. emails and calls to suppliers and transport agencies) and basic electricity (e.g. bread baking and lights in the bakery shop). AI is increasingly used across the value chain for any product and service.

Here is a short scenario that demonstrates the readiness of a country or organisation to ensure AI is used as effective as possible with a benefit for the ecosystem and society.

Think of two countries/organisations -- country/organisation A and country/organisation B.

Country/Organisation A has a clear AI strategy: a well thought out AI policy, a strong AI infrastructure, and competency roadmap across all industry sectors. Country A's strategy aims at longer-term transformational impacts of AI on society and the world, identifies strategic priorities for near-term and long-term support of AI that address technical and societal challenges. Country A can also ensure that products and services meet international AI quality standards (such as ISOs) and international AI ethical guidelines.

Country/Organisation B has fallen behind on creating an AI strategy: it has not provided a framework for industry and it has set aside no sustainable budget funding for education and innovation. Which country is more likely to create and ensure higher living standards, longer healthier lives, and competitive and higher quality services and products?

A similar comparison can be made for companies and other organisations. Country A will of course do better in such a scenario, just as it would do better compared to a country that does not have a good Electricity or Internet infrastructure.

Here are two considerations that should be met to ensure a sustainable ecosystem and continue the creation of high quality services and products. Governments and government authorities make Artificial Intelligence a strategic priority across all sectors and create a clear AI strategy. Business can then plan effectively. Companies in key industry sectors create strong a AI leadership by assembling the brightest minds in AI, collaborate with leading research institutions and develop a strong internal AI roadmap that is executable. One important point to make: AI talent is extremely hard to come by.

What an AI strategy, priorities and leadership would entail will be discussed in a next article in this AI series. Stay informed by simply following Christian Guttmann on Linkedin and Twitter, and follow the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute. 

Christian Guttmann (PhD) is the executive director of the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute, Associate Professor (Adj.) at the University of New South Wales, and Research Fellow (Adj.) at the Karolinska Institute. Christian is also in the organisation of the joint conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). With over 20 years of experience in leading international projects on AI in Health Care and Medicine, his expertise is in the intersection of research, innovation and industrial/commercial application of AI. He has a PhD and degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Psychology.