Tech Talks: Lead AI Scientist Bin Shao on Artificial Intelligence
Welcome to eSimplicity’s Tech Talks blog series! Tech Talks is a series launched by eSimplicity’s technical writing interns to discuss various topics within the tech industry. From personal experiences within the company to emergent innovative technologies, eSimplicity aims to gauge diverse perspectives and shed light on engaging topics within the tech sector!
In a recent interview, eSimplicity’s Lead AI Scientist Bin Shao shared with us his thoughts on the prominence of artificial intelligence, as well as its place in the future. Bin has over 20 years of professional experience in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and cybersecurity. His perspective on artificial intelligence sheds light on how businesses can utilize new technology to prevent and solve problems.
When asked what artificial intelligence means to him, Bin referenced Stuart Russell’s and Peter Norvig’s book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Norvig classified AI into four categories with corresponding definitions: thinking humanly, thinking rationally, acting humanly and acting rationally. These categories break down AI’s capability to enable human traits including thinking, problem solving, learning and reasoning.
“To me (Bin), AI is a way to extend human recognition and reasoning process with creativity, that a computer program is no longer a static code sequence but rather a dynamic process to absorb and adapt to the environment or tasks.”
In recent years, AI has become increasingly prominent. According to Bin, AI is now more accessible than ever before due to a combination of academic advances and hardware acceleration. In his words, “AI not only solves known issues, but also discovers opportunities that humans do not anticipate or predict.”
AI is a broader, catch-all term that includes other disciplines such as machine learning, neural networks, robotics, expert systems, evolutionary computation and more. Bin notes that “some tasks that are quite challenging for humans can be effectively solved by AI algorithms. In practice, AI is used everywhere in the industry; in fact, it is the enabler for future technological advances such as autonomous vehicles and auto translation.”
When looking towards the future, business automation is a cornerstone of the digital transformation. AI drives business automation forward, thus creating more room for innovation. Bin lists a few examples including: “applying AI to detect fraud and speed up medical research, as well as automating and optimizing recruitment processes.”
eSimplicity applies the latest technology such as deep learning, deep reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning in cloud environments to tackle challenging problems. For example, Bin shares how “we have prototyped a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model that has achieved more than 150% returns in terms of fraud investigations.” He concludes that “AI not only detects anomalies and makes predictions; it is also capable of interpreting models and explaining model importance, this way our clients can combine human expertise and AI recommendations to make better decisions.”
In the future, Bin plans to continue implementing AI technology in his work to solve real world problems.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to Bin Shao for taking the time to share his thoughts and expertise on the capabilities of artificial intelligence. His insight forecasts the future success of AI implementation due to its ability to improve on human processes.
Bin’s Favorite Quotes:
Thinking humanly: “The exciting new effort to make computers think . . . machines with minds, in the full and literal sense.” (Haugeland, 1985)
Thinking rationally: “The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models.”
(Charniak and McDermott, 1985)
Acting humanly: “The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil, 1990)
Acting rationally: “Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents.” (Poole et al., 1998)
Works Cited:
Russell, Stuart J, and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1995. Print.
