Tuesday, 27 June 2017

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Will AI/ML intelligence surpass humans? Part Seven by Dr. RGS Asthana Senior Member IEEE

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence     (AI):  Will AI/ML intelligence surpass humans? Part Seven

by
Dr. RGS Asthana
Senior Member IEEE

Figure 1: Playing games with Robot [31]
Summary
Will ML/AI surpass human intelligence in near future is the question, we wish to discuss here.  There is a strong possibility that ML/AI will replace lot of routine jobs.  Further ML and AI may not generate any solid negative outcome like extinction of humanity as feared by many known people in today’s scenario. Use of AI may not result in the replacement of humans for some time to come but it will happen sooner than expected.
There is a strong possibility that AutoML tech from Google and technologies from Facebook and Microsoft with or without Human-in-the-loop or HITL may prosper in near future. AutoML is without HITL tech and is good for reproduction of itself.  In fact, AI is redefined with introduction of AutoML.  Further, use of ML/AI in retail is a positive outcome.  The ultimate outcome is obtained by the fact that who uses this tech and for what purpose. 
Graceful degradation of performance is another jointly developed technology from Microsoft and CrowdFlower where HITL is used till AI is 100% confident of the outcome. But ultimately it will be AI without HITL as we can see on date. 
The only drawback today is that ML/AI using ANN based solutions are unable to explain why they have arrived at a particular decision.  Such an explanation justifying the outcome is something considered necessary for wide scale adoption of AI in certain industries like Healthcare where ethics must be followed. Further, this is a subject of research and may take time to resolve.
Keywords
Prelude
Computer or any automation is hardware and it becomes general purpose only by running software as then it shows functionality provided in the software.  Similarly, ML, Deep Learning, big data and AI Technologies produce only software with special functionality which when run on hardware, makes it general purpose.  Deep learning runs well on parallel processing machine but today one can put a USD 1000 GPU based card on computer and make it suitable for deep learning.  Deep learning can solve voice recognition, computer vision, machine translation and many other problems by tuning ANN [2] provided one has enough training data. One question is that can hardware change shape as situations require?   The answer is yes but can it reproduce itself and that too in a different shape as required in a given scenario is a question mark. You can produce hardware in different shapes and use it in specific scenarios.  This aspect, however, we will not discuss in this paper. 
The other question is that can software be general purpose with human in the loop (HITL) or without HITL? The answer to this question is yes in both cases.  We will discuss this aspect further in this paper. It is assumed that HITL provides a control to ensure that everything is always in control and any decision arrived by ML where confidence level is less than 100% is passed on to human to satisfy many ethical issues too.  But do we really need to worry while developing AI based systems and let research in AI take its course. 
20 years ago… “Chess World champion - Garry Kasparov - lost to computer referred to as,”IBM Deep Blue”.  As per the champion [31], “Machines have a decisive advantage because, you may call, they have steady hand. Humans are vulnerable because we cannot keep the similar vigilance required to play with the machines, even if we understand chess as well as machines do, even if we can survive the brute force of calculation. At the end of the day, the pressure on the human player facing the machine is simply unbearable”. Now the expertise of IBM machine can be put in robot (see figure 1).  In simple words, AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. AI is a broader concept of advanced computer intelligence on par with the smartest human minds ever.  CEO of CrowdFlower [28, 29] – which mainly solves data problems relevant to cancer research to image moderation to sentiment analysis, combining the best of human and machine intelligence to collect, clean, and label data, no matter its size or complexity - presented an interesting definition of AI through the following equation:
AI = TD + ML + HITL, i.e.
Artificial Intelligence = Training Data + ML + Human in the Loop.
Knowledge is delivered to the machine or AI Automation through repeated explanations; the ML algorithms are so designed as to give the machine extraordinary cognitive ability. With these inputs the machine or AI Automation simply learns, understands and predicts. As AI/ML grows in power, it is likely to surpass human intelligence sooner than expected.  
The rule for maintaining good ratio of training and test data is amid 65:35 to 80:20.
AI = (Tr+te) D + ML + HITL, where Tr is training and Te is test data.
Other golden rule is that never mix training and test data.  The combination of Big Data and ML/AI techniques play an interesting and decisive role in analyzing and handling enormous amount of data (which medical fraternity possesses) and deriving meaningful and more accurate results. 
Google and ML/AI
At Google’s I/O conference held at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, California from May 17 to 19, 2017, the company put up its plans in the field of AI. Microsoft is the leader of cloud computing, but recent developments have prompted Google’s CEO to see ML/AI as an economic opportunity and perhaps a challenge. The announcement of second generation cloud tensor processing units (TPU) is making cloud computing  and open source ML framework not only faster but also well-organized as compared to generation one. The use of ML enables rapid development and promises better Google’s future in the AI sector, putting the company at the frontline of the ML area [14].
Figure 2: A graph with edges colored to illustrate path H-A-B closed (green), path or walk with a repeated vertex B-D-E-F-D-C-B (blue) and a cycle with no repeated edge or vertex H-D-G-H (red): [16]
Long short-term memory (LSTM) [15] (see figure 2) is recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture.  RNN is a class of artificial neural network [2] where connections between units form a directed cycle [16] which is defined by Wikipedia as follows:
“A simple cycle may be defined either as a closed walk with no repetitions of vertices and edges allowed, other than the repetition of the starting and ending vertex, or as the set of edges in such a walk. The two definitions are equivalent in directed graphs, where simple cycles are also called directed cycles: the cyclic sequence of vertices and edges in a walk is completely determined by the set of edges that it uses. In undirected graphs the set of edges of a cycle can be traversed by a walk in either of two directions, giving two possible directed cycles for every undirected cycle”.  A LSTM network with enough network units can compute anything a computer can
do provided it has the proper weight matrix which, in fact, is its program.  Figure 3 shows a typical RNN [17].
Modern AI systems are outpacing the intellectual capabilities of their creators in a wide variety of fields. From beating grandmaster Go players to outguessing cardiac surgeons, lip reading to audio transcription, neural networks and machine learning have already surpassed humans [1-5, 6-10] -- and that list is only going to grow longer with time.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham in the UK [10] recently learned a ML algorithm capable of predicting a patient's tendency for a heart attack or stroke better than both the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines.
Figure 3: A typical RNN [17]: where BTSXVPE at the bottom of the figure denotes the input example and CONTEXT UNIT gives the output of the previous moment. So RNNs have two sources of input, the present and the recent past, which combine to form a response to new data.     The accuracy in RNN is achieved by reducing the back propagation of error through gradient descent.
Google's AphaGo AI powered system has defeated the world's best human players [19] in recent years.  Facebook’s AI [20] can predict how those blocks in board games will fall just as well as people can. 
Google’s [21] new Smart Reply feature uses ANNs [2] to come up with appropriate replies to email messages. Google says 10% of Inbox replies on the mobile app use this feature.  A new approach to A.I. referred to an “AutoML” for “auto-machine learning,” [23] it lets one AI to become the designer of another, and direct its development without any human intervention.  It sounds like a situation which can give the right environment for the evolution of the singularity [24] - as defined in futurist Ray Kurzweil's book - but it’s actually Google’s way to place incredible power of ML in the hands of humans.
Definition of Singularity:
'A future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.'
Figure 4:   Pepper robots at an insurance company’s Taipei branch, Taiwan
It's commonly understood to be a coming convergence between humans or machines.  The Google’s self-driving cars, IBM Watson are a few known examples of an AI system. Designers say they envisage the ML a range of usages, from working on assembly lines to care-giving [31]. Intel has also put their hat in AI market [33] and may compete mainly with IBM Watson [12]. Taiwan has already introduced a troop of mini-robots going by the name of "Pepper" [34] into workplaces (see Figure 4). A few areas where AI/ML is playing an interesting role are:
·         Natural Language Processing NLP which helps in designing very interactive and natural UIs
·         Knowledge representation to store information  
·         Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw conclusions.
·         Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.
Google’s AutoML Technology [22]
Strategy of AutoML – a project from the company’s Google Brain AI research group [39] is to exploit ANNs to design other neural networks without HITL   Google allows programs to edit the code of other programs which is well within the definition of ML. AutoML is a more full-featured version of what normal “ML” was always supposed to be.
As per CEO of Google, “We hope AutoML will take ability that a few Ph.D.s have today and will make it possible in three to five years for hundreds of thousands of developers to design new neural nets for their particular needs.”
To solve a problem with ML, a human expert provides a starting neural network. AutoML, however, tries and tests many neural network architectures and finds appropriate one to solve the given problem by computing scores obtained by each network against the goal. The main idea is to find the best mathematical approach to find a perfect solution for the problem without the need of any human involvement. The final ANN need not use any of the algorithms found so far but instead can include individual elements derived from multiple architectures it has tested so far, thus, AutoML approach is able to design more efficient neural nets.    

Figure 5: Network developed by Google Engineers (on the left) and the one suggested by AutoML (on the right) [22]
To classify images in a large database, AutoML advised a better network (see right picture in figure 5) though it was similar but slightly superior to the one designed by Google’s engineers as shown in the picture on left side of figure 5).   
Barriers to adoption of Machine Learning
ML is being adopted by many key companies of today viz. the Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and Uber who have massive resources and are implementing projects like self-driving cars, AI assistants and autonomous drones.  For ML to become commercially viable within mainstream businesses, we needed to address two main barriers to adoption.
Lack of High Quality Customized Training Data
ML Models need training and good test data.  The results become better if there is more and more of training and test data.  Without training and test data the model cannot learn.  It’s like buying a car and there are no gas stations.  This is supervised learning as human is in loop.
ML Models Failing Safely
So how can companies cross this deadlock?  The solution is in keeping HITL where the model predicts where it’s confident but human predicts when it’s unsure.  ML without HITL is only possible when model has 100% confidence lavel.  HITL will ensure that there are no bad outcomes.  
Machine Learning without HITL may lead to bad outcomes
Let’s take as an example classification of support tickets and to begin with it is 100% human.  The ML ability to convert TrD into a predictive model is applied to the new inputs in this case model is further trained on TeD, i.e., new support tickets with unstructured text that model has not seen so far.  You want the ML model to apply its predictive power to create new outputs – in this case the “severity level” label. So HITL can accept or reject the prediction based on the Machine’s own assessment of its confidence level.  For example, if a support ticket has words and phrases which haven’t been seen in the training data, or seen very infrequently, then the Machine will objectively assess its own confidence level as being low for that particular prediction.
Then we introduce ML model and caters for only the high confident cases which is 10-20% of the volume but humans still handle the majority because the model not trained fully and is learning.  HITL is the critical third component of commercially viable AI.  If the ML model is not confident in its prediction it can route it to humans to review and answer. Over time the model is trained on new training and test data and it slowly becomes ready not only for commercial exploitation but also precise and also sure, this in turn increases work done by the model and reduces work done by human.  Additionally, the volume of work that can be handled by this semi-automated process dramatically increases.  
The model is

AI = (Tr + Te) D + ML + HITL (To oversee the performance and outcomes)

Microsoft has launched the joint solution with “CrowdFlower and AI powered by Microsoft Azure Machine Learning” to leverage the joint strength of both companies.
Digital Transformation of General Electric (GE) [36]
GE came in existence in 1897 and established itself as an industrial and consumer products and financial services firm.  In the few past years, GE has become a “digital industrial” company with a strong focus on the “Industrial Internet”. In 2016, it has $7 billion in software sales.  GE has achieved this feet by exploiting AI and ML powered by Big Data.
GE’s software Predix [38] processes continuous data acquired using scalable technologies on the cloud. It delivers actionable insight into assets and operations, revealing new business opportunities as it uses Big Data technology to handle data that is being captured by its industrial device and interprets this data using AI and analytics. It has helped GE in becoming a digital company in a big way.    
Retail business and AI
The online stores collect [32] almost all useful info about their customers.  The brick-and-mortar store sales are slowly declining. However, use of cameras and AI tools by big retailers like Wal-Mart to identify shoplifters are being used to gather the same kind of data in physical stores also.  Retailers are using big data and computer vision technologies along with AI to help shoppers find what they need. 
The new point-of-sale (POS) system developed by a company called Target will be able to search real-time inventory across the organization, arrange for shipping, and take payment from the customer. It will record all credit card data. The POS is expected to be in all key stores in U.S. by the end of the year. Brick-and-mortar stores may also use technology to get useful data about customers from their social profiles and send customers custom-made offers. At REX, a real estate service platform, the complex problem seems deceptively simple at first glance.
Realtors [37] face regularly problem of qualifying leads. As the seriousness, commitment and timeframe when sellers start thinking about putting their home on the market to the time they actually do varies substantially and this can lead to wasted time and lost sales.  These are situations where ML/AI algorithms help by analyzing data and giving guidance on qualifying leads.
Healthcare [43]
In the year 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York applied deep learning to the hospital’s vast patient records database. This data had hundreds of variables on. The resulting program was named deep Patient.  The 700,000 patient data was used for training and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting diseases. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. This model gave good results but there is no way to know how they work.  It appears that deep patient is able to correctly predict the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia but new tool offers no clue as to how it does this.  
An MIT professor at age of 43 years was diagnosed breast cancer but cutting-edge statistical and ML/AI methods were not being used to help with oncological research or to guide patient treatment. After undergoing cancer treatment it is felt that AI has huge potential to revolutionize medicine, provided one analyzes raw imaging data, pathology data, etc. and ML/AI system is able to give reason for its arriving at a particular conclusion.
The most significant application of AI and ML in genetics understands how DNA impacts life and also what influences life and biology; we need to first understand the language that is DNA. This is where ML algorithms play a big role and big players, such as; Google’s Deep Mind [11] and IBM’s Watson [12] are in the fray.  Technologies like big data detect patterns from enormous amounts of data (e.g. patient records, clinical notes, diagnostic images, treatment plans).
Deep Genomics [44] is developing the capability to interpret DNA by creating a system that predicts the molecular effects of genetic variation. Their database is able to explain how hundreds of millions of genetic variations can impact a genetic code. This will provide personalized insights to individuals based on their   biological dispositions. This trend is indicative of a new era of “personalized genetics,” whereby individuals are able to take full control of their health through access to unprecedented information about their own bodies.  As is the case with any application of AI/ML and also Big Data, the technology must have access to vast amounts of data in order to better curate lifestyle changes for individuals.  
Most diseases are far more than just a simple gene mutation. Although the healthcare system generated enormous amounts of (unstructured) data—which is gradually refining and improving in quality—but we did not possess the necessary hardware and software in place to investigate it and produce telling results.
Disease diagnosis involves a number of factors, like the texture of a patient’s skin to the amount of sugar level in his blood.  So far, we have worked on symptomatic detection, e.g. if one has a fever and stuffy nose, he is diagnosed most likely to have the flu.  Systems can now predict the molecular effects of genetic variation [44], opening a new and exciting path to discovery for disease diagnostics and therapies.
Way forward
Deep learning is evolving as a way to pull intelligence out of Big Data to an extent well beyond a human brain can do or even imagine. Google and Facebook personalize search results and Facebook pages respectively on the fly with algorithmic approach and without HITL. Thus, Google is able to show different search results to people for the same query. This may have ethical issues but we are not discussing it in this article.
Google and Facebook have become true AI based companies and together are introducing ML/AI in almost all their products and that too without HITL.   These companies get 85% share of incremental digital ad revenue and have automated video personalization process by using ML/AI algorithms [42]. Video will become crucial to businesses as we move forward and as per Cisco - 82% of all web traffic will be video by 2020 - so anyone not exploiting video is likely to lose on ad revenue in the long run. Facebook [41] is also attempting to use AI to help it remove every terrorist message and propaganda from its platform without HITL.
It is assumed that reader has seen references [1-5, 7-12]. The Microsoft [25] announced recently a new version of Cognitive Toolkit (previously known as CNTK) which has lot of new features, including beta support for Keras [35] - an open source neural network library written in Python  and used extensively in TensorFlow and Theano - a deep learning library. This update will allow data scientists to port their computer programs among backends of choice.  Developers can now play with ML based systems as now they have option to choose from wide variety of tools. With AutoML technology we can revisit and define AI through the following equation:
AI = (Tr + Te) D + ML, i.e.
Artificial Intelligence = (Training + Test) Data + ML   i.e., now no human is needed in the loop.

To make sure that ML models fail safely, a human is kept in Loop and till AI system is 100% confident all doubtful decisions are vetted by the human.  Human‘s role will be close to zero when AI system becomes 100% confident even in the Microsoft’s approach which then becomes in a way close to AutoML model. No one really knows [43] how the most advanced deep learning ML/AI algorithms do what they do and nor the AI algorithms can give any reasoning how and why they arrived at a particular decision. That could be a problem and also area of further research.

AI is an add on technology so it can only displace human but can’t replace them [45]. The ML algorithms are so designed as to give the machine extraordinary cognitive ability including ability to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention as human brain does. With these inputs the machine or AI Automation simply learns, understands and predicts.
  Figure 6: shows milestones of AI replacing jobs from Year 2016 [26]
As per Figure 6, most of human tasks will be substituted by AI based systems in next 120 years. As per the figure, teachers may need to be ready for machine-written essays by 2026 and truck drivers may be replaced by 2027. AI is likely to surpass human capabilities in retail by 2031.  AI will be capable of writing a best-seller by 2049, and perform a surgeon's work by 2053.
The outcomes shown in figure 6 are "possible but as on date prospects of ML/AI [27] look both exciting and scary as it is likely to affect our careers.  It may have positive and efficient outcomes as mentioned in use of ML/AI in retail and progress shown by Google in AutoML which has capacity of reproduction in a sense that too at a reduced cost. But there is a five percent chance of an "extremely bad" outcome also, like human extinction as dreaded by many experts [1, 40].
There are already 120 potential game-changing ML applications in 12 industries — and the evolution is accelerating.   
References
[1] Progress and Perils of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

[2] Invited Chapter 6 - Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks, Pages 111-136, R.G.S. Asthana in book, Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (Theory and Applications), Academic Press Series in Engineering, Edited by:Naresh K. Sinha, Madan M. Gupta and Lotfi A. Zadeh ISBN: 978-0-12-646490-0

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780126464900

[3] Future 2030 by Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE

[4] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Part 1, by Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE

[5] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Part Two, by Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE
[6] Internet of Things (IoT)

[7] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Cognitive Services and Robotics – Part Three by Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE

[8] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):  Big Data and 3 D Printing – Part four by Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member, IEEE.

[9] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):  Drones and Self-driving Cars– Part Five by, Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE
[10] Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Healthcare– Part Six by, Dr. RGS Asthana, Senior Member IEEE
http://newblogrgs10.blogspot.com/2017/05/machine-learning-ml-and-artificial_26.html
[11] Deep mind website
[12] IBM Watson Website
https://www.ibm.com/watson/
[13] Google's DeepMind to peek at NHS eye scans for disease analysis
[14] Why Google is betting big on AI

[15] Long short-term memory

[16] Cycle (graph theory)

[17] A Beginner’s Guide to Recurrent Networks and LSTMs

[18] AI is already beating us at our own game

[19] Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats the world’s best human Go player

[20] Learning Physical Intuition of Block Towers by Example

[21] HOW GOOGLE’S AI AUTO-MAGICALLY ANSWERS YOUR EMAILS

[22] Google reveals Automatic ML: A.I. can create itself

[23] Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture

[24] Singularity

[25] Microsoft gives developers more machine learning ammo

[26] AI experts predict the future: Truck drivers out of jobs by 2027, surgeons by 2053

[27] The rise of AI makes Emotional Intelligence more important

[28] Why is AI still so incredibly powerful?

[29] CrowdFlower Website
[30] “Garry Kasparov on AI, Chess, and the Future of Creativity” @Kasparov63 @IBM
[31] Chess-Playing Robot Takes Centre-Stage at Computex 2017

[32] 3 Ways Retailers Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Save Stores

[33] Intel just painted a target on IBM Watson’s back

[34] Mini 'Pepper' robots start new jobs in Taiwan

[35] Keras
[36] How AI and ML are helping drive the GE Digital Transformation

[37] Machine learning that could make realtors extinct (VB Live)

[38] GE Imagination at work
[39] Why Google’s CEO Is Excited About Automating Artificial Intelligence
[40] How long it will take for your job to be automated?
[41] Facebook’s AI for targeting terrorists will go beyond Muslim extremists

https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/16/facebooks-ai-for-targeting-terrorists-will-go-beyond-muslim-extremists/

[42] Publishers fight Facebook and Google with Video Personalization

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dadehayes/2017/04/14/publishers-fight-facebook-and-google-with-video-personalization/#49f03ef72eaf

[43] MIT Review: Intelligent Machines: The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

[44] Changing the course of genomic medicine

https://www.deepgenomics.com/

[45] AI can displace human buy can’t replace them

https://www.pressreader.com/usa/inc-usa/20170301/281964607457516







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