

Ask HN: Is AI useful in industry? - roundsquare

So I was thinking, I really like AI, but I don't want to be an academic.  So I'm wondering, are there any industries where AI is actually being used?  I've heard of some projects like tumor detection and ever some use in finance, but do people actually trust it enough to use it?
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f33l
I'm getting my PhD in Machine Learning right now, so I'll try to give you some
ideas.

First of all Machine Learning will be useful to you, because you'll understand
much about statistics, data mining, optimization and efficient programming. If
you don't get to work on an ML project in industry directly, some of the
enabling techniques might come in handy.

Now, ML is also interesting for industry. Google is essentially a Machine
Learning company. They use statistics to evaluate and display data, be it
website ranking, recommender systems, or whatnot. Some goes to some extend for
MS, Facebook and Yahoo.

Now, there is also increasing demand in the computational biology community
for ML methods. Pharma companies are producing terrabytes of data that will
need to be analysed with intelligent algorithms, so that might be an
interesting direction to consider.

In times of unlimited data access, studying how to teach computers to learn
from data seems like the right thing to do.

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mahmud
Are you kidding me? Statistical AI is the _hottest_ thing in computing now.
You might have heard of it as "Machine Learning".

However, you wont see any of the human emulators that were being conjured up
in the 70s and 80s. The new AI is in the business of synthesizing massive data
into intelligence.

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pmichaud
Right, AI isn't recognizable as the Scifi thing you might have in mind... it's
automatic financial trading software, or it's robotic path finding or target
acquisition.

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roundsquare
Thanks for the answers. I guess I was really asking if anyone is actually
using the techniques.

E.g. in finance, I'm under the impression most people still use standard
pricing models as opposed to something like an ANN (or other statistical
learning algorithm). The reason that I was told is that people are afraid of
using some generic black box and instead prefer something like black-scholes
(or whatever) that has an explanation they can understand.

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kleinsch
Online advertising uses all kinds of machine learning.

When companies are running billions of impressions across multiple ad networks
and using different creative variants, it takes serious algorithms to cut
through the noise and find the inventory that's performing well. It's a tricky
problem because typically you'll get tiny click-through rates, meaning you're
looking to group a few points of data among millions of impressions.

Contextual analysis (figuring out the context of the page where the ad
appears) is a big deal now also. That's a lot of natural language processing
on some of the most diverse (read: difficult) content available.

I happen to work for a company that does both of these. :)

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roundsquare
Very cool. Do you know any good resources on what kinds of algorithms are
used?

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gamble
There's plenty of applied AI out there, but since the '70s people prefer to
call it something that sounds more practical, like 'machine intelligence' or
'soft computing'.

Part of the reason people don't notice it is that many of the applications are
'hidden' in embedded systems, especially control systems and computer vision.
Also, any practical application is likely to be limited in its ambitions and
there are always disputes over how 'intelligent' something has to be to
qualify as AI.

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Oxryly
Any AI in use won't look like AI. When it becomes useful it gets decomposed
into controllable components and then used. But it is used in many places.

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AretCarlsen
An excuse to quote the AI Glossary
(<http://www.stottlerhenke.com/ai_general/glossary.htm>)!

\---- AI Effect

The great practical benefits of AI applications and even the existence of AI
in many software products go largely unnoticed by many despite the already
widespread use of AI techniques in software. This is the AI effect. Many
marketing people don't use the term "artificial intelligence" even when their
company's products rely on some AI techniques. Why not? It may be because AI
was oversold in the first giddy days of practical rule-based expert systems in
the 1980s, with the peak perhaps marked by the Business Week cover of July 9,
1984 announcing, Artificial Intelligence, IT'S HERE.

James Hogan in his book, Mind Matters, has his own explanation of the AI
Effect:

"AI researchers talk about a peculiar phenomenon known as the "AI effect." At
the outset of a project, the goal is to entice a performance from machines in
some designated area that everyone agrees would require "intelligence" if done
by a human. If the project fails, it becomes a target of derision to be
pointed at by the skeptics as an example of the absurdity of the idea that AI
could be possible. If it succeeds, with the process demystified and its inner
workings laid bare as lines of prosaic computer code, the subject is dismissed
as "not really all that intelligent after all." Perhaps ... the real threat
that we resist is the further demystification of ourselves...It seems to
happen repeatedly that a line of AI work ... finds itself being diverted in
such a direction that ... the measures that were supposed to mark its
attainment are demonstrated brilliantly. Then, the resulting new knowledge
typically stimulates demands for application of it and a burgeoning industry,
market, and additional facet to our way of life comes into being, which within
a decade we take for granted; but by then, of course, it isn't AI."

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known
Short answer: No

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bhousel
Video Games..

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roundsquare
I'm not really up to date on video games. I realize there is a lot of AI in
the sense of smart opponents, but is there a lot going on with learning? I.e.
enemies that get better at defeating you by seeing your tactics?

I've thought about this could be applied in RPGs... if you have a recurring
opponent that learns how you fight each time you face off and gets better. Is
anyone doing something like this (even at a basic level like "he uses magic a
lot")?

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Tichy
I have only programmed very little AI for games (standard Alpha Beta Pruning),
but I think I can already understand why AI in games is not better. It simply
takes a lot of time to create a very good AI. It is not done with having a
good baisc idea (like Alpha-Beta Pruning for chess), you then also have to
tweak it endlessly.

I think if you can come up with an effective way to create good AI, game
developers would be delighted to use it. It is only time constraints that
makes most of them stick to "good enough".

Also, the game has to remain fun for the humans.

