The Experience Lab

Jul 2, 2020

5. A big plunge into Machine Learning

This is the experience lab, the official podcast of Digital Scientists from Atlanta, Georgia. We’re an experience lab that explores and builds digital products. My name is Rob Hall, and I’m the Senior Director of Product at DS. Jay Cosgrove And I’m Jay Cosgrove, Senior Product Manager. Rob Hall Thanks for listening. We’re here today with our esteemed colleague, Mr. Jerry Deng. Jerry Deng Hello, guys. Jay Cosgrove Jerry, so excited to have you man. Rob Hall Jay, can you explain what Jerry really does? Jay Cosgrove Jerry is a principal developer that is one of our lead AI and machine learning engineers. Rob Hall He’s basically a genius is what you’re saying? Jay Cosgrove Pretty sure he built Skynet. Jerry Deng I don’t want John Conner to come and kill me, but anyway. People come to me with problems and usually clients, and I trying to figure out ways to solve it. Rob Hall What we’re here to talk about today is machine learning. First of all, what is it? What is machine learning? And is machine learning the same thing as artificial intelligence? Is it different from AI? And if so, how? Jerry Deng AI and machine learning just little differentiation there can give you an idea of what machine learning is. Probably during your childhood, you play video games and came across the term AI as a way to actually like those NPC or enemy actually find its route and come attack you or some some basic baked in logic like that. Rob Hall You kind of have this classic sci-fi image in your brain about what artificial intelligence does. And usually it’s the bad guy, right? Jerry Deng Yes, yes, it’s usually the bad guy. But if you bring it to practicality and today’s application, actually a lot of things can be considered AI. For example, your google maps that you like, “take me from here to the restaurant.” And that routing mechanism or algorithm is considered AI. It’s just baked so much into our life that we don’t call it AI anymore. It’s just so given. Even simple computer logic, if and then or else, that kind of rule, they could be considered AI. And machine learning is a subset of that. It’s trying to mimic intelligence like AI does, except it’s using repetition, and figuring out a pattern out of that repetition. Sort of, that’s where the term learning came from. Rob Hall Just to get like super literal and simplistic with it. If I’m a machine, and I am being trained to recognize certain patterns and data. Jerry Deng yes Rob Hall I have a set of data that I’m trying to analyze, and I create an algorithm that loops over that data and tries to look for certain types of patterns or a certain type of information within that set of data. You could consider that machine learning. Jerry Deng Yes. And you can actually give it a simpler example. For example, in stock trading, there is moving average. Moving average itself is the simplest form of machine learning. It’s basically you have a bunch of price data points, and then you draw our slope line diagonal line up, or downward. And that’s in a way that’s machine learning to. It’s just the simplest form of the machine learning. I think it’s linear regression, which is just calculating that particular slope and positioning it on the amount of price point dots. And that is considered machine learning to. Rob Hall I’m pretty sure I remember learning about linear regressions in high school. Yeah, that was a long time ago. Jay Cosgrove Did you, Did you finish high school? Rob Hall Oh, cute. Jay Cosgrove Jerry, I’m, I’m curious because you use the first example of AI as like bots, or what I would call bots and like games, right? Like you play against that are trying to figure out. The first thing that always comes to my mind is 007 GoldenEye on the N64, for all this used to play that, and the bots coming after you and you would try to get the Golden Gun. So what, what differentiates maybe in that example, between just strict machine learning and AI? Jerry Deng In that particular example, the bot is actually more of an AI than machine learning because it’s like a pre programmed route, usually, that it takes to chase from his starting point to the point that your character is figuring out a path to it. But it doesn’t really learn from past experience. It doesn’t grow stronger over time. Rob Hall It’s not really, okay, so it’s not smart. It just has its defined boundary of operation and that’s it. Jerry Deng Yes. Rob Hall Okay. Now, are they getting smarter in games where the bots do learn? Jerry Deng Yeah, for sure. I mean, there are point of view eSports open AI is participating in entering one of the esports tournament where they train the machine to compete with the human player, and it beats quite a few elite level players onlin. And similarly with deep mind has trained something to play Starcraft that almost consistently wins over the strongest human player. Rob Hall Where, at least in your expertise Jerry, where do you draw the line between machine learning and artificial intelligence? Jerry Deng Well, today when people talk about AI and machine learning, they are mostly referring to machine learning more so than AI. It’s just if you ask a bunch of like, experts in the field, they would all give you a slightly different definition. So for the sake of for the sake of keeping the reference point the same I think most people are referring to machine learning as the term instead of referring to AI anymore. Because AI is so given even an IoT product, even If This Then That kind of like, product is considered an AI to a point. So, it’s too broad of a term to actually discuss. Rob Hall So it’s cool to just say, “Yeah, we’re into artificial intelligence.” But not really necessarily truly doing that. Jerry Deng Yeah, you could totally be doing like an If This Then That kind of statement logic and call yourself AI. Rob Hall Oh, well, then I’m an AI expert. I’ve done that. Just kidding. What is machine learning not? Jerry Deng Oh, it’s not hard code. It’s not building in rules for to actually just follow like 007 bot example. You try to craft it so general that it can react to different situations. So anytime you try to hard code stuff in your solution, that’s not machine learning. In machine learning, the main differentiator is actually it learns over time, learns over past experience. And that’s the key component. Jay Cosgrove So if the situation that you’re setting up does not have a learning mechanism as part of it, then you may consider AI, but you wouldn’t consider it machine learning at that point, because not actually becoming smarter. Okay, cool. That makes sense. Rob Hall Like Google Analytics, for example, there’s this whole question of machine learning data science, analytics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as buzzwords they’re very easily interchanged, I think. Even though they mean very discrete, different things. Jerry Deng In your example, you’re talking about analytics. And that’s definitely a field or where it can shine. You can use machine learning and say Google Analytics to predict trends of your inbound visitor and their likelihood of dropping at certain stage of their visit to your website or interacting with your mobile application. You can use those data to enhance your user experience by knowing exactly where the user drops and how do you actually improve those steps of the engagement to improve that. So, so that’s definitely one area of machine learning. But it’s way more than that, you could apply it in pretty much any field. Pretty much you if you give me an example, I can give you an example of utilization of machine learning. Rob Hall popcorn sales. Jerry…

43 min