Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning are new buzzwords that are actively discussed in the tech world. Do you remember how our future was described in the movies some time ago: Terminator, Skynet, AI rules the world? General AI machines have remained in the movies and science fiction novels however narrow AI technologies are gradually evolving from the science fiction era to the reality and are already around us. Google uses Machine Learning to filter out spam messages from Gmail. Facebook trained computers to identify specific human faces nearly as accurately as humans do. Deep Learning is used by Netflix and Amazon to decide what you want to watch or buy next.
AI, machine learning, and deep learning are not quite the same thing but these terms are often used haphazardly and interchangeably, and that sometimes leads to some confusion. So let`s see what is the difference between each type of technology.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence, which has been around since the 1950s, has seen ebbs and flows in popularity over the last 60+ years. But today, with the recent explosion of big data, high-powered parallel processing, and advanced neural algorithms, we are seeing a renaissance in AI—and companies from Amazon to Facebook to Google are scrambling to take the lead.
AI is the broadest way to think about advanced, computer intelligence. It can refer to anything from a computer program playing a game of chess, to a voice-recognition system like Amazon’s Alexa interpreting and responding to speech. The technology can broadly be categorized into three groups: Narrow AI (that is focused on one narrow task), artificial general intelligence or AGI (a machine with the ability to apply intelligence to any problem, rather than just one specific problem), and superintelligent AI (when its equal to humans or even surpasses them).
Pardoe believes that “we’ve just entered the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, and while the adoption of AI has just started, the next few years will transform many sectors.
Machine learning
Machine learning is one subfield of AI. Or lets say its the field of AI which today is showing the most promise at providing tools that industry and society can use to drive change. The core principle here is that machines take data and “learn” for themselves. Unlike hand-coding a software program with specific instructions to complete a task, ML allows a system to learn to recognize patterns on its own and make predictions.
Here are some of the popular machine learning methods:
-supervised learning: the “trainer” will present the computer with certain rules that connect an input (an object’s feature, like “smooth,” for example) with an output (the object itself, like a marble), and the algorithm learns by comparing its actual output with correct outputs to find errors. Supervised learning is commonly used in applications where historical data predicts likely future events. For example, it can anticipate when credit card transactions are likely to be fraudulent or which insurance customer is likely to file a claim.
-unsupervised learning: the computer is given inputs and is left alone to discover patterns. The goal is to explore the data and find some structure within. Unsupervised learning works well on transactional data. For example, it can identify segments of customers with similar attributes who can then be treated similarly in marketing campaigns.
-reinforcement learning: the algorithm discovers through trial and error which actions yield the greatest rewards. This type of learning has three primary components: the agent (the learner or decision maker, for instance, the driverless car), the environment (everything the agent interacts with, for instance the road) and actions (what the agent can do).
Deep Learning
Deep learning is a brunch of Machine Learning, let`s see it as the cutting-edge of the cutting-edge. It uses some ML techniques to solve real-world problems by tapping into neural networks that simulate human decision-making.
Deep Learning involves feeding a computer system with a lot of data, which it can use to make decisions about other data. This data is fed through neural networks. These networks are logical constructions which ask a series of binary true/false questions, or extract a numerical value, of every bit of data which pass through them, and classify it according to the answers received.
Text-based searches, fraud detection, spam detection, handwriting recognition, image search, speech recognition, Street View detection, and translation are all tasks that can be performed through deep learning. Deep Learning is used by Google in its voice and image recognition algorithms, by Netflix and Amazon to decide what you want to watch or buy next, and by researchers at MIT to predict the future.
The machine revolution has certainly started and the AI revolution is sure to pave the way for some significant changes in our lives. Machines will gradually improve, slowly replacing jobs that require repetitious behavior. But what happens when one day the machines become smarter than us?
Anna Kozik
Business Development Manager
