Data-Driven Jarrad Jinks takes a deep dive into artificial intelligence with Christian Brown ’12
“Hey Siri, schedule an interview with Christian Brown at 5:30 Pacific time for The Ambassador.” As Siri catches the tail end of my request, I turn my attention back to Gmail. Christian Brown ’12 had previously agreed to speak with me about his professional role in data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). As I continue to type, I tab to autocomplete the common phrases I’m apt to use in similar contexts. A notoriously poor speller, I revisit a couple of red underlines before sending. AI in 2020 is pervasive. So pervasive, in fact, that even the age-old cornerstones of human interaction—written and spoken language—are increasingly impacted by its advent. Siri adds Brown to my calendar, adjusting for my current time zone. The moment I hit enter on the keyboard, Google servers set forth a splitsecond series of events that land my message in Brown’s inbox, before which time his own email servers use an artificially intelligent system to read not just the content of my email, but a slew of additional metadata to assign my correspondence a spam score. It passed.
What is AI? The terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “algorithm” increasingly appear in conversations and headlines. But conveying an understanding of AI proves much more difficult than reporting the significance of its use. Artificial Intelligence is an overarching designation given to any computer system intended to mimic intelligent human reason. It encompasses disciplines such as natural language processing, the manipulation of human language for applications such as autocomplete, translation, and smart assistants; computer vision which allows now-common photo album features such as facial-recognition; and machine learning, where it excels at extracting patterns from large datasets, learning from that data without human intervention, and applying that learning. These and other subsets of AI often overlap to power not just consumer-level life-enhancements, but technologies that drive processes impacting our lives in a much more significant way, influencing enterprise decision-making, global financial markets, the course of academic research, and government policies.
(Martin Voss) THE AMBASSADOR \\ FALL 2020
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