Understanding the Invisible Force Changing Our World
Machine Learning
KEN TABOR @KenTabor

“I think that AI will
lead to a low cost and
better quality life for
millions of people.
Like electricity, it’s a
possibility to build a
wonderful society.” Andrew Ng

"We were early in
machine learning and are
already seeing significant
dividends coming out.
Many of the XXXXXXXX
companies are already
using this technology and
are planning to use it
even more."
Larry Page

Machine learning drives
… product search
ranking, product and
deals recommendations,
merchandising
placements, fraud
detection, translations,
and much more.
Jeff Bezos

XXX XXXXXXX laid out a
development plan on
Thursday to become the
world leader in A.I. by
2030, aiming to surpass
its rivals technologically
and build a domestic
industry worth almost
$150 billion.
State Council
of China

“Artificial intelligence is
the future, not only for
XXXXXX, but for all
humankind. … Whoever
becomes the leader in
this sphere will become
the ruler of the world.” Vladimir Putin

WHAT?

What it’s Not
ML is something different.

It’s Not
Big data
“Copy your stats into the lake tonight.”

It’s Not
Data science
“Any local users old enough to buy?”
SELECT * from users WHERE age BETWEEN 35 AND 55
AND country = 'UK';

It’s Not
A rules engine
if (currentProductId === A_BOOK_ID) {
RenderBookProduct(SIMILAR_BOOKS);
}
“Show her related book titles.”

Machine Learning
Algorithms (code recipes)
That can learn behavior
Without writing more code

Machine Learning
Through pattern matching
By classifying things
Offering % predictions

Using data to create knowledge


Data
Structured Unstructured
{
"user": {
"name": "Ken Tabor",
"title": "Principal Software Architect",
"company": "Sabre",
"contact": {
"email": "hello@kentabor.com",
"phone": "8675309",
"twitter": "@kentabor"
},
"eatsChocolate": true
}
}
Ʃ
Ƭ ƫ

Learning how?
1. Supervised learning
2. Reinforcement learning
3. Unsupervised learningǠ

1. Supervised
You feed the algorithm data
You tag the data with labels
Algorithm creates a model of
understanding (learns)


BALL

Can we trick our
customers into helping us?

User clicks are training

Design a micro-interaction
encouraging training

2. Reinforcement
You have a trained ML model
You let it run
Give it a reality-check function
ǽ

function IsEnRouteAndNotCrashing()

function HasWonGame()

3. Unsupervised
You feed the algorithm data
It discovers hidden patterns
Clusters based on similarity
of features

Ǡ

Orange 10
Brown 4
Yellow 9
Blue 12
Green 11
Red 8
Total 54

Orange 10/14
Brown 4/4
Yellow 9/6
Blue 12/12
Green 11/8
Red 8/11
Total 54/55

Orange 10/14/15
Brown 4/4/1
Yellow 9/6/9
Blue 12/12/8
Green 11/8/11
Red 8/11/10
Total 54/55/54

“I could do that!”
You don’t scale
Humans are error prone
People get bored

Questions
How much do I regret eating all of the M&Ms?
Do people consume brighter colors faster?
Ship more brown because dye is cheaper?
Production glitch - expected a repeatable amount?
Why do the red ones taste better?

Why Now?

Increase in compute power & data storage
Ȑ
your phone
your laptop
companies
the cloud

Technology

Why are they just giving it away
for free?

Good will
Show of force
Talent recruitment
I’m guessing

Are they not afraid of my
competition?

NO

Data
Compute cycles
Brain power
They have more
The smart get smarter

Why Now?

Interest
Success
Visibility Build

SO WHAT?

Business: Big

GM and Lyft announced
the joint venture on
Monday, which also
includes a $500 million
investment by GM in Lyft.
January 4, 2016

IBM will spend $240
million over 10 years to
develop an artificial
intelligence research lab
with the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology…
September 6, 2017

Databricks, a big data
analytics platform …
announced that it has
raised a $140 million
Series D round…
August 22, 2017

DataType: Text

Neural Machine Translation
November 15, 2016
English/French
German
Spanish
Portuguese
Chinese
Japanese
Korean
Turkish
Total of eight language pairs
to/from English and French.

2010 - 2015
Credit card transactions +48%
Debit card transactions +46%
Electronic transactions +45%
Annual transactions +34.2bill
July 27, 2017

Quarterly Earnings Stories
5,300 public companies
2013 - wrote 318 stories (6%)
65 (human) reporters
2015 - 3,700 stories (70%)
AI system
April 14, 2017

DataType: Image

…Google will now show you a silent six-second
clip…decided to use some of its machine
learning smarts to enable this feature…
algorithm actually analyzes the whole video
and then decides which six-second clip to pick.
August 18, 2017

Assisting Pathologists in Detecting Cancer with
Deep Learning…prediction heatmaps
produced by the algorithm had improved so
much that the localization score (FROC) for the
algorithm reached 89%, which significantly
exceeded the score of 73% for a pathologist
with no time constraint.
March 3, 2017

DEMO
Amazon Rekognition

NOW WHAT?

Human-centered
Design

“People like you also shopped for…”
Auto-generate Personas

Don’t give me 200 results.
Offer the 3 best choices.
Personalized Data

Like a robot Like a person
Humanize AI with Awesome UI
“flat” “skeuomorphic”

Position Your
Career

Be curious

“Knows machine learning”
“Experienced with Adobe CS2 Suite”
is the new

Find the data
(representing users)
Machines lack empathy and ethical frameworks
for passing humane judgements on humans.

Racist AI?
Mindfully consider training data
Unconscious bias is tough
Make diversity a priority
Choose inclusion by default

Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight
Body Count
1992
See more:

Design for
Zero-D

Past computer/human interface (CHI)
Command Line Windows AR/VR
1D 2D 3D

Voice recognition
Face recognition
Touch-screen secondary
API response refinement
Future of CHI is 0D?
Chatbot scripts

Trusting corporate ML algorithms
Representing your brand well

Explain nuances
Surface assumptions
Confirm safe context
“Why is your list different than mine?”
Zero-D UX

THEN WHAT?

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re
not working in the right area.” - David Bowie

Ken’s next move

Invest another year into being a
learning machine

Find a
problem
Discover
data
Code like
a caveman
Test
solutions
Daydream
 ☼

Share what I learn
@KenTabor
hello@kentabor.com
www.KenTabor.com
AvailableonAmazon

References
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/interviews/ai-
can-make-an-impact-like-electricity-andrew-ng/articleshow/
60227045.cms
https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2016/index.html
https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/business/china-artificial-
intelligence.html
https://www.rt.com/news/401731-ai-rule-world-putin/
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10706250/gm-lyft-
driverless-cars-ride-sharing-investment
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-07/ibm-
to-invest-240-million-to-develop-ai-research-lab-with-mit
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/big-data-analytics-
platform-databricks-raises-140m-series-d-round-led-by-
andreessen-horowitz/
https://www.cuinsight.com/everyone-talking-machine-
learning.html
https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-companies-are-already-using-ai
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/18/google-brings-six-
second-video-previews-to-mobile-search/
https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/assisting-
pathologists-in-detecting.html
https://console.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/home?
region=us-east-1#/label-detection
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/588727-pc-dos-
included-game-dos-screenshot-file-list-of-donkey-bas.png
http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Microsoft-
Windows-Turns-29-Happy-Birthday-to-the-World-s-Number-1-
OS-465507-8.jpg
https://www.americaninno.com/wp-content/uploads/
wpallimport/files/1/2013/09/dezeen_ikea-launch_augmented-
reality_2014_ss2_pan.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h48hGHALFC4
https://unsplash.com/
http://www.KenTabor.com