July 7, 2020
By Heather Kotula President & CEO, Access Innovations, Inc.
Features

AI 50 Spotlight: AI in Your Pocket

You probably have a relatively sophisticated artificial intelligence device in your pocket right now. I have one that I use every day to let my special needs daughter know when it is time to come down for dinner. I type “5” and it suggests “minutes” and then “until” and then “dinner”. This is a simple, easy to understand implementation of a Markov chain Monte Carlo method, one of the often-used statistical algorithms used in artificial intelligence systems. It saves me literally seconds in composing a text message on my iPhone.

Narrow AI is Okay

We often think of artificial intelligence as what is known as general or strong AI – highly sophisticated systems that have human-like characteristics – Skynet that controls the Terminator, the computer from Star Trek, and others. That remains science fiction, at least today. We currently live in a world that has a multitude of narrow AI implementations– those that perform one function. For example, my text messaging app suggests what word I might want to use next. Other implementations include self-driving cars, answer bots, and stock trading.

It Just Works

Data Harmony from Access Innovations, Inc., was first deployed in 1999 and is still in use with our first client. It’s a narrow AI, developed to suggest indexing terms from a controlled vocabulary for a human to select or deselect, with the option to add additional terms. Using statistics collected from that human’s activity, the AI layer is fine-tuned, often to the point that our clients use it unsupervised. Call us for a demo.