Jan 15 By Tyler Galagher
Wisdom From The Women Leading The AI Industry, With Dr. Judith Bishop of Appen
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Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
There are no uninteresting projects in AI, and while I can’t give specifics, we’ve started to move into multimodal data creation and product evaluation projects that require a new focus on time and timing — for example, how the visual output of the AI engine, such as an avatar face or face and body, aligns in time with the synthesized speech. Human beings are super keyed into timing. It’s usually at a subliminal level, but as you know from watching poorly dubbed movies, any slight misalignment between channels can really make the experience challenging.
What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?
What excites me most about AI is that it’s aimed both at mimicking and exceeding human capabilities of reasoning, perception and communication. The knowledge we’ll gain about ourselves through developing AI — how we interact with each other and with the world — will be so deep. Linguists will be critical to this process because we’ll have to unpack how we communicate in order to help machines learn what we do and how we understand the world.
Another exciting area of development is that, with COVID-19, contactless services will continue to be important to all types of service providers. As we look to convert any situation where you currently have to walk into a room and talk with someone into a contactless service, we’ll continue to look at ways that AI can power chatbots, virtual assistants and the like. In healthcare, for example, there’s tremendous interest in developing AI-powered healthcare assistants that can perform triage to provide more options that eliminate the need for patients who are feeling ill to travel to see a doctor. This type of benefit will be replicated across many industries.
What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?
I would bucket my concerns into two main categories. First is the fact that policy and regulation are lagging far behind AI development. There’s a very real possibility that AI will leave people vulnerable in ways they’ve never been before. AI-powered insights into how we communicate and what we’re expressing and the emotions we’re expressing it with — things most people will want to keep hidden — will be stored in systems and devices. This can create opportunities for abuse.
It’s also a possibility that we could fail to ensure that AI technology is fair in terms of diversity and inclusivity. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, if we use biased training data for AI systems, we could end up replicating existing human bias in powerful AI projects that treat people unfairly on a huge scale. Systemic bias in automated systems for mortgage and credit applications, insurance rates, and even hiring come immediately to mind.
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Full text can be found here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/wisdom-from-the-women-leading-the-ai-industry-with-dr-judith-bishop-of-appen-f285e24cd63a