Live from SXSW: Why humans are critical to the success of Artificial Intelligence
QuantumBlack’s Brian Crandall summarises the key themes from day one at SXSW Interactive highlighting the need for humans in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution to ask the right questions, build the right data pipes and apply algorithmic fairness.
The second you walk onto Congress Street and into the epicentre of SXSW, there is a jolt of energy reminding you of the art of the possible streaming at us from the tech revolution. The most exciting part is that AI is the focus now, making our daily work at QuantumBlack exceptionally relevant. Throughout the panels and surrounding conversations today, there was a clear theme: the call to personalise AI.
New technology has enabled change in operating models. At Mount Sinai hospital they have built a clinic-of-the-future in a box, a 1000 sq. ft space where a person can receive a 100-point physical exam, 10–15x the amount of metrics, with real-time insights on clear charts projected on a massive HD wall. All this is done by one nurse practitioner, arguably removing 80% of personnel demands of the typical clinic visit. The goal: Create immediate, easy to understand, objective view of your personal health, while removing up to six hours of physician admin entry. Regarding AI, data scientist and founding clinical practitioner, Joel Dudley, says:
“Data science and engineering tools exist and are incredible but aren’t what we need to focus on; we need to collect the data, ask the right questions of the data and build the data pipes to use these wonderful data for analytics”.
Shared during: Next Gen Health Health Clinic: Deciphering Fact from Fad by @JDudley and @davidestark from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
As the streets of Austin began to fill up, we made our way to The Female Quotient Girls Lounge, where our very own @Ines_Marusic joined a panel named “Reality Check”, where women in analytics explored the role of AI. She raised an inspiring call to action to improve upon data science integrity and remove bias using “algorithmic fairness”. In many instances, the biases that permeate society also extend into analytics with unfortunate impact; poor female representation in clinical trials, fewer females and minorities accessing financial loans, etc. Ines highlighted mitigating models but emphasised the importance of diversity in the data scientists running them.
“AI is a misleading term, as it is built by humans to benefit humans”. Well said.
Shared during: Reality Check moderated by John Keefe of Quartz alongside panelists Nadia Morris of AT&T Connected Health Foundry, @carolynrodz of Hello Alice, @ines_marusic of QuantumBlack (a McKinsey Company) and Lauren Kunze of Pandorabots.
The common thread is that AI adoption and honest insights requires human engagement to reach their full potential. Companies struggle with activating employees to proactively manage their health and want a direct and personal mode of information delivery. Companies relying on analytics to deliver products and services need differing human perspectives to prevent skewed insights from challenging their outputs. QuantumBlack’s diversity and balance of both service minded analytics bolstered by technology will help to create this personalised AI that is increasingly demanded today.
Our hot picks for Saturday 10th March at SXSW Interactive:
09:30am Hacking the Racial Bias in Artificial Intelligence (JW MARRIOTT
SALON 3): Timnit Gebru of Microsoft Research, Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech / Zyrobotics, Jeff Nelson of Cinchapi and Princess Sampson of Kingonomics.
11:00am Designing & Building for a Data Science Future (JW MARRIOTT
SALON 7): Dan Chuparkoff of McKinsey & Company.
5:00pm The Power of Advanced Analytics in Sports (JW MARRIOTT
SALON AB): Ben Alamar of ESPN, Tom Haberstroh of Spotlight Media Ventures, Sam Hinkie of Stanford University and Rajiv Maheswaran of Second Spectrum.
We’re live reporting from SXSW!
Keep an eye out for daily event guides for the best in data, machine learning and AI. We’ll be doing roundups of events we attend via Threaded Tweets and speaking to some interesting people.
