Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Josh Sullivan, SVP and Angela Zutavern, VP of Data Sciences at Booz Allen Hamilton (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What you want are people who know how to set up machine learning algorithms and how to diagnose the patterns and set them up with the heuristics so you can leverage the algorithms to come up with meaningful actionable insights. That knowledge doesn’t necessarily exist in the minds of the greatest domain experts.

I believe we are going towards a world where there will be a lot of abstraction happening. I know Microsoft is working on it. IBM is also working on it, but I think Microsoft is further along. This abstraction allows creation 

of software such that the domain experts can drive this software with their domain expertise and the machine learning work can be done in a blackbox mode. That is a definite trend in the industry.

Angela Zutavern: What Josh and I have seen goes beyond just domain expertise and machine intelligence expertise. What’s key to all the examples we’ve talked about is a visionary leader. This is a leader who understands enough of what’s possible about machine intelligence and what technology can do, but also someone who’s willing to shatter their constraints and set aside their doubts about what can or can’t be done.

These visionary leaders are the ones who are inspiring the problem solving. Without these leaders, we can have all the technologies and the best algorithms. The key were these individuals who are willing to take a chance and take action.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, the field of AI is moving so fast that anyone in any leadership position who’s not considering AI and how AI is going to disrupt their jobs is going to be left behind.

Angela Zutavern: Absolutely.

Josh Sullivan: You’re right. I also think it’s more than that. Everyone’s rushing to think about their workforce and what they can automate. It’s the displacement of certain activities that humans do. Especially in the government and financial industries when they’re doing credit assessments, we automate more and more of this. The bias of programmers can really be reflected in there.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Josh Sullivan: The Census Bureau is leading the way. Very few companies are thinking about do they really want to know this much about so many people. If they do, is there a legal responsibility to disclose.

Sramana Mitra: The whole field of AI is fraught with ethics questions. I have been writing for the last couple of months. It’s a series called Man and Superman. There are about nine parts. I actually opened it up for people to contribute. There’s lots of ethics question that are going to be front and center as we go along. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Josh Sullivan, SVP and Angela Zutavern, VP of Data Sciences at Booz Allen Hamilton
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