On November 28, ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (IFHE) organised a special lecture on “Big Data and Artificial Intelligence”. Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Principal Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Information and Decision System (LIDS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to the students about his experiences with big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Dr Kalyan said that machine learning and predictive models are traditionally created by scientists by generating feature metrics and these generated models are deployed to address various business requirements. He stated that automating the process of creating the models proved a time-saving initiative.
He also told the students how the automation algorithms were tested and their results were “very encouraging in terms of speed as well as accuracy.” He urged the students to try implementing machine learning models using available data sets and free online software.
Elaborating on the process of machine learning, Dr. Kalyan said: “Data sets can be used for multiple functions and extra value can be extracted through careful planning of four stages: collecting, feature engineering, modeling and deploying”. “The biggest bottleneck however,” he cautioned “is identifying the variables and understanding the underlying relationship”.
The data scientist also spoke about his start-up PatternEx, which monitors traffic between client query and the database. He said: “PatternEx identifies unusual patterns of transactions. If the pattern is ambiguous, cyber security experts identify, analyse and capture the threat.”
Addressing a question about machine learning as a threat to employment he said: “We are still far from reaching a place where machine learning replaces complete human involvement”.