Conversation starter: Machine learning in one sentence

blog.smellthedata.com

19 points·danger··9 comments

I'm trying to work out why computers are so stupid, and stop them.

With the follow up sentence being "So far, it seems to happen only when they interact with humans, and I'm working to cut down their need for involvement."

I work on detecting and exploiting interesting patterns in data.

My line is "I do Artificial Intelligence". To most people it sounds like rocket science. It also has some The Matrix/Terminator/I Robot flavor.

I've tried that one before and--no joke--the person got very excited, and started going on and on about aliens and life on Mars. I couldn't figure out why until I realized that he had mistaken AI for ET.

I think that "I teach computers how to learn" is more indicative of the chicken or the egg nature of the problem.

I've worked at a face recognition startup for 5 years now. I've already solved this guy's problem. You have the correct answer. My response is slightly modified in that I open with "I work at a software startup... we do face recognition". And if they ask how it works, I say "We don't teach computers how to recognize faces, we teach computers how to learn how to recognize faces" and most people tend to light up (and/or have their mind blown).

If you mention "startup", "face recognition", and "teaching computers how to learn", virtually everyone has something they want to talk about.

I'm involved in the creation of our eventual overlords.

i would start with the abstract to one of your papers, then keep iterating over it and simplifying it until you think your target audience can comprehend it, then say that sentence to him/her

that way, you stand a chance of preserving at least a part of what you're actually doing rather than stating a hand-wavy "I help computers to think"

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