Intro to Artificial Intelligence

October 2016, Stavros Vassos Helvia.io

(a very basic)
Intro to
(some part of)
Artificial Intelligence 

Artificial Intelligence through some applications

Self-driving cars

Games: Go

Games: Jeopardy

Movie recommendations

Predictive text

Artificial Intelligence through some applications

• Some cases are clear in our head that this is AI because we relate them with "thinking" abilities.
• Some cases are less exciting and we tend to not acknowledge AI behind them.
• E.g, in principle spam filtering uses similar AI techniques as some of the previous examples.

Artificial Intelligence through some applications

• Typically the exciting cases require a complex mix of methods from many subfields of AI and Data Science.
• In any case, many exciting results have been driven mostly by the recent advances Machine Learning.
• So let's go through some basic concepts and terminology!

Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML)

• Arthur Samuel way back in 1959: “[Machine Learning is the] field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.”

Programming vs ML

• What does it mean to program something explicitly?
• ML systems are programmed of course, but the way to achieve their functionality is not given by the programmer.
   
• For instance, an ML system detects cats in images; the programmer has not given "cat detection" rules.
• In contrast, the program that handles an ATM transaction has a very explicit and fixed rules.

Learning by example

• Ok, so what is learning and how it works?
• The programmer needs to give something to the ML system in order to program itself. 
• And this is data, in particular lots of data!
   
• For instance, in an ML system detects cats in images; the programmer has not given "cat detection" rules.
• But the programmer gives a huge number of cat images so that the system can learn on its own!

Machine Learning (ML)

• We prepare a big dataset of instances of the problem we want to solve, e.g., lots of cat images.
• The ML system uses the dataset to train itself and create a model of problem we want to solve.
• Then the model can be used to predict the answer to new problem instances, e.g., is this new image a cat?

Un/Supervised ML

• There are two big categories depending on the dataset we provide (and different results we can get).
• Supervised learning: we go over the dataset and mark ourselves the right answer.
• Unsupervised learning: we give the dataset without hints and let the system figure out patterns.

Un/Supervised ML

• There are two big categories depending on the dataset we provide (and different results we can get).
• Supervised learning: we go over the dataset and mark ourselves the right answer.
• Unsupervised learning: we give the dataset without hints and let the system figure out patterns.

ML input/output?

• How do we actually give something as input to an ML system, e.g., a picture?
• What is the output we received?
• Let's see a specific class of problems and an example to make things more concrete.

Classification

Ice-cream example

• Here's a simple (silly but useful) scenario.
• We have data about how people eat their ice cream.
• In particular we know per person:
  • how much time it took them to eat it;
  • how much noise they were making while eating it;
  • whether they are kids or not.
• We want to predict whether a new person is a kid based on their ice-cream eating behavior.

Dataset

• Let's make a training dataset for supervised ML:
  • x1: time to eat the ice cream;
  • x2: noise while eating the ice cream;
  • we put an O if they are kids and X otherwise.

Model

• Let's assume we can separate the two classes of ice cream eaters using a simple linear function (model):

Training

• In the training phase, the ML system looks into the labelled data and learns the parameters of the function so that when f=1 then the person is a kid.

Training

• There is no single solution and the way to find one is numerical in the sense that we start with a random setting and update until it fits the data.

Classification

• Now when we have information about a new person in terms of time and noise, the ML system can predict whether they are a kid.

Classification

• We want an ML system to learn to identify kids based on their ice cream eating behavior (time, noise).
• We prepare a dataset with positive and negative examples (the Xs and the Os) and train an ML system to create a model for kid-ness.
• Then the model can be used to predict kid-ness.

Perceptron

• This simple method is a linear classifier called perceptron.
• The perceptron is trained using backpropagation.
• This essentially goes like this: we try out the labelled data, check the error and then go backwards tweaking the parameters to make the error smaller.

That was pretty easy

• Why did we have to do this with ML?
• Well, it's easy because we have just two inputs and it happened that the data is very well separated.

That was pretty easy

• What if we have 100s of inputs, e.g., the user rankings for all the movies they have seen?
• What if the data was like the this?

Deep Learning

Ice-cream example

• Consider a more tricky dataset like this:                         

• We cannot separate the two classes using a linear function like before.
• We could try different functions, e.g, a circle.

Neural Networks

• But the point is that we want the ML system to be flexible to "devise" it's own function (i.e., the model) in order to classify the data correctly.
• Neural Networks is a way to achieve this. 
• Instead of writing down a bigger function, we can link together many simple functions.
• This is inspired by the neurons that are interconnected and trigger each other.

Neural Networks

• Let's link together many classifiers like the linear one and form a Neural Network! 

Input-Hidden-Output

• Input nodes on the left (one per input). 
• Linear classifiers on the middle (as many as we want).
• Output nodes on the right (one per output).

Ice-cream example

• In the example before: 2 input nodes (noise,time), 1 hidden node (the linear classifier), 1 output (kid-ness) . 
• The hidden node learned to identify kids.

Many inputs

• When  there are many inputs (e.g., 100s of them),
  each hidden node will learn a different aspect of the problem we try to solve.

High-level classifiers

• The output nodes will combine the information they get from the classifiers (hidden nodes) and work as more high-level classifiers to generate the answer.

Going deeper

• We can do this for many hidden layers.
• Each layer will work as if the previous hidden layer is the input it is trying to learn.

Deep Learning

• This is a Neural Network that is Deep.
• And we use the Machine Learning paradigm.
• This is where the name Deep Learning comes from.

Deep Learning

• The main idea is the same as in the case of f(x1,x2).
• Essentially, the whole Deep NN is a just one complicated function that can fit itself to the data.

Deep Learning

• Let's focus on the case of two inputs (x1, x2) and let's play with a visual tool to experiment with layers and nodes.

Live Experiment

NNs with Tensorflow

Overfitting

• You need to find the right balance in defining the function  that fits in the training dataset

More

• Vision
• Games
• Text

Convolutional NNs

• Vision: exploit "local" relation of features in images.

Convolutional NNs

Reinforcement Learning

• Games: exploit "rules" to do learn by playing thousands of games alone or to itself as an opponent.

Recurrent NNs

• Text: exploit "temporal" relation between words.
• Generative models for many scenarios.

Recurrent NNs

• Text: exploit "temporal" relation between words.
• Generative models for many scenarios.

NLP + AI = Chatbots!

• Messaging apps as a uniform and familiar UI.
• Natural language as a new UI element.

AI is not only ML

• Knowledge representation
• Action languages
• Automated logical reasoning
• Verification
• ...

Takeaways

Applications?

• The range can be confusing.
• From analyzing item transactions that we mentioned in the beginning..
• ..to AI that we fear that it may one day rule the world!

Applications?

• ML research and tools progress rapidly.
• Computing resources progress rapidly.

Applications?

• On the one side you can use "black box" methods for implementing "users who liked X also liked Y".
• On the other side you can expect that it is feasible to use lots of data to do problem solving of the form:
  • "evaluate this situation based on inputs";
  • "decide the best action based on inputs";
  • "classify data into categories";
  • combinations of all of the above.

It starts here

• There is a vast (vast) amount of information online.
• Here's some introductory tutorials on ML and DL.
  • Machine Learning theory: An introductory primer.
  • An introduction to Deep Learning from
    Perceptrons to Deep Networks.
  • Click on the slide images to go to relevant posts!
• Deep Learning Book
• Tensor programming tutorials with Python
• There is a big need for more practitioners to apply these methods in many domains.