Daily Archives: June 3, 2017

Pacific Standard

Alexander Peysakhovich's Theory on Artificial Intelligence Pacific Standard He's a scientist in Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab, as well as a prolific scholar, having posted five papers in 2016 alone. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won a teaching award, and has published articles in the New ...

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Alexander Peysakhovich's Theory on Artificial Intelligence - Pacific Standard

While we worry about artificial intelligence driving us into unemployment, a lot of job positions remain vacant and a large percentage of applicants never hear back from employers.

This is largely due to the inefficiency of the manual recruitment tools and processes, which make it extremely hard for employers to find the right candidates. Among problems that recruiters struggle with are company job boards and applicant tracking systems that fail to deliver, email threads that become unmanageable, resumes that get lost in the corporate hiring pipeline and online job posts that become cluttered with low quality applications.

Fortunately, developments in artificial intelligence have created a huge potential to fix the problems of antiquated hiring systems and accelerate the process to make recruiters more productive.

A handful of software vendors are incorporating AI algorithms into their tools in order to automate tasks such as examining resumes, sending follow up emails, or finding potential candidates for your companys new vacancies.

Beamery, a candidate relationship management software, uses machine learning software to enhance its clients applicant tracking systems and build relationships with their candidates. Beamery searches across social media channels to find and parse information and fill the gaps in candidates profiles.

The company, which provides its service to Facebook and VMware among others, uses data mining algorithms to keep track of interactions between candidates and employers to find the best candidates to engage. The service can help companies scale their recruitment efforts without the need for large teams.

Alexander Mann Solutions, a recruitment outsourcing and consultancy services provider that made early investments in AI, creates profiles of candidates by processing their resumes and extracting information that is publicly available on the web. The company uses AI to analyze the data and determine which candidates are best suited for each job role.

ThisWay Global, another recruitment platform, has tried to incorporate AI while avoiding bias, a problem that exists in both humans and machines. ThisWay focuses on gathering skills data instead of identifiable information such as gender, race and age, and it uses that information to match the employers requirements.

Automating mundane tasks will help recruiters perform better by freeing up their time and enabling them to engage applicants at a more personal level.

Another interesting development in the space is the advent of AI-powered assistants that help streamline the process of seeking jobs and hiring talent.

An example is Mya, a recruiting assistant that automates up to 75% of the recruiting process. On its front end, Mya provides a chatbot that applicants can communicate with through its native environment or popular messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger.

Instead of waiting for a recruiter, applicants can get immediate feedback on their applications. Mya uses Natural Language Processing to examine candidate data and pose relevant questions to fill the gap. Applicants in turn can query the assistant on topics such as company culture and hiring process. Whenever Mya cant answer a question, it will ask human recruiters. The assistant constantly learns from its interactions to become more efficient at its work.

Mya subsequently processes the data to rank candidates based on several factors, including their qualification and level of engagement.

JobBot, another AI-powered chatbot, aims to optimize the recruitment of hourly workers, a labor market that is growing in demand and hard to manage. JobBot plugs-in to platforms such as Craigslist and Indeed and interviews applicants immediately after they apply. The assistant uses AI to assess and rank candidates and book interviews with the staff.

Tests show that applicants that go through AI assistants are much more likely to get a response from their employers.

Being more responsive to job applications will ultimately have a positive impact on a companys customer relationship management, because applicants that dont hear back from an employer are less likely to buy from it in the future.

Other assistants are focused on helping out skilled workers find their next job. One example is Yodas, a bot that asks a series of questions, analyzes your skills and brings back job listings along with its own assessment of the employer. For the moment Yodas works for software engineers only, but the company plans to expand to other domains in the future.

Jobo, an HR chatbot, provides a similar service. You can provide it with your LinkedIn profile address and resume and let it search for jobs that fit your skill-set and send you alarms. Alternatively you can query Jobo for jobs in your area of expertise and apply directly through the conversational interface.

EstherBot, another interesting project, helps turn your resume into an interactive chatbot that interacts with potential employers.

Ironically, the same technology that isbecoming known as a job destroyer might facilitate your way into your next job position.

Read next: Understand data science with access to dozens of cool courses - for less than $40

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How artificial intelligence optimizes recruitment - TNW

SAN JOSE >> With iPhone sales slowing and the last new Apple product released two years ago, expectations are building for what the company will reveal next week at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Some Apple watchers are counting on artificial intelligence.

With Facebook, Microsoft and Google emphasizing AI in their conferences over the past two months, market analysts believe it is Apples turn. As the race for artificial intelligence heats up in Silicon Valley, some worry that Apple is already behind the game.

If Apple skips AI, I would consider that a significant miss on their opportunity, said John Jackson, a Boston-based analyst for IDC. Apple is late to this game. There is no other trick up their sleeve around this.

Apple, long known for its secrecy, declined to discuss specifics of the event but emailed a statement that its global developer community has earned more than $70 billion since the App Store launched in 2008.

Rumors and early reports indicate the Cupertino tech giant may release a new iPad pro, and according to Bloomberg, a Siri-controlled home speaker to challenge Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Gene Munster, a venture capitalist at Loup Ventures and a longtime Apple watcher, said a home speaker would be a step in the right direction for Apple.

Artificial intelligence is fundamental to every company now, Munster said. We knew Apple was going to improve on Siri, and (the speaker) seems to line up. It makes logical sense.

In addition to the Siri speaker, rumors of a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, a 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2, an updated MacBook Pro and a new iOS 11 have circulated on the Internet.

The five-day conference to be attended by more than 5000 developers who each paid $1599 after winning a lottery is moving from San Francisco to San Jose, where it will be held for the first time since 2002. Apple CEO Tim Cook will give the keynote speech in McEnery Convention Center at 10 a.m. on Monday. His speech will be streamed live on Apples website, or through the WWDC iOS app.

Some experts pushed back on the notion that Apple is behind in the AI race, saying Siri is not the only AI-driven technology built by Apple. But they acknowledged that companies such as Amazon and Google have made smart AI-driven devices marketable Google identifies itself as an AI first company as Apple has mostly worked behind closed curtains.

For the average Joe on the street, AI for Amazon is Echo and Alexa, said Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies. Apple just chose not to label everything AI. Apple chose to let our experience with its devices speak for itself. But I think we are at a point where AI does matter in the advertising spiel.

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In recent years, Apple has seen a decline in the sales of its main products, most noticeably the iPhone. Apple reported 50.8 million iPhones sold worldwide in the second quarter of 2017, down from 51.2 million a year earlier. Expectations are that Apple will unveil a new iPhone in the fall for the devices 10th anniversary.

Apple Watch, its latest product from 2015, saw its 2016 sales number double from the year before, according to Cook in the last earnings call. Apple does not release Apple Watch sales numbers, but some analysts have estimated about 12 million of the devices were sold last year.

If reports of a Siri home speaker are correct, Apple will be entering a growing smart home market with a closing window of opportunity. Both Amazon Echo and Google Home proved to be commercial successes. At its I/O conference in May, Google announced more features to its Home speaker, including the ability to place free calls, connect with Bluetooth and control more apps such as HBO Now and Hulu.

Apples Siri speaker reportedly comes with a virtual surround sound technology that give it an edge in sound quality over its competitors, according to Bloomberg.

But the biggest draw may be its compatibility with other Apple devices and services. The speaker will likely be connected to the iPhone and Apple TV and services like Apple Music and the HomeKit home automation system.

Although skeptical that current Amazon Echo owners will switch over to the Apple speaker, analysts believe Apple may be able to bridge the gap.

Apple has done a great job sewing up households as Apple households, said Jackson. A lot of us own iPhones and MacBooks. But it hasnt been central to their messaging. Creating this type of innovation is darn hard, so theyre late.

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Apple's developer's conference may highlight artificial intelligence - Santa Cruz Sentinel

One of the biggest civil liberties issues raised by technology today is whether, when, and how we allow computer algorithms to make decisions that affect peoples lives. Were starting to see this in particular in the criminal justice system. For the past several years the ACLU of Idaho has been involved in a fascinating case that, so far as I can tell, has received very little if any national coverage, but which raises fascinating issues that are core to the new era of big data that we are entering.

The case, K.W. v. Armstrong, is a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU representing about 4,000 Idahoans with developmental and intellectual disabilities who receive assistance from the states Medicaid program. I spoke recently with Richard Eppink, Legal Director of the ACLU of Idaho, and he told me about the case:

It originally started because a bunch of people were contacting me and saying that that the amount of assistance that they were being given each year by the state Medicaid program was being suddenly cut by 20 or 30 percent. I thought the case would be a simple matter of saying to the state, Okay, tell us why these dollar figures dropped by so much.

What happens in this particular program is that each year you go to an assessment interview with an assessor who is a contractor with the Medicaid program, and they ask you a bunch of questions. The assessor plugs these into an Excel spreadsheet, and it comes out with this dollar figure amount, which is how much that you can spend on your services that year.

But when we asked them how the dollar amounts were arrived at, the Medicaid program came back and said, we cant tell you that, its a trade secret.

And so thats what led to the lawsuit. We said youve got to release this, you cant just be coming up with these numbers using a secret formula. And then, within a couple of weeks of filing the case, the court agreed and told the state, yeah, you have to disclose that. In a ruling from the bench the judge said its just a blatant due process violation to tell people youre going to reduce their health care services by $20,000 in a year for some secret reason. The judge also ruled on Medicaid Act groundsthere are requirements in the act that if youre going to reduce somebodys coverage, you have to explain why.

That was five years ago. And once we got their formula, we hired a couple of experts to dig into it and figure out what it was doinghow the whole process was working, both the assessmentthe formula itselfand the data that was used to create it.

Eppink said the experts that they hired found big problems with what the state Medicaid program was doing:

There were a lot of things wrong with it. First of all, the data they used to come up with their formula for setting peoples assistance limits was corrupt. They were using historical data to predict what was going to happen in the future. But they had to throw out two-thirds of the records they had before they came up with the formula because of data entry errors and data that didnt make sense. So they were supposedly predicting what this population was going to need, but the historical data they were using was flawed, and they were only able to use a small sub-set of it. And bad data produces bad results.

A second thing is that the state itself had found in its own testing that there were problemsdisproportionate results for different parts of the state that couldnt be explained.

And the third thing is that our experts found that there were fundamental statistical flaws in the way that the formula itself was structured.

Idahos Medicaid bureaucracy was making arbitrary and irrational decisions with big impacts on peoples lives, and fighting efforts to make it explain how it was reaching those decisions. This lack of transparency is unconscionable. Algorithms are often highly complicated, and when you marry them to human social/legal/bureaucratic systems, the complexity only skyrockets. That means public transparency is vital. The experience in Idaho only confirms this.

I asked Eppink, if Idahos decisionmaking system was so irrational, why did the state rely on it?

I dont actually get the sense they even knew how bad this was. Its just this bias we all have for computerized resultswe dont question them. Its a cultural, maybe even biological thing, but when a computer generates somethingwhen you have a statistician, who looks at some data, and comes up with a formulawe just trust that formula, without asking hey wait a second, how is this actually working? So I think the state fell victim to this complacency that we have with computerized decisionmaking.

Secondly, I dont think anybody at the Medicaid program really thought about how this was working. When we took the depositions in the case I asked each person we deposed from the program to explain to me how they got from these assessment figures to this number, and everybody pointed a finger at somebody else. I dont know that, but this other person does. So I would take a deposition from that other person, and that person pointed at somebody else, and eventually everybody was pointing around in a circle.

And so, that machine bias or complacency, combined with this idea that nobody really fully understood thisit was a lack of understanding of the process on the part of everybody; everybody assumed somebody else knew how it worked.

This, of course, is one of the time-honored horrors of bureaucracies: the fragmentation of intelligence that (as I have discussed) allows hundreds or thousands of intelligent, ethical individuals to behave in ways that are collectively stupid and/or unethical. I have written before about a fascinating paper by Danielle Citron entitled Technological Due Process, which looks at the problems and solutions that arise when translating human rules and policies into computer code. This case shows those problems in action.

So what are the solutions in this case? Eppink:

A couple years ago after wed done all that discovery and worked with the experts, we put it together in a summary judgment package for the judge. And last year the court held that the formula itself was so bad that it was unconstitutionalviolated due processbecause it was effectively producing arbitrary results for a large number of people. And the judge ordered that the Medicaid program basically overhaul the way it was doing this. That includes regular testing, regular updating, and the use of quality data. And thats where we are now; theyre in the process of doing that.

My hunch is that this kind of thing is happening a lot across the United States and across the world as people move to these computerized systems. Nobody understands them, they think that somebody else doesbut in the end we trust them. Even the people in charge of these programs have this trust that these things are working.

And the unfortunate part, as we learned in this case, is that it costs a lot of money to actually test these things and make sure theyre working right. It cost us probably $50,000, and I dont think that a state Medicaid program is going to be motivated to spend the money that it takes to make sure these things are working right. Or even these private companies that are running credit predictions, housing predictions, recidivism predictionsunless the cost is internalized on them through litigation, and its understood that hey, eventually somebodys going to have the money to test this, so it better be working.

As our technological train hurtles down the tracks, we need policymakers at the federal, state, and local level who have a good understanding of the pitfalls involved in using computers to make decisions that affect peoples lives.

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Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence Decisionmaking Highlighted In Idaho ACLU Case - ACLU (blog)

The Indian Express

Artificial Intelligence: Chinese internet company teams up with German firms to make self-driving cars The Indian Express A Chinese firm specialising in artificial intelligence (AI) has partnered with two German companies to make self-driving systems and vehicles. China's Baidu will cooperate with the two German firms -automotive suppliers Bosch and Continental AG in ... and more »

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Artificial Intelligence: Chinese internet company teams up with German firms to make self-driving cars - The Indian Express