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#431872 AI Uses Titan Supercomputer to Create ...
You don’t have to dig too deeply into the archive of dystopian science fiction to uncover the horror that intelligent machines might unleash. The Matrix and The Terminator are probably the most well-known examples of self-replicating, intelligent machines attempting to enslave or destroy humanity in the process of building a brave new digital world.
The prospect of artificially intelligent machines creating other artificially intelligent machines took a big step forward in 2017. However, we’re far from the runaway technological singularity futurists are predicting by mid-century or earlier, let alone murderous cyborgs or AI avatar assassins.
The first big boost this year came from Google. The tech giant announced it was developing automated machine learning (AutoML), writing algorithms that can do some of the heavy lifting by identifying the right neural networks for a specific job. Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), using the most powerful supercomputer in the US, have developed an AI system that can generate neural networks as good if not better than any developed by a human in less than a day.
It can take months for the brainiest, best-paid data scientists to develop deep learning software, which sends data through a complex web of mathematical algorithms. The system is modeled after the human brain and known as an artificial neural network. Even Google’s AutoML took weeks to design a superior image recognition system, one of the more standard operations for AI systems today.
Computing Power
Of course, Google Brain project engineers only had access to 800 graphic processing units (GPUs), a type of computer hardware that works especially well for deep learning. Nvidia, which pioneered the development of GPUs, is considered the gold standard in today’s AI hardware architecture. Titan, the supercomputer at ORNL, boasts more than 18,000 GPUs.
The ORNL research team’s algorithm, called MENNDL for Multinode Evolutionary Neural Networks for Deep Learning, isn’t designed to create AI systems that cull cute cat photos from the internet. Instead, MENNDL is a tool for testing and training thousands of potential neural networks to work on unique science problems.
That requires a different approach from the Google and Facebook AI platforms of the world, notes Steven Young, a postdoctoral research associate at ORNL who is on the team that designed MENNDL.
“We’ve discovered that those [neural networks] are very often not the optimal network for a lot of our problems, because our data, while it can be thought of as images, is different,” he explains to Singularity Hub. “These images, and the problems, have very different characteristics from object detection.”
AI for Science
One application of the technology involved a particle physics experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab researchers are interested in understanding neutrinos, high-energy subatomic particles that rarely interact with normal matter but could be a key to understanding the early formation of the universe. One Fermilab experiment involves taking a sort of “snapshot” of neutrino interactions.
The team wanted the help of an AI system that could analyze and classify Fermilab’s detector data. MENNDL evaluated 500,000 neural networks in 24 hours. Its final solution proved superior to custom models developed by human scientists.
In another case involving a collaboration with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, MENNDL improved the error rate of a human-designed algorithm for identifying mitochondria inside 3D electron microscopy images of brain tissue by 30 percent.
“We are able to do better than humans in a fraction of the time at designing networks for these sort of very different datasets that we’re interested in,” Young says.
What makes MENNDL particularly adept is its ability to define the best or most optimal hyperparameters—the key variables—to tackle a particular dataset.
“You don’t always need a big, huge deep network. Sometimes you just need a small network with the right hyperparameters,” Young says.
A Virtual Data Scientist
That’s not dissimilar to the approach of a company called H20.ai, a startup out of Silicon Valley that uses open source machine learning platforms to “democratize” AI. It applies machine learning to create business solutions for Fortune 500 companies, including some of the world’s biggest banks and healthcare companies.
“Our software is more [about] pattern detection, let’s say anti-money laundering or fraud detection or which customer is most likely to churn,” Dr. Arno Candel, chief technology officer at H2O.ai, tells Singularity Hub. “And that kind of insight-generating software is what we call AI here.”
The company’s latest product, Driverless AI, promises to deliver the data scientist equivalent of a chessmaster to its customers (the company claims several such grandmasters in its employ and advisory board). In other words, the system can analyze a raw dataset and, like MENNDL, automatically identify what features should be included in the computer model to make the most of the data based on the best “chess moves” of its grandmasters.
“So we’re using those algorithms, but we’re giving them the human insights from those data scientists, and we automate their thinking,” he explains. “So we created a virtual data scientist that is relentless at trying these ideas.”
Inside the Black Box
Not unlike how the human brain reaches a conclusion, it’s not always possible to understand how a machine, despite being designed by humans, reaches its own solutions. The lack of transparency is often referred to as the AI “black box.” Experts like Young say we can learn something about the evolutionary process of machine learning by generating millions of neural networks and seeing what works well and what doesn’t.
“You’re never going to be able to completely explain what happened, but maybe we can better explain it than we currently can today,” Young says.
Transparency is built into the “thought process” of each particular model generated by Driverless AI, according to Candel.
The computer even explains itself to the user in plain English at each decision point. There is also real-time feedback that allows users to prioritize features, or parameters, to see how the changes improve the accuracy of the model. For example, the system may include data from people in the same zip code as it creates a model to describe customer turnover.
“That’s one of the advantages of our automatic feature engineering: it’s basically mimicking human thinking,” Candel says. “It’s not just neural nets that magically come up with some kind of number, but we’re trying to make it statistically significant.”
Moving Forward
Much digital ink has been spilled over the dearth of skilled data scientists, so automating certain design aspects for developing artificial neural networks makes sense. Experts agree that automation alone won’t solve that particular problem. However, it will free computer scientists to tackle more difficult issues, such as parsing the inherent biases that exist within the data used by machine learning today.
“I think the world has an opportunity to focus more on the meaning of things and not on the laborious tasks of just fitting a model and finding the best features to make that model,” Candel notes. “By automating, we are pushing the burden back for the data scientists to actually do something more meaningful, which is think about the problem and see how you can address it differently to make an even bigger impact.”
The team at ORNL expects it can also make bigger impacts beginning next year when the lab’s next supercomputer, Summit, comes online. While Summit will boast only 4,600 nodes, it will sport the latest and greatest GPU technology from Nvidia and CPUs from IBM. That means it will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan, the world’s fifth-most powerful supercomputer today.
“We’ll be able to look at much larger problems on Summit than we were able to with Titan and hopefully get to a solution much faster,” Young says.
It’s all in a day’s work.
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#431671 The Doctor in the Machine: How AI Is ...
Artificial intelligence has received its fair share of hype recently. However, it’s hype that’s well-founded: IDC predicts worldwide spend on AI and cognitive computing will culminate to a whopping $46 billion (with a “b”) by 2020, and all the tech giants are jumping on board faster than you can say “ROI.” But what is AI, exactly?
According to Hilary Mason, AI today is being misused as a sort of catch-all term to basically describe “any system that uses data to do anything.” But it’s so much more than that. A truly artificially intelligent system is one that learns on its own, one that’s capable of crunching copious amounts of data in order to create associations and intelligently mimic actual human behavior.
It’s what powers the technology anticipating our next online purchase (Amazon), or the virtual assistant that deciphers our voice commands with incredible accuracy (Siri), or even the hipster-friendly recommendation engine that helps you discover new music before your friends do (Pandora). But AI is moving past these consumer-pleasing “nice-to-haves” and getting down to serious business: saving our butts.
Much in the same way robotics entered manufacturing, AI is making its mark in healthcare by automating mundane, repetitive tasks. This is especially true in the case of detecting cancer. By leveraging the power of deep learning, algorithms can now be trained to distinguish between sets of pixels in an image that represents cancer versus sets that don’t—not unlike how Facebook’s image recognition software tags pictures of our friends without us having to type in their names first. This software can then go ahead and scour millions of medical images (MRIs, CT scans, etc.) in a single day to detect anomalies on a scope that humans just aren’t capable of. That’s huge.
As if that wasn’t enough, these algorithms are constantly learning and evolving, getting better at making these associations with each new data set that gets fed to them. Radiology, dermatology, and pathology will experience a giant upheaval as tech giants and startups alike jump in to bring these deep learning algorithms to a hospital near you.
In fact, some already are: the FDA recently gave their seal of approval for an AI-powered medical imaging platform that helps doctors analyze and diagnose heart anomalies. This is the first time the FDA has approved a machine learning application for use in a clinical setting.
But how efficient is AI compared to humans, really? Well, aside from the obvious fact that software programs don’t get bored or distracted or have to check Facebook every twenty minutes, AI is exponentially better than us at analyzing data.
Take, for example, IBM’s Watson. Watson analyzed genomic data from both tumor cells and healthy cells and was ultimately able to glean actionable insights in a mere 10 minutes. Compare that to the 160 hours it would have taken a human to analyze that same data. Diagnoses aside, AI is also being leveraged in pharmaceuticals to aid in the very time-consuming grunt work of discovering new drugs, and all the big players are getting involved.
But AI is far from being just a behind-the-scenes player. Gartner recently predicted that by 2025, 50 percent of the population will rely on AI-powered “virtual personal health assistants” for their routine primary care needs. What this means is that consumer-facing voice and chat-operated “assistants” (think Siri or Cortana) would, in effect, serve as a central hub of interaction for all our connected health devices and the algorithms crunching all our real-time biometric data. These assistants would keep us apprised of our current state of well-being, acting as a sort of digital facilitator for our personal health objectives and an always-on health alert system that would notify us when we actually need to see a physician.
Slowly, and thanks to the tsunami of data and advancements in self-learning algorithms, healthcare is transitioning from a reactive model to more of a preventative model—and it’s completely upending the way care is delivered. Whether Elon Musk’s dystopian outlook on AI holds any weight or not is yet to be determined. But one thing’s certain: for the time being, artificial intelligence is saving our lives.
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