Top Trends in AI in 2018 Posted on : Jul 14 - 2018

According to Gartner’s hype cycle of emerging technologies, 2017; Deep Learning and Machine Learning have reached the peak of inflated expectations. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Deep Reinforcement Learning are in the phase of innovation trigger.

We are in 2018. The sentiment over Artificial Intelligence (AI) is euphoric. Every technology firm is jumping on the AI first bandwagon. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba are pushing the frontiers. There are a plethora of smaller players that are doing cutting-edge work in a niche area. AI is permeating into everyday lives.

As an active practitioner in this field, my views on the top AI trends to look out for in 2018 are as follows:

Firstly, let’s get the context of AI correct.

AI encompasses the following:

Machine Learning (subset of AI)

Deep Learning (subset of Machine Learning)

Trend #1: Machine Learning to Automated Machine Learning

A typical machine learning process involves the following stages:

A data scientist spends a lot of time in understanding the data. A data scientist tries to fit multiple models. They try out multiple algorithms to find the best model fitment that provides the optimal result.

Automated machine learning attempts to automate the process of performing exploratory analysis. It tries to automate the process of finding hidden patterns. It automates the training of multiple algorithms. In short, automated machine learning saves a lot of data scientist time. Data scientist spends lesser time in spending on model building and more time on evaluation. Automated machine learning is also a blessing for non-data scientists. It helps them to build decent machine learning models without deep-diving into the mathematics of data science.

In 2018, I see that this trend will become mainstream. Google recently launched AutoML in their cloud computing platform. There are niche companies like Data Robot who specialise in this area and are becoming mainstream. View More