In this article, let me narrate a story about my affair with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in particular.

The L😍ve Story

The Early Story

Even before I dived into the field of AI or ML I always had a liking towards smartness quotient in each and every product. Whether it was building robots and infusing them with smartness or just adding intelligence to a small piece of software, I enjoyed it a lot. Regarding ML I just had a rough idea of what it is but nothing more than that.

The Beginning

My actual encounter with ML happened when Darshan gave me an opportunity to be a part of Innovation Labs at Y Media Labs. As most of the people do, I stepped into the field of ML by enrolling in Machine Learning course taught by Stanford Professor Andrew Ng. So the journey began with some inspirational demos and by attending some meetups. Slowly I started reading more articles on ML work and started to gain a wider understanding of the happenings in this domain. The widespread adoption of ML and its application versatility inspired me to dig deeper into the subject. Usage of ML to generate art, or to develop driverless cars, ML just didn’t stop to amaze me and still, it isn’t. And the most recent article that I read deserves a special mention which talked about using ML for predicting if a patient could die soon or not.

My Findings

Probably one of the best realizations was when I started learning about neural networks. The concept of drawing inspiration from the human brain, then modelling it mathematically and then finally implementing it using computer programing was itself amazing. This amalgam of Biology (nature in general), Mathematics and Computer Science is what I think makes ML a beautiful subject.

Mathematics and Machine Learning

No ML stuff can be complete without my first love Mathematics. So, let me highlight few realizations about it.

Once I started using ML libraries such as Tensorflow, my life as a programmer became easy because these libraries abstracted the underlying Math. I am the guy who doesn’t like to implement any stuff without having a complete knowledge of it. So, I started digging deeper into the Math part. Today I firmly believe that anyone can become an ML Engineer with a little bit of effort, but to be an ML Researcher or ML Scientist one needs to have a good hold on Maths. Since I intended on becoming a later one, I enroled for few Math courses at Udacity and started dedicating more time for it. Moreover, I’m of the opinion that a good Math knowledge will give a complete control over ML model and help to tackle any shortcomings in the field.

Happy and sad moments with Maths

My happiest moment with Maths and ML till date is the day when I first built my first word-embedding. The application of word-embedding to language translation just blew my mind. I still remember I could not control my excitement the whole day. This excitement was largely due to the fact that what felt magic (things like language translation, similar search results) till now started seeming so natural due to Maths.

On the contrary, sometimes I felt very sad about my past studies in Mathematics. Since my pre-engineering days, I was very good at Maths. I enjoyed solving problems a lot. But this indeed is a problem I guess. The whole education system trained me to be good at finding solutions to the Maths problems but never trained me to get an intuition about it. The whole education system deserves a dedicated article, but not today.😅 I always thought Statistics would be the dumbest subject I would be studying in my whole life. But as it turns out I’m completely wrong. Only if my education system had made me realize the importance of a subject and gave me an intuition about it, I would have never encountered such situation.

My take on AI fears

Of lately there have been a lot of concern about the usage of AI for wrong reasons. People like Elon Musk have raised their voice on this topic on more than a single occasion. AI definitely has immense power. Finally, it is left for humans to take a stand whether they want to use this immense power for the right or wrong reason. And I totally disagree with the statement that AI will wipe away mankind. There are two main reasons for this, one we still haven’t reached that level of intelligence using AI. Secondly, even if we reach that level of intelligence, I think our brains can build an high-level intelligence that can counter-attack the worst AI fear.

Conclusion

AI especially that too Machine Learning is the magic potion that we all have been waiting for to solve some of the greatest problems faced by mankind. But we need to make sure we just don’t over apply it.😅

Finally, I hope that my love for AI and ML continues for a longer time and there is still a lot to explore together.😀