AI has revolutionized almost every aspect of human lives - from healthcare to agriculture, and from fashion to political campaigns. There is a lot of excitement as well as fear around the future promises of AI. Yet, speculations abound that we are soon going to hit the third AI winter. In this talk, I will try to address some these questions and speculations. I will use examples from the domain of Natural language processing (NLP) - allegedly one of the hardest areas of AI - to illustrate what we have achieved, what are the promises offered by the recent advances in deep learning and why there are certain problems that are too difficult for any of the current approaches to handle. I will also highlight the non-AI aspects of AI system building (aka data creation and engineering) which are the unsung foundations of most practical AI systems.

1. SACON 2020
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
Past, Present and Future
Monojit Choudhury
Microsoft Research Lab India
monojitc@microsoft.com
SACON
SACON International 2020
India | Bangalore | February 21 - 22 | Taj Yeshwantpur

2. SACON 2020
I am a Homo
sapiens, not a
machine.

3. SACON 2020
“You want to know how super-intelligent
cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-
blood humans?
Better start by investigating how humans
treat their less intelligent animal cousins.
It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but
it is the best archetype we can actually
observe rather than just imagine.”

4. SACON 2020
Agenda
Deconstruction
• What is AI?
• What AI can (not) do
today?
• What’re the recent
trends?
• Critical Synthesis
• Limitations of current
techniques
• What we should be
worried about
• The way forward

5. What is
Artificial
Intelligence?

6. SACON 2020
What is Artificial
Intelligence?
PREDICTIVE ADAPTIVE
USES MACHINE
LEARNING

7. SACON 2020
AI can …
• Beat grandmasters in Chess, Backgammon and Go
• Understand images as well as humans (computer vision)
• Predict diseases from radiology images better than experts (-
do-)
• Transcribe speech as well as humans (speech recognition)
• Beat world champions in Jeopardy (information extraction/
NLP)
• Translate text as well as humans (machine translation/NLP)

8. SACON 2020
This, AI cannot solve
মােদর গরব মােদর আশা, আ -মির বাংলা ভাষা
Our pride our hope is our Bengali language
Checked on 21st Feb 2020, International Mother
Language Day

9. SACON 2020
The trophy did not fit in the suitcase. It was too big.
It = trophy or suitcase?
Source:The Winograd Schema Challenge
This, AI cannot solve

10. SACON 2020
What can AI
solve today?
McKinsey Global institute analysis

11. SACON 2020
Unlike chess or
backgammon, the rules
of the LANGUAGE
GAME are defined and
redefined by the
language users every
time a game is played.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)

12. SACON 2020
A brief
history of
AI
1950s – 1980s: Rule based systems
Domain experts ruled the world
1990s – 2000s: Basic statistical learning
Domain insights with some data
2000s – 2010s: Large scale supervised
and semi-supervised
learning
Big data with some domain
insight
2010s - : Deep learning
ONLY DATA
Domain
knowledge
Data

13. SACON 2020
DATA-driven AI
DATA
Training
or
Learning
AI System
or Model
Users
User interaction generates data that
feeds back into the system.

14. SACON 2020
Learning
Techniques
DECISIONTREES REGRESSION SUPPORTVECTOR
MACHINES
MAXIMUM
ENTROPY MODEL
BAYESIAN BELIEF
NETWORKS
…

15. SACON 2020
DEEP
LEARNING
THE ALCHEMY
OF THE
21ST CENTURY

16. SACON 2020
Benefits of
Deep
Learning
Thinking fast
vs. Thinking slow.
Universal Approximator
Great at Generalization
No need to define features
Accuracy does not seem to
saturate

17. SACON 2020
March 2018

18. SACON 2020
When it comes to languages, AI is not
inclusive ☹Languages sorted by amount of useful
resources (and therefore, technology)
English
Arabic
Chinese
Spanish
German
French
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Hindi-Urdu
Bengali
Italian
Greek
Swedish
English
Chinese
French
Hindi-Urdu
Telugu
Project ELLORA: Enabling
Low Resource Language
Speakers

19. SACON 2020
Fairness
Accountability
Transparency
Explainability
Data Privacy in the age of AI

20. SACON 2020
“What determines vulnerability to automation
is not so much whether the work concerned is
manual or white-collar but whether or not it is
routine”

21. SACON 2020
Challenges of Human-Aware AI Systems
Our Systems seem
happiest
• Either far away
from humans
• Or in an
adversarial
stance with
humans
Subbarao
Kambhampati:
AAAI 2018 Presidential
Address

22. SACON 2020
A 20 year community roadmap for AI research in the US.August 2019

23. SACON 2020
Thank You
monojitc@microsoft.com

24. What is
Artificial
Intelligence?
A phrase that you use to
attract your customers and
funders
Make sound like you work on
cool, sexy and cutting-edge
stuff
Anything for which neither
the developer nor the user
understands what’s going on.

25. SACON 2020
How much
DATA?
POS Tagging
(#annotated
words)
Machine
Translation
(#parallel
sentences)
Speech
Recognition
(hours of
speech)
1950s-1980s
Rule-based
As much as needed for linguistic analysis
1990s-2000s
Linguistic
insights +
Statistical
10k – 100k 10k-100k 10-100
2000s – 2010s
Big data
100k – 100M 100k – 1M 1o-1000
2010s –
Deep Learning
1M – 1B 1M – 1B 1000 – 10k
Natural languages are fascinating.
Adj Noun Verb Adj
Natural languages are fascinating.
⾃自然语⾔言是迷⼈人的。
Na-tu-ral lan-gua-ges are fa-sci-na-ting

26. SACON 2020
“It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a not
very bad game of chess… Are there imaginable digital computers
which would do well in the imitation game?"
AlanTuring, 1950
“The biggest breakthrough in AI will be when computers
can read and understand information like humans do."
Bill Gates, 2017