Machine Learning Making a Difference Today !!

I get to work with an amazing group of people. The things we create, the things we invent and just the things we do are mind boggling for such a small team. You know things are going well when you sit through a demo from one of the team and your just left thinking…… wow!!

I firmly believe that AI and machine learning will have a significant impact on us all and in a positive, ethical and truly enlightening way. I also focus on what can be done now and what can we get business value out of today.

Well let me tell you about the demo I just watched. In psychometric testing the items (also known as questions to us mere mortals) only have a certain lifespan. Over time these items get seen by lots of people and these people start to know the answers and they generally get “exposed”. The item then must be retired and a new one reproduced and we used to do that manually.

A psych would design an item, test the item, then get it validated etc etc and this would take many human hours by our R&D team. We can now turn our items into features (numeric representations) and get a machine to produce similar items!!!

Not only does this save us hundreds of man hours but it produces a more reliable and better measure of human ability. Let me give you an example, below is an example of a puzzle item and it has a number of solutions, together with its size, number of shapes , position of blank spaces and other features it has a difficulty rating.

We can now tell the machine to produce a similar item with similar difficulty characteristics and based on what it has learnt will produce a new puzzle …. Brilliant!!

That puzzle can then be feed into our normal validation process and once data is collected and its verified the item performs as expected … an old item is retired and a new one takes its place… did I mention its brilliant!!!

Ah but is it right?, what if there is an error? What if its not ethical? … Here is where another key factor comes in, a human in the loop. Until we are 100% satisfied that the process is producing great results and is always producing items that are solvable by a human, then it gets checked by a human.

Is it flashy, maybe not (but it is to us). Is it a robot going across a stage recognizing people, No , but this is real machine learning making a difference to our business and to our assessments … Today !!

Incredible!!

PS : These views are mine and not of any organisation that I work for or have worked for. The purpose of my articles are to begin a debate and not to propagate a singular point of view, and hence comments and shares are appreciated.