How AI will change our lives in the near future, Alex Liu

Interesting interview with Dr. Alex Liu, former IBM Chief Data Scientist who spearheaded Watson

What is your background briefly?

I studied statistics and sociology at Stanford, then worked as a researcher of many issues including health care, entrepreneurship, marketing, risk etc. After many years in research, I taught research methods and data analysis in universities before I took
position as lead data scientist at a few companies including IBM. Now I am the founder and CEO of the RMDS Lab.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Yes, I have always been working on data analysis, and took a strong statistical learning approach with application orientation that led me to machine learning on big data and AI now.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

Using ecosystem approach to improve data and AI success for everyone to elevate their competitiveness.

Why did you get involved with AI?

First started with AI to aid complicated data analysis, as I think it is necessary to get AI assistance to complete good data analysis efficiently. Then, I found it is necessary to have AI assistance for almost everything to be competitive enough.

How can AI help with weather predictions?

AI can help speeding up data analysis, and help researchers to take care of some tedious stuff like data cleaning so researchers can focus on high level important work like building models. AI can make using more data and more models easy.

Re AI and healthcare what are the advantages, privacy concerns and regulatory implications?

In healthcare, a big amount of information is available beyondhuman capabilities. For example, if all the research papers, doctors’ notes, experiment reports … about certain cancer got printed out and piled up, it could be higher than any mountains in US. Not any doctor can read them all. Only AI can process all the available info
about certain diseases so to assist doctors for diagnostics.

On the patients’ side, of course privacy concerns are important, but AI can help to manage privacies and help regulatory compliance.

RE AI and education, why standardized tests will be abolished very soon?

Teachers were limited by time and resources to evaluate students individually, and to offer education one to one. But, we all know each student is differently. And standardized tests force ranking students linearly on some narrow set of standards that hurt education.

On the other hands, AI can pass tests with high score easily. Why do we want to engage in any activities that machine can do better?

Tell us about AI and the future of insurance?

Insurance companies will offer more individualized services and coverages soon, with more data available from people, and also more data to be collected by sensors and IoT.

More available data and better prediction can also help insurance to cover more people and more events.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

Go to my company web sites of www.rmdslab.com and www.grmds.org, or www.researchmethods.org/alex

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

I think AI will become people’s assistants inseparable and with AI,
data professionals can produce good social impacts, for which our RMDS  has developed a special Impact Score aiming to assess good social  impact of all data and AI projects.

More about Alex ->

Dr. Alex Liu, former IBM Chief Data Scientist who spearheaded Watson. His lab, Research Methods and Data Science (RMDS) Lab is hosting its inaugural conference convening the world’s leading experts in this field this upcoming weekend in Pasadena. RMDS is the world’s leading non-profit organization to support over 30,000 data scientists around the globe, with training, strategic partnerships, and a council of the world’s leading data scientists who have advised NASA, MIT, Harvard, McKinsey, and more. 

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