Mariojose Palma is a Florida based Artificial Intelligence Expert. Apart from his expertise in AI, he has successfully developed software applications for his clients throughout his career. An advent believer of the fact that AI is there to change the world for the good, Mariojose has written a famous blog ‘COVID-19 scenario planning using Artificial Intelligence’.
In this Interview, he discusses in detail the application of AI in various sectors and what AI holds in future for us.
Mariojose, Thank you for talking with us. Kindly describe your journey as an Entrepreneur so far.
This great journey started at the age of 15 years old when I began designing websites and developing applications which could play my favorite online games and of course win my friends because while I was sleeping or studying, my computer would be playing for me. Since that moment without me consciously knowing, I was trying to emulate human behavior through a machine to get certain actions as a response.
Later on, I started to work with different companies in my home country Venezuela, where they had the need to automatize processes taking data from different sources and with that data have the application make different decisions on its own.
One of the most interesting projects I worked on in my US first years was to develop an application which would obtain and show cars and boats real-time data in a user-friendly manner to make better decisions. In that time, I formally learned a lot about AI and how to apply it in a large-scale project considering smaller time frames where we would make it possible to get real-time data in 300 milliseconds which at the time was considered an “impossible” thing to achieve.
Currently I find myself working as a consultant for several companies in the financial and real state fields most of the time.
They way we perceive AI and ML has changed rapidly in the last few years. In your view, how things have changed in the last few years.
In my opinion, AI has substantially grown in the past few years. It just didn’t exist before, as a programmer you were limited to certain conditioning elements (ifs and else) to make a software work based on the current data but that did not mean it was an intelligent software as we see it now.
It is incredible the high number of Artificial intelligence frameworks that’s been born and keep getting better in only five years like TensorFlow, Keras and Cognitive Tools from Microsoft. These frameworks help to a great extent to comprehend how to solve AI problems without having the need of diving in each and every neuron of the neural network. The way AI has evolved makes me believe that with today’s tools it is possible to construct superior and stronger solutions, not only for high-end companies but for everybody in a very near future.
How can AI revolutionize health sector? Do you see its potential in the fight against Covid 19?
It seem to me AI could be of great help in the health sector specially in the preventive side due to the large amount of data a single person can have, considering all the family history for example, it is humanly impossible to analyze all the data from everyone, that is the reason AI will revolutionize this industry satisfying the need for more accurate percentages and patterns. Imagine how helpful would be for health care providers to view on their screens the key points of the patient they are about to see, that indeed would help recognize patters of symptoms and catch up with any disease in its early development.
In the case of already existing diseases like Covid-19 AI would be crucial because as I mentioned before the large amount of data that needs to be processed in order to find the best solution takes a lot of time and it is just impossible for humans to do it faster, in the meantime people die, AI is going to be essential in the fight of viruses like Covid-19.
In your experience, which sector has best used the powers of AI? Also, what are some of the untapped powers of AI?
I would definitely say the automotive industry is one of the pioneers using AI since we now have self-driving cars available for the public to buy. Cybersecurity of course, implements AI to detect credit cards frauds based on the transactions data, to name one.
The education industry could take a great deal of advantages from AI taking into consideration each and every student’s data, how does he learn? what does he likes best to learn? which is the best way he learns more? Is he a visual learner? Is he a participation-focus learner? There are so many things to be considered so our students can perform at their best, therefore AI will be a teacher’s best friend in order for them to personalize education and reward each student the proper way to maximize their outcome.
There are concerns around how AI can be detrimental to certain sectors. Moreover, there are fears around the possible misuse of the powers of AI. Are these fears justified?
As every new industry has faced in their beginnings with difficulties due to the instant and natural rejection we feel towards the unknown, AI industry is not the exception owing to the apparent fear of AI overtaking most of our jobs, such as repetitive kinds of jobs where machines take over, this staff needs to reroute and find a more challenging job which the machine itself can’t do, for instance controlling or repairing the machines.
The dark side of AI is not the AI itself but the humans behind it. AI could be wonderful or it could be dangerous if it ends up in the wrong hands, what I mean is that the same AI used in cybersecurity that prevents a credit card fraud could be used to actually perform the fraud, “attack” applications, servers, etc. What’s more there’s something called “Deep fake” which is an AI able to make any public person’s face “say” what you want, with the person’s voice and expressions. The way it works is by allowing you to video tape yourself saying whatever you want to say and the AI will transform that into the celebrity or public person of your choice, as a consequence in the near future we are not going to know for sure if what we are watching was recorded indeed by that person.
What future Trends do you see in Software Development?
In my view the trends will be towards developing applications with AI to communicate with us as if they were humans too. For example, the bots used in customer service call centers which sometimes are helpful and most of the time annoying, in this new trend, humans are not going to identify whether they are talking to a human or a bot, making this calls a lot more satisfactory and keeping the wait times very low. On the other hand, the people working on call centers are going to encounter the AI threat.
What suggestion would you like to give to someone who wants to make a career in AI and ML?
If you ask me, I think anyone who wants to learn can do so, there’s so much information on the internet and YouTube, anyone could learn anything. I’m not saying you’ll become an AI expert in one day, week or even a year but you will definitely have a better understanding on AI. I’ve been working in the AI industry for over five years and I keep learning with every project I involve myself in and It excites me that there’s still a lot more to be discovered.
