Page 14 - FCW, March/April 2020

Artificial Intelligence
The perfect storm
behind the rise of AI
More data, affordable computing power and better algorithms are making AI accessible for government
Jay Boisseau
AI and HPC Technology Strategist, Dell Technologies
processors and the adoption of graphics processing units make it possible to perform a tremendous number of computations on
a vast amount of data. Along the way, the algorithms used for those computations have matured, adding the third element to the perfect storm for AI adoption.
Making sure AI is a force for good
Companies like Dell have helped commoditize computing and put it in
the hands of government, companies
and consumers. We provide vast storage capabilities for collecting and managing all that data, and together we can use advanced
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REPRESENTS a powerful
way to understand present conditions and predict future conditions. Given enough rich, high-quality, unbiased data, AI gives us the ability to create models that continue to learn and provide meaningful insights on an unprecedented scale.
Other analytics techniques do not require as much data to gain some understanding, but when there are massive amounts of data, machine learning and deep learning can produce more powerful insights, particularly when it comes to the sort of unstructured data agencies are awash in — free-form text, audio and video.
With AI, agencies can take advantage of object classification, video analytics, natural language processing and translation of unstructured data.
Ultimately, the technology gives us the ability to understand the present better by uncovering patterns and features that would have eluded humans or other analytics techniques.
Using data to understand
and predict
We humans have a fundamental desire to answer four key questions: What is going on? Why is it happening? What’s going to happen next? And how can I influence it?
The government exists to help and protect people and our interests. To do that, it needs to understand current conditions
in a range of areas — including social, economic and military defense — and be able to predict what might happen next. The more data the government can collect and
analyze, the better it can protect us and our interests.
The ideas behind AI are not new. However, three elements have come together to create a perfect storm and
push AI to the forefront. First, our ability
to capture more digital data has grown exponentially. Although we’ve understood some basic ideas about machine learning and deep learning for decades, it’s only been in the last decade that we’ve had enough data to use those techniques in interesting enterprise, research and government applications.
Second, the advent of powerful
davooda/Shutterstock/FCW Staff
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