AI today is all over the news, yet it has not transformed the workplace as promised. We will argue that the reason is that we forgot humans, both as developers of AI (lacking organizational tools in AI development) and as consumers of AI (lacking transparent interfaces). I will show how we deal with these issues at Huaweis Noahs Ark lab where we (AI researchers) work closely with system engineers (our AI consumers).
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Managing the AI process: putting humans (back) in the loop
1. HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD.
www.huawei.com
Managing the AI process:
putting humans (back) in the loop
Balazs Kegl for Noah's Ark Research Lab, Paris
2. HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Page 2
AI research veteran (25 years)
recently crossing over from academic research to industry
Leading a team of 15 at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab
in Paris
Main objective: optimizing engineering systems
Better
Cheaper
More reliable
Safer
More energy efficient
Who am I?
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A typical engineering control system
EngineerSystem
,
Engineer observes
system states and performance indicators,
tunes some parameters time to time
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Automated control, if exists, is based on
deep understanding of the physics
of the system.
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What is AI (in this context)?
Learn the system behavior
based on historical data
and use it for better control
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Meet the data scientist
Highly trained scientific minds
Iterating the scientific method, collecting data, running
a lot of experiments, trial and error
Work on (predictive) "models"
Work alone or in small teams
"Full stack" - little specialization
Build their sandbox
Hate operational constraints imposed by
standardized tools
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Meet the system engineer
Highly trained operators of systems
Responsible for safe operation
Performance is important but secondary (within
limits)
Little incentive of collecting data and let the data
scientist experiment
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Challenge
The system engineer is the
consumer of AI
(so interfaces should be built between AI and engineer)
And also the
crucial collaborator of the data scientist
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SE:I would like you to use AI to control my engineering system.
DS: Ok, can I access your system with an algorithm which takes control of
the system, possibly breaking it sometimes in order to learn?
SE: Over my dead body.
DS: OK, do you have a simulator which I can use to learn a control policy?
SE: We are working on it. But in any case, it will never be good enough to
be trusted.
DS: Can you execute a new control policy, after thorough checking and with
human safeguards, time to time and log the system variables and KPIs?
SE: Maybe.
A typical conversation between data scientists
(DS) and system engineer (SE)
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Strong top-down mandate
Don't just create a powerless CDO/CDSO position
Form "commandos"
The 70-20-10 rule: 70% of an AI project is change management
Build trust through iterative pilots
We need data to start the AI process we need trust to engage the resources to collect data
Design and enforce the data science process
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-build-a-data-science-pipeline-f24341848045
Start building standard operational tools for data science
Save experience in reusable code
https://paris-saclay-cds.github.io/ramp-docs/ramp-workflow
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