Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Steve Scott, CTO of Cray (Part 2)

Steve Scott: The way people have used Cray and other high-performance supercomputers is, you have a bunch of equations that present a model for the natural world whether that’s equation of airflow across an airplane wing or equations dictating the molecular dynamics involved in drug discovery.

You iteratively solve these equations spread across these points in space. You’re figuring out what goes on by solving these large numbers of equations that represent the real world. In AI, we have a different way of calculating results. Deep neural networks are more of data-driven versus mathematically-driven techniques where you have these layers of of artificial neurons. They’re taking inputs in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Steve Scott, CTO of Cray (Part 1)

Steve takes us deep into the field of high performance computing and how AI is impacting it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself a little bit as well as Cray’s activities in the domain of AI currently.

Steve Scott: I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Cray. I’ve been with Cray most of my career. I actually was a summer intern here for two years during grad school and have been here ever since except for a three-year walkabout I took a few years back. I went and spent two years as the CTO of the Tesla GPU computing Group at Nvidia and spent a year in the platforms group at Google and then came back in 2014. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The domain that I feel very bullish about is healthcare. There are vast swaths of the world that have no access to good healthcare. I think AI can turn that around.

John Roese: Absolutely. In the mid 2000’s, I was the CTO of a company called Nortel in Canada. I was on the Board of Directors of an initiative called One Laptop Per Child. The vision was not about building a cheap computer. The vision was, if we can get, at least, computer access to the developing world, we can bring the transformation.

We drove down the cost of computers. We completely created environments where we could start to think about having computers >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I wrote a series called Man and Superman. It makes a point that we’re going to a society where people who have the higher-order skillsets are going to thrive and everybody else is going to struggle. That gap is going to grow. The obvious question is how do you create more superman kind of skillset.

John Roese: I’m a bit more optimistic than some people are because I can see all of the areas where AI is having a positive impact on job creation, but there is a bias towards high-skill, high-function jobs. It has a very significant impact on more manual labor service-type of roles. If you look at it holistically, we probably are going to create more jobs than we’re going to lose. It’s just biased towards the high functioning areas. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is this pool?

John Roese: There’s an unfortunate statistic that we tracked from many years. The pool is not growing in terms of the total number of potential people who can do this work in many markets. In the United States, there were about two million professional computer scientists about 20 years ago. Even today, it’s about two million which is disturbing.

Sramana Mitra: Why? >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll just make one point. I agree with you that there is this whole category of invisible AI that is already prevalent in some domain. In cyber security and ad tech, that invisible AI is very much present already. There are a lot of functions that cannot be done without that kind of AI. You can’t really do automated bidding of ads in real time without AI. How the hell do you do it?

John Roese: You’re absolutely right. The third category is, you do it because no amount of human beings thrown at the problem could achieve the outcome. Back to the topic today, that third one is a massive opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Exactly. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 3)

John Roese: Not only do I think that there is a huge opportunity here for entrepreneurs to take a business process and apply machine learning, but there’s also a fantastic job market that once you do it, the people you sell it to are the IT people who are looking for relevance as they move into the cloud world. These things have a huge material impact on the business and the productivity.

This is the next wave of productivity that we’re going to experience on a global scale. My message was unambiguous on that second bucket. If there is one place where we are not talking loud enough and are not excited about, it is this idea of real value of AI in enterprises. It will spawn startups. It will spawn entrepreneurs. It will spawn re-transformation and re-skilling of the IT work force. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Roese, Global CTO of Dell EMC (Part 2)

John Roese: I would argue that the other two types of AI are much more important even though they’re much less visible. In addition to AI to improve the human condition, the second domain that we think is probably significantly more important and probably more valuable is applying artificial intelligence to transform every single business process that exists today.

Business processes always have a level of automation that’s done by the computing infrastructure and the software. In almost every case, that automation stops at a point when human thinking is required. What happens with AI when you apply it to business processes is that boundary between when the human being has to intervene in the business process versus when the computers do their work suddenly shifts dramatically.

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