The days of “big data” being the industry buzzword have long passed. Today, businesses, manufacturers, producers, and even governments are using the power of data to fuel everything they do. Companies have gotten to a point where they already have invested in infrastructure and processes for data capture, data ingestion, and data storage. It is now time for them to derive value from their investment and from the data they have gathered.
Because of the ever-growing ubiquitousness of data, the field is now shifting its focus into its applications in business processes and systems, consumer behaviour, analytics algorithms, AI, machine learning, automation, voice technology, and even data-driven decision-making.
In an exclusive interview with adobo magazine, Isaac Reyes, Data Scientist and Founder of data science specialist company DataSeer laid down the trends and the state of the field in the Philippines.
“We are going to see a lot more predictive analytics in AI. Now that the data is ready for being pushed into those AI models, companies make decisions better, target their customers better, and so they can service clients better,” Reyes said. Yet, because of the ever-widening use of data, analytics, and AI, the industry is running into the ethics question — what kind of data-driven decisions can be automated? “We are actually going to have to program ethics into the machines and into the models to decide what they should do,” he stressed.
Another piece of data-driven technology that will continue to make its way into mass use is voice recognition. “Instead of interacting with my devices via my fingers, by a keyboard or a GUI, now I’m interacting with my devices increasingly through my voice, because the language recognition is just so good now that Siri and Alexa are dropping the ball less and less. In 2018, I think certainly what we’re going to see is the app development ecosystem around Alexa around Siri, increase massively,” he said.
Training machines with data
Machine learning and human learning are quite similar according to Reyes. Just like how the human brain processes data from its environment such as telling what is hot and cold or what is painful or not, machines can be programmed to collect data and form trends out of these.
“We train the artificial intelligence model with data and after doing so, the model decides ‘yes’ or ‘no’, whether it recognizes a face or not, or it gives some sort of response,” he explained.
“These models collect huge amounts of data. In Gmail for example, they are looking at the characteristic of the e-mail, at what time it was sent. If there are any keywords that are a little bit sketchy and show up 99 times in an e-mail, then it is read as spam. The model is looking for certain trends and using that data, it comes up as spam or not spam. That’s one way to use data to make decisions,” Reyes added.
State of data science in the Philippines
Reyes revealed that the Philippines, compared with other countries in Asia, is unfortunately one of the most behind. Countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea give incentives to professionals and students wanting to learn data science and provides support and an encouraging environment for the field.
In Malaysia for example, their government has established ADAX or the Asia Analytic Data Exchange which is tasked with skilling up the nation in data science analytic skills. In Singapore, the government provides refunds to professionals who want to take data science and analytic courses, and people end up paying a fraction of the true cost of this course. We’ve seen some cursory move in this direction in the Philippine but it’s too late at this point,” he lamented.
Yet, Reyes saw many Filipinos showing great interest in learning data science. This is why he and his colleagues started Data Science Philippines, a group that aims to educate local professionals with free workshops and talks.
“We have seen great work from this current government just not on this particular area. Filipinos are resilient. In spite of the lack of support from the academe, companies, and the government, people are deciding they want to get into this field, and they are educating themselves through the power of the internet through mass online courses, through face-to-face courses, through online e-books. They are skilling themselves up, and they are trail-blazing people who are flying the data science torch in the Philippines,” he enthused.
AI affecting the BPO industry
Several studies have already come out declaring that the BPO industry will die out in the next few years to be replaced by bots and artificial intelligence programs. Reyes sees two sides to this. While he sees truth to this, there are still functions that will need human skills.
“It’s not a matter of whether (BPO functions) will be automated. It’s a matter of when, and I give the call centers and BPOs about eight years. On the flip side, companies like Google, Facebook, and Tinder may actually employ armies of people here in the Philippines to do manual reviews of inflammatory content. Facebook is not at this point relying on machines to do that. The reason is when it comes to natural language processing, some stuff is just so subtle and hard to classify,” he explained.
Machines and creativity
Can machines become creative? We’re still off from that by 50 years according to Reyes. ““We are at the point that machines do credit risk modelling better than humans. Banks use machines to decide is someone going to be a good credit risk, and they don’t always get it right, but they are better than a human overall. The next frontier is perhaps in medicine. Can a machine diagnose better than a doctor? But are we gonna get to a stage where machines can be the next Shakespeare and write plays, musicals that rival the creativity of some of the greats?” Reyes posed.
He also gave a piece of advice to the younger generation to study fields which are not likely to get automated. “There is so many areas you would not want to get into, because it’s gonna be automated. So get into the fields that are not gonna be automated, like those that are very human. For example, Psychology. At the end of the day, if I’m going to lie on a chair and talk about my problems, I don’t want to talk into a thing. I want to talk to a empathetic human. So Psychology is one field; acting, directing, those in the creative industry,” he said.
