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A short white paper by Nikhil Malhotra

INTRODUCTION

An era of rapidly changing technology, virtualisation, SDN/NFV, advent of 4G LTE technology and in
the near future, 5G is redefining businesses across the globe. The digitalisation wave has brought
artificial intelligence, machine learning and with it a wave of organizations trying to understand
natural language and intent of customers or visual clues using deep neural network techniques. We
are still far away from understanding “understanding” via machines but the steps towards those
have started.

This is making most of the ways of doing things exceptionally well in the past invalid in this new
environment. At its peak we expect the traditional operations replaced with operations driven by
speech recognition, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, analytics and machine
learning. There will be new key roles emerging in facilitating machine learning (helping machines
become intelligent) and analytics.

In this digital age we are also evidencing a marked shift in the consumer purchase cycle. From
managing media and publishing – the key aspect of promoting mass consumption – marketers are
shifting their attention to on-going customer experience. This is because of the critical shift in
consumer trust from a published media to a peer opinion. That is what is driving service uptake and
loyalty.

In fact this has a major impact on how we view digital - the new way of creating services and the
new way of consuming and servicing them which is dramatically changing the traditional customer
supplier equation and is driven by the evolving technologies that offer a new lifestyle and insights

The era of the customer reaching out to the product is gone. Now it is the service that must seek out
the customer and that too through peer influence, and not the conventional media.
The word ‘convenience’ has assumed an all important role in not just discovering a service but also
in delivering and managing. Product life-cycles have become short placing a very high demand on
the traditional ways of creating and delivering products. More often than not the very nature of time
required to release a product makes it obsolete or is unable to deliver the ROI

This is where convenience attains the role of personalization and personalization needs Data and
data inherently means patterns that a machine would understand to first automate mundane
processes and then drive towards business efficiency

FUTURE CONVENIENCE VIA AI

Digital Information coupled with personalized perception, learning and even prescription is the
future we are looking at. Today we are at a “scale 2” where organizations have realized the story and
pushing towards automation. The next level we call as “scale 3” would see hyper-automation
followed by “scale 4” where we see Cognition

WE ARE HERE

1960 - 2007 2007 - 2020 2020 - 2025 2025 - 2030

Initial phase of • Era of Bots Hyper- Phase of


software as a • Start of automation/pe Cognition
service personaliza rsonalization
Fewer tion using phase
automation language
and and vision
personalization

Figure 1: This is the writer’s prediction based on the trends and experience.

It does not represent any industry views

The range of AI application that we are looking from a commercialization standpoint include the
following

a) We are looking at fluid operations in call centres using Natural Language processing via
machines learning and A.I.
b) Onset of bots in how we do operations be rail ticketing, getting content on devices and
getting directions to a restaurant,

c) We are looking at an onset of robots in homes taking your EMRs and raising alarms when it
concerns a citizen’s wellness

d) We are looking at machines using adversarial neural networks to try and be better at a task,
like coding, calculating costs and even project managements

As far as jobs are concerned, we are looking at a completely new class emerging, the “New collared
jobs” and yes it involves re-skilling and to some extent dismantling the current job structure of
frameworks. The traditional worker model would get disrupted in the coming 5 years . A new job
role would emerge and that would be a “Neuro Linguistic Programmer” as I call it, a person who
knows how to talk to machines and understand the vastness of information that comes out of these
machines.

WHAT IS THE REALITY?

It is prudent to check what the actual reality is. The reality would be far from truth. The figure below
showcases the trends in 2017 as a report from Mckinsey and company

While there have been fantastic investments from the big 5 on the AI, the adoption has been very
low. Most of the industry champions have been reluctant to apply A.I. and machine learning for
customer facing tasks, primarily because the mechanism to test the efficacy of output is a big
question at this time. Some other trends that are visible in the market today are as follows:

 There has been a lack of unified framework for A.I. and a common ecosystem. The current
trend of A.I. has been clustered with Phd students and scientists trying to improve the
algorithm by a percentage value. There is a lack of common ecosystem for developers to use
AI algorithms. Developers today utilize different toolsets (Caffe, Tensorflow, Python, Keras
etc) to make machine learning models.

 Commercial deployments of A.I. in the areas of speech and image processing have primarily
been from the big 5 software houses . Research on these techniques started some 3 decades
ago but the usage in production environment has been limited

 There has been a severe lack of A.I. being utilized in communications and networking,
prompting data and voice providers to look at old statistical automation techniques to
achieve desired results. This has led to more rules based systems than a pattern matching
systems which were being proposed

 Deployment of A.I. systems continues to be difficult with models, integration with different
workflows being the biggest challenges

ACUMOS – Need for harmonizing A.I.

The above chellenges prompted TechMahindra’s research wing and AT&Ts research wing to look at
the problem differently. The idea that emerged was to build a system that would serve to harmonize
the dysfunctional world of A.I. Imagine if developers across the world had a common platform to
look at models, download these models, test them , share them back by updating and also stitch
different models together was the thought that triggered the creation of ACUMOS

When the two teams lingered on this thought, a set of guiding principles emerged. There were many
to start with but the teams settled on four such guiding principles or mantras to ensure that the
world of A.I. would not remain same post ACUMOS. These principles are as follows:

a) Acumos would provide a common open source framework of AI. A framework where
freelance developers and developers from various organizations could see practical models
being built, shared and utilized. The term practical models is highlighted. The goal of the
framework was to have models that could be practically utilized in a production
environment to attain business efficiency

b) It would be a distributed market place with a federated structure. A world which is open to
anyone to look at and a world which I wanted to keep close knitted to a certain set of
developers

c) The framework would allow creation of Interoperable micro-services as deployable units,


services that solved only one specific use case at one time and services that would be easily
utilized by others. This has a wider connotation. In today’s world, different developers are
using different toolkits to generate models. Let’s explain it via an example. A developer
manages to create a model to understand image category using convolutional neural
network using a tensor flow toolkit. Another developer uses scikit learn to create model to
understand sentiments on an image base.

Now, Acumos considers these two pieces as two interoperable services. By a simple drag
and drop an organization or a developer can combine these two complex models (viz. model
to find objects and model to recognize sentiments) to create a complex solution. This
complex solution now becomes a solution for an Ad agency to find out efficacy of an
advertisement placed for its users.

d) A framework that would expedite innovation

A pictorial representation of tenets would appear as follows

Create & On-Board Models Execute In Target Environment


Runtime Systems

Local Learning
Continuous
AI Development Model Learning Docker
Service and tools Images

Onboard Deploy
Train AI Platform & Publish
Marketplace
Executable
Search
Review
Predictor
Chaining
Rating
Data Sources Training Training / Testing
Dataset Lifecycle

Enhancing Model With Application Data Sets Sharing Models In Marketplace

Figure 3: Acumos market place features


1. Ability to create and on board models

2. Ability to download models , train with your own data sets

3. Share the models with a targeted group or the world

4. Ability to chain complex models

5. Execute in a targeted environment as a docker image

With the Acumos platform, we’re working to create an industry standard for making AI apps
reusable and easily accessible to any developer. AI tools today can be difficult to use and often are
designed for data scientists. The Acumos platform will be user-centric, with a focus on creating apps
, microservices and an ability to stitch models to create complex services for a business.

THE NEXT FRONTIER

Well, another question that keeps getting asked is whether the world is doomed and we are looking
at another SKYNET ?

I don’t think we are even near to something like this in the next 200 years .The human race
destroying itself via weapons is more probable a cause of destruction than the AI components . The
reason is very simple. What we have achieved from statistical models and machine learning /deep
learning is just a very shallow AI. The AGI (artificial general intelligence) which remains a dream has a
lot of factors involved to make it a reality.

Today the machines do some things exceedingly well. Give it a pattern and data to crunch upon, and
a machine classifies and predicts an outcome. This is nowhere close to how the human brain works.
We are far cognitive and emotional beings who house their intelligence in a small portion of our
brain called the ‘Neocortex’ . It is Neocortex which is involved in making cognitive decisions be it our
faith, our emotional responses or our response to the society at large. What we build with machines
would be getting closer to this cognition. The reptilian part of the brain which is an appendage from
the reptilian brain is no-where being positioned in AI

Our harmonization via Acumos can see a breed of new algorithms emerge, algorithms other than the
neural networks which are our main stay today
Conclusion
A change is on the horizon, and that change looks ominous. We are looking at a world where
humans would work together with machines in doing some of the mundane tasks we do today, but
we need to imbibe that change in our psyche and work towards a more AI+iA that would enable us
to intelligently augment machines. For this we need a common ecosystem,a harmonization amongst
developers, researchers and hobbyists alike to create a standard for the world to look at

About the Author


“We are reminded of the limitless-ness of Human curiosity, when we see man and
machine create marvels for the future together” is the quote Nikhil Malhotra
lives by

Nikhil Malhotra is the head of Maker’s Lab, a unique Thin-q-bator space within TechMahindra with
over 17+ years of experience in a variety of technology domains.
In his present avatar he is the head of Tech Mahindra’s R&D space called the Makers Lab which he
created in 2014. The lab focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics and,mixed reality. Nikhil’s area of
personal research has been natural language processing, enabling machines to talk the way humans
do. Nikhil has also designed an indigenous robot in his lab, as a personal assistant.
He lives by a dream of creating smart machines that would wed human emotions with artificial
intelligence to make lives better.
He is also a leading speaker on digital transformation, practical use of AI and the future AI
He holds a Masters degree in computing with specialization in distributed computing from Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne.
Nikhil currently resides in Pune with his wife Shalini and son Angad.

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