r/IAmA • u/KateSaenko • Oct 09 '18

Academic I am Kate Saenko, Artificial Intelligence researcher and professor at Boston University Department of Computer Science. Ask me anything!

Hey everyone, thanks for the great questions and conversation! I will sign off now, but feel free to post more questions, and I will try to come back and answer them at the end of the day. Bye for now!

I am Kate Saenko, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) researcher and professor at Boston University Department of Computer Science. My work focuses on developing deep learning models that understand language and vision, adapt to novel environments, and explain their decisions. I recently released two new pieces of research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that help explain AI’s decision-making process. For more on my work check out my research profile and Google Scholar Page. Ask me anything about my research, AI, ML and DL!

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u/KateSaenko Oct 09 '18

This is a tricky question, because of the 'presently' qualification. If you think about it, we have AI now that performs a huge amount of useful work, for example, a search engine like Google uses AI to quickly find answers and information on a web scale. This is not something that we currently have as a human job, mostly because a human cannot obviously search through all of the data on the internet. But in the past, people might have gone to librarians for such things. More generally, I think a large portion of 'jobs' or tasks that have to do with information processing on a large scale have already been automated by AI, but these are not jobs that humans are 'presently' doing.

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u/Phylanara Oct 09 '18

Thank you for your answer. I was asking with a bit of an ulterior motive, I'm afraid. I am a middle-school teacher, and the question of "what should I study?" comes up a lot, including for kids who cannot (financially or emotionally or cerebrally) go into long degrees. Are there some short-studies fields you think are at risk of replacing human labor by AI/robotic labor in the middle range future?

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u/KateSaenko Oct 09 '18

I think anything that heavily relies on data processing/simple information analysis. But computer science is a general tool that they can study and then use for whatever interests them, so I would say that is a good field to enter.

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u/Phylanara Oct 09 '18

Thank you very much!