Companies make it easier than ever for scientists to use artificial intelligence
Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001
Yang-Hui He, a mathematical physicist at the University of London, is an expert in string theory, one of the most abstruse areas of physics. But when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, he was naïve. "What is this thing everyone is talking about?" he recalls thinking. Then his go-to software program, Mathematica, added machine learning tools that were ready to use, no expertise required. He began to play around, and realized AI might help him choose the plausible geometries for the countless multidimensional models of the universe that string theory proposes.
In a 2017 paper, He showed that, with just a few extra lines of code, he could enlist the off-the-shelf AI to greatly speed up his calculations. "I don't have to get down to the nitty-gritty," He says. Now, He says he is "on a crusade" to get mathematicians and physicists to use machine learning, and gives about 20 talks a year on the power of these new user-friendly versions.
AI used to be the specialized domain of data scientists and computer programmers. But companies such as Wolfram Research, which makes Mathematica, are trying to democratize the field, so scientists without AI skills can harness the technology for recognizing patterns in big data. In some cases, they don't need to code at all. Insights are just a drag-and-drop away. Computational power is no longer much of a limiting factor in science, says Juliana Freire, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who is developing a ready-to-use AI tool with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). "To a large extent, the bottleneck to scientific discoveries now lies with people."