Human in the loop: Machine learning and AI for the people
HITL is a mix and match approach that may help make ML both more efficient and approachable.
Paco Nathan is a unicorn. It’s a cliche, but gets the point across for someone who is equally versed in discussing AI with White House officials and Microsoft product managers, working on big data pipelines and organizing and part-taking in conferences such as Strata in his role as Director, Learning Group with O’Reilly Media.
Nathan has a mix of diverse background, hands-on involvement and broad vision that enables him to engage in all of those, having been active in AI, Data Science and Software Engineering for decades. The trigger for our discussion was his Human in the Loop (HITL) framework for machine learning (ML), presented in Strata EU.
HITL is a mix and match approach that may help make ML both more efficient and approchable. Nathan calls HITL a design pattern, and it combines technical approaches as well as management aspects.
HITL combines two common ML variants, supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, curated (labeled) datasets are used by ML experts to train algorithms by adjusting parameters, in order to make accurate predictions for incoming data. In unsupervised learning, the idea is that running lots of data through an algorithm will reveal some sort of structure.