In the field of Artificial Intelligence we make use of mathematics, probability theory and statistics. But even the best statistics can’t gain real control over humans. The question, “When will machines be able to produce true consciousness?” will remain unanswered for a long time.

 

SwissCognitiveDr. Herbrich, we asked “Alexa” who Ralf Herbrich is. The answer that she came back with was “the inventor of the hairbrush”. So may we ask you directly?
Ralf Herbrich was born in East Germany, grew up on a farm, was always interested in mathematics and studied computer science at the time when things were really getting going with the Internet.

What exactly are you doing today at Amazon?
To put it in simple terms: Already at the time of the first search engines, it was becoming clear that anything that was digital could also be analyzed. And that meant that it would not be long before all of our personal and business information is digitally retrievable – our real-time heart rate, how fast we are running, blood glucose levels, adrenaline, or oxygen levels in the blood. At Amazon Machine Learning, we are trying to wipe the dust out of the data and filter out pure results. Algorithms are getting smarter, but what makes them really smart is the rules that bring all the content together. And these rules are written by us.

“We are wiping the dust out of the data”

How do you find and write these rules?
In the field of Artificial Intelligence we make use of mathematics, probability theory and statistics. But even the best statistics can’t gain real control over humans. The question, “When will machines be able to produce true consciousness?” will remain unanswered for a long time.

Give us an overview of your various research topics at Amazon.
On the commercial side, Amazon has already been active in Germany for twenty years, but the Research and Development area has existed in Germany only since

Give us an overview of your various research topics at Amazon.
On the commercial side, Amazon has already been active in Germany for twenty years, but the Research and Development area has existed in Germany only since 2013. We have different sites dedicated to this in Aachen, Dresden and Berlin. In Aachen and Berlin we are very research-oriented: Aachen in the field of speech recognition – for example for Amazon Alexa – and Berlin in the field of machine learning. In Dresden, we are developing cloud-based services for Amazon Web Services. In addition to the Berlin offices, Amazon’s machine learning operations are internationally represented in five other locations, namely in Bangalore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Cambridge and Barcelona.


Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe to our AI NAVIGATOR!


 

Can you tell us some of the subjects that you are currently working on?
In Berlin, for example, we’re working on algorithms for predicting fashion demand. By this I mean that we are trying to track the fashion trends, colors and styles of tomorrow. These algorithms are being applied worldwide.[…]

read more – copyright by www.vontobel.com