Hector creates scripts to provision resources in the cloud for the pharmaceutical company he works for. Asked about the business, he replies: "I'm not interested.
Mario is Kaggel Master. His passion is data science. He knows all the resources to find relationships between variables. The column names of the tables he likes are: column1, column2... The content of the columns? He is not interested. Pure abstraction is his thing. The content is a business thing, algorithms are his thing.
Jonás gives his entertaining talk on AI. At the beginning of the talk, Unity, a video game engine, starts up. On the screen are two dolls lying on the floor. Jonas applies an algorithm to make them learn to walk. The dummies are reinforced as the height of their shoulders moves away from the ground. As he narrates his talk, the dummies make random, jerky movements. Little by little they crawl. At the end of the talk he returns to Unity. Within half an hour of his talk, the humanoid agents have stood up and are doing something resembling walking. The algorithm has worked.
Fernando, organiser of one of the AI events, is CTO of a well-known savings bank. The relationship between talent and business? It's a tough one, he answers. In one competition, contestants found an almost perfect correlation between two variables unknown to them. One variable was the date the insurance policy was surrendered. The other was the death of the insured. We already knew that correlation, he asserts with derision.
There is a tendency to say that there is a lack of talent. That there is a lack of new skills in Big Data and AI. But the truth is that there are thousands of young people who enjoy using, refining and creating algorithms for problems they have invented. Just for fun. They are the geeks. Intelligent, restless and creative.
On the other side are companies whose day-to-day work prevents them from tackling new projects. New projects, the kind you hear so much about. They don't even know what can be done, it sounds like they should do something, but they don't know where to start.
Traditionally, the IT people in a company knew everything about the business. Programmers knew about policies, warehouses or current accounts. Today it is difficult to find someone who knows as much about deep learning as they do about payroll.
The gap between business and geeks is huge. The former do not know what algorithmic resources exist. The latter don't know what practical matter to apply their wisdom to. The result is a gigantic waste of talent.
Antonio Orbe
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