The AI Boardroom people did a virtual interview with me via email, where they asked me to respond to five questions. See https://aiboardroom.com/Blogs/AI-Boardroom-Insights/2024/05/Microsoft-James-McCaffrey-QandA.aspx.
The aiboardroom.com web site is a new site. It is managed by the 1105 Media Company people who do several things I’m associated with, including the Microsoft Visual Studio Magazine web site and the Microsoft Visual Studio Live conferences I often speak at. I think my interview is the first content for the site, which looks like it’s still in ramp-up mode.
The goal of the AI Boardroom web site is to provide information about AI that is useful for business decision makers, such as CEOs, CIOs, and senior technical managers.
The five questions I answered are:
1. AI has always been used by businesses to help them innovate. Do you have any favorite examples?
2. How do you see AI changing businesses and the future of work?
3. You’ve seen a lot of AI implementations. Do you see common threads among people that have successful AI projects? Or, conversely, unsuccessful projects?
4. What AI-related technology are you most excited about right now?
5. How deep of an understanding of AI technology does, for example, a CEO need in today’s world?
Somewhat interestingly, to me anyway, was that I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to answer these relatively simple questions. I can usually handle purely technical questions quite easily, but the further away from coding a topic is, the more difficult it is for me to answer.
Left: The world’s first website appeared in 1991. In 1992 there were approximately 30 websites in existence. Right: By 1994 there were approximately 2,300 websites in existence. Some of the subjects of the earliest websites are quite surprising, including this one about the Ren and Stimpy cartoon characters.
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Nice interview Dr. McCaffrey, it could have been a bit longer. 🙂
There was one example that really blew me away how AI has changed the world.
It was given by Manfred Spitzer, unfortunately his lectures on this topic are all only in German, I hope that will change. But subtitles are possible.
The image at 1 hour shows the heatmap of a trained neural network on many examples of chest X-ray images labeled as which people are dead and which are still alive after some time. They used something like a cutout technique to estimate the regions in the heatmap.
Not sure how they did it exactly, but the right graph shows mortality with 5 outputs: lowest, low, normal, high, highest. The left heatmap is more interesting, where the yellow regions show where the highest cause of death was, and the blue regions should show where the lowest was.
The system was able to predict correct more than 50% of mortality after 12 years. And what radiologists never look at till then, the shoulders, seems to be the key element for a longer life.
There was other cool examples, like finding and proving Einstein-Chwolson rings with the use of AI. But not with this impact on me.