Hey JARVIS: A study of Natural Language Processing
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — William Shakespeare.
Iron Man movie. Jarvis is helping Tony Stark build the armor. JARVIS is able to process all the questions Tony Stark, answer all of them and make changes based on Tony Stark’s suggestions. JARVIS is also suggesting improvements. JARVIS is so advanced that his capabilities are almost human.
JARVIS is potentially what the study of Artificial Intelligence can allow us to create. JARVIS is the reason why I got interested in Artificial Intelligence. Watching Iron Man when I was 9 years-old made me marvel at the superb possibilities of AI. Today, as a high school senior, I am still exploring what AI can bring to humanity.
Why AI?
Throughout History, humanity has been scared of technological revolutions. The Industrial Revolution has created huge uncertainties: millions of people were scared to lose their jobs to machines. The Internet and social media completely changed the world, but we are now complaining about the invasive presence of devices in our lives. The theme of human vs technology is constantly present. I believe we can solve this relationship through AI.
Artificial Intelligence allows humanity to create technologies that mimic human intelligence. These technologies are easier and more enjoyable to use. Artificial Intelligence will help humanity resolve its biggest problems. Through the analysis of data, AI can help us make accurate predictions in healthcare, economy, and even in our time-management. AI is the tool that will help humanity be closer to technology.
My journey into AI
I was fascinated by AI but I never felt good enough to be able to work on one. I thought I needed to master coding to be able to work on the BEAST that AI is. So, in 9th grade, I started learning about coding. I developed mobile applications. This summer, I was steady into my mobile development, when my counselor told me about InspiritAI, an online summer program during which students learn about concepts of AI. I was surprised about the length of the program: how was I supposed to learn about AI in two weeks?? I had been preparing for AI for years. Nevertheless, applied just to see. I got accepted into the program and courses started on July 7th. Throughout the two weeks, I got introduced to multiple concepts of AI from reinforcement learning to generative adversarial networks. With my instructor Sophia Barton, my team and I worked on a natural language processing project. We created a machine learning model that would identify the intent of sentences. For example, our model was able to understand that the user wanted the weather when they were saying “how cold is it in New-York today?”.
I think InspiritAI was the ideal way for me to get introduced to Artificial Intelligence. I am still surprised by how much I learned during these two weeks. The program made me understand that AI is just one branch of technology and that anyone can learn about it through online courses or by reading articles like this one.
Where do we go from now?: THE BLOG
I want to dive deeper into Natural Language Processing and this will be the topic of the future articles I will be writing. Throughout this series of articles, we will be exploring JARVIS!
I will write about the entire pipeline of virtual assistants like JARVIS. We will start with the speech-to-text capacities. How does a virtual assistant “hear” what we are saying, and translates these sounds into text? We will then be learning about how this model understands what we are saying. How do virtual assistants know that we want them to play music when we tell them “Give me some music”. The last article will cover the action of the virtual assistant. When the assistant knows you want them to play music, how do they go about giving it to you? Will they open an app, or will they fetch the music from an online platform? What are the permissions the virtual assistants need to have to open apps or access the Internet?
This series is for anyone interested in understanding how virtual assistants on our phones work, or how to build one. I hope that at the end of the series, we will all have a broad knowledge on how virtual assistants work.
Jean Ghislain BILLA is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
