AI Week Feature - Interview With Spencer Murray
An exciting week for you computer and programming nerds is upon us: AI week! For the uninitiated, AI stands for artificial intelligence, which is a term used to describe when machines perform complicated tasks such as translation, speech recognition, and every scarily accurate recommendation Spotify has given you.
Take a gander at this real treat: an interview with Spencer Murray, who works at Amii, a group in Edmonton that helps businesses integrate AI into their practices and services.
The logo for Amii, the company that Spencer works for.
Source: dhdp.ca
How did you get involved with Amii?
I think this is one of those interesting stories because so many people, when they think of an AI career, they’re thinking about the technical side of things, right? It’s like, “oh, I’m gonna have to be an engineer, or I’m gonna have to be a computing scientist and all these kinds of things. I was working at the Alberta Cancer foundation, I was in their marketing and communications department and a friend of mine found out about this opportunity in this small research group at the University of Alberta (at the time we were called “AICML” - The Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning). They were looking to connect with industry and business a bit more so my friend kind of clued me into the job and I applied. I thought it was a great fit because I had always been interested in science, technology, futurism, sci-fi, things like that. Joining Amii was that chance to tell those types of stories and use my arts background (as an english major from the U of A) in a field that doesn’t always think about “where do the arts fit” in AI.
Describe your position at Amii.
My role is Director of Communications in Public Relations. What that really focuses around, seperate from the marketing side, is how we communicate out our scientific excellence and our thought leadership to the world. Among our research team at Amii, we’ve got some people who are the biggest names in AI research. They might not be household names for folks like you and I, but for academics, they’re known around the world. My role really focuses on how we take work that they’re doing, and how to translate it into language that's more accessible to the public. How do I help business leaders who might not have any sort of tech background understand more about what AI can help them do. Or, how do I help people who are looking at what’s going on in the world, how do I get them to see some really cool stories about what’s coming out of places like Amii.
What do other positions at Amii look like?
There’s a huge variety, I would say. I actually did some research for Amii on what types of skill sets people look for and there’s a huge need for people who can translate between really technical individuals and clients/business people. So often you get engineers or computing scientists who just get really deep into the technical intricacies of the work they do, but it can be a little overwhelming for people who are just wondering “what is artificial intelligence”. Suddenly you’re getting into algorithms and even deeper than that, so having people in the organization who can have those conversations, that’s sort of one piece that we do. We also have a number of people who are responsible for the development of our products that they need. So we have all these different ways that we help industry, and all of those teams have scientists who are embedded within those teams, but they also need somebody who can manage the program overall. So who’s the person who’s putting together the business case for why we should do this particular project? Who’s the person who’s leading the people who are working on that? Who’s the person who’s educating our clients about AI? So there’s all these sort of non-technical roles like program coordinators and product owners and stuff like that. A lot of people came to our organization saying “I have no idea what AI is, I have some basic understanding but that’s it”, but they’re still really great contributors to Amii.
We’re growing so fast these days but we have over 40, nearly 50 people [in the company] now. And we have another five or six job postings out right now.
What does a project look like within the company?
What the project looks like really depends on where the company [that we’re working with] is at in terms of what they’re doing with AI. In some cases, we work with companies just to identify where they could use AI in their business, in other cases we’re working with groups that already have some good technical skill sets on their teams and we just need to figure out what the fastest way for us to develop this AI model or get to the business solution that we want to have. Other times, there’s a lot of education that’s needed to actually understand what AI looks like.
There are also lots of projects on the research side that you can also explore. We have people who are working on fundamental, theoretical AI research. These are people who are working on the math, improving the systems incrementally. And then there’s people on the other end of the spectrum, who are working on application-focused work. We have people working in the healthcare space, we have some people working in something called ‘computational creativity” (how can we get AI systems to do creative tasks). I’ve seen systems that can write news stories or can create video game levels, so there are lots of interesting things for people to work on.
What is an example of day-to-day use of AI?
One thing about AI is that people don’t usually realize that they’re interacting with it on a regular basis. Think, have you used Google maps today? Google search? Even your email’s spam filter is AI at work. I think a lot of people don’t realize how common it is for us to use AI. Like, Netflix is recommending something for you because an AI system is making those recommendations. There’s lots of those examples.
What kind of person would you recommend a position in AI to?
“There’s a lot more need for people who have design skills, people who have interpersonal communication skills, people who have business skills, all those sorts of things are becoming more important in the field of AI. ”
I think you have to be the kind of person who’s really interested in a lot of different stuff. That’s what I’ve really realized at Amii, as much as I talk about AI, we also talk about where AI is being applied. In any given week, I might have to learn about crop science, or blood testing, or tiger reserves in India. And these are all different stories that our researchers have worked on and told, so I get this great experience of learning about AI and how it’s solving problems and also learning about all these other fields at the same time. If you want to work in a career like I’m in, you really need to be interested in lots of different varieties of stuff. I’m just interested in learning a variety of things about our world, so I think that’s a really important part.
If you want to work on AI systems, then you’re looking at somebody who has a math background and who really is thinking about systems and how to best design and develop these systems out. One of the things that I always laugh about with my researchers is one time, I was attending a class and as they were writing on the board they said to all of their students “oh, guys, this is no big deal, this is just linear algebra” and I was sitting there like “what are you talking about, I have no idea what’s going on”.
It’s not one of these things where you absolutely need to have that background to be able to work in a field like AI. There’s a lot more need for people who have design skills, people who have interpersonal communication skills, people who have business skills, all those sorts of things are becoming more important in the field of AI.
If people are looking for concrete steps for how to get involved with AI, I think there’s lots of resources online that are really easily accessible. There are things like online courses called “MOOCs” (Massive Open Online Courses). You can find a lot of these through sites like Coursera. There are lots of courses that you can take for free now that will help you start to learn about AI. There are also online coding competitions through kagel, and of course, lots of community building around the tech and AI ecosystem. There are things like meetups that happen through Amii, through Startup Edmonton. There’s actually a really big community here in Edmonton especially built around tech. The other thing to do is to find someone who works in the field and send them a message on LinkedIn or something like that and see if they’ll go for coffee and just learn a bit about the field from them.
