Big Data & Digital Marketing

Interview to IEEE Fellow Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

1. Deep Learning has nothing to do with Neuroscience

People continue to infer that something involving neuroscience is behind deep learning, and that deep learning is taking advantage of an understanding of how the brain processes information, learns, makes decisions, or copes with large amounts of data. And that is just patently false.

For issues of higher cognition—how we perceive, how we remember, how we act—we have no idea how neurons are storing information, how they are computing, what the rules are, what the algorithms are, what the representations are, and the like.

So we are not yet in an era in which we can be using an understanding of the brain to guide us in the construction of intelligent systems.

3. A Big Data Winter is waiting ahead

When you have large amounts of data many of your inferences are likely to be false. It’s like having billions of monkeys typing. One of them will write Shakespeare.

A lot of people are building things hoping that they work, and sometimes they will. And in some sense, there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s exploratory. But society as a whole can’t tolerate that. Eventually, we have to give real guarantees. Civil engineers eventually learned to build bridges that were guaranteed to stand up.

So with big data, it will take decades, I suspect, to get a real engineering approach, so that you can say with some assurance that you are giving out reasonable answers and are quantifying the likelihood of errors.

If nothing changes, there will be a “big-data winter.” After a bubble, when people invested and a lot of companies overpromised without providing serious analysis, it will bust. And soon, in a two- to five-year span, people will say, “The whole big-data thing came and went. It died. It was wrong.”