Why the new name, RStudio AI Blog? There is a straightforward reason. The
previous title, “TensorFlow for R Blog”, was a good match for the content
we covered so far: technical or applied aspects of performing deep
learning with TensorFlow and Keras. Yet, our team (the Multiverse Team) is not
working exclusively in those areas; instead, enabling distributed computing from
R (sparklyr), integrating automated
machine learning workflows (mlflow), and
optimizing data ingestion (pins) are
substantial aspects of what we do. We would like to have a platform we can use
to tell you about our work in these areas as well. Furthermore, regarding the
hitherto dominant topic on this blog, deep learning, we might also want to
reflect about it in a less technical way, focussing on impacts on
society, ethics, or even “just” epistemic questions.
Consequently, we needed a new name, but why “AI”? Maybe “data science” would work
as well – however, the science in data science brings up connotations of formality and
theoretic ambitions which we would rather avoid. Instead, AI appeared to be a more rigorous
definition, understood as outlined in an article by Michael
Jordan. Jordan envisions AI as a
new engineering discipline that builds on existing knowledge about inference,
optimization, computation, and data processing the way that chemical engineering
and civil engineering built upon chemistry and physics, respectively.
Supplementing those building blocks (from mathematics, statistics, computer
science), the goal of this new discipline is to include guidance from the social sciences
and the humanities.
By the way, as of this writing, the Multiverse Team consists of Daniel
Falbel, Sigrid
Keydana, Yitao
Li, and Javier
Luraschi.
You can find us on Twitter under the
#mlverse
tag, or pass by our new mlverse
channel on
YouTube. Thank you for your support!
Reuse
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Citation
For attribution, please cite this work as
Team (2020, March 30). Posit AI Blog: Introducing: The RStudio AI Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.rstudio.com/tensorflow/posts/2020-04-01-rstudio-ai-blog/
BibTeX citation
@misc{team2020rstudioaiblog,
author = {Team, The Multiverse},
title = {Posit AI Blog: Introducing: The RStudio AI Blog},
url = {https://blogs.rstudio.com/tensorflow/posts/2020-04-01-rstudio-ai-blog/},
year = {2020}
}