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Speaker "Anand Ranganathan" Details Back

 

Topic

The Turing Test for Conversational BI & Analytics
 

Abstract

Conversational BI & Analytics aims to make data and insights more accessible to all users. It is a paradigm where users can ask questions in natural language to a bot and get back relevant results, in the form of natural language, charts and other visualizations. Furthermore, the user can have a conversation with a bot in order to dig deeper into the data and extract actionable insights. The bot acts as a virtual data analyst or virtual data scientist. 
In this talk, I'm going to explore the question of deciding if a conversational analytics bot has AI. I'm going to answer this question using the framework of a Turing test. That is, “Can a conversational analytics system imitate a data analyst well enough that a business user cannot distinguish it from a real human (i.e. a real data analyst)?“. I will focus on different tasks that data analysis involves, and describe how we are a bot might undertake these tasks. Finally, I'll give my thoughts on where conversational analytics bots are today, and how close they are to the dream of achieving AI (at least in the narrow sense of doing analysis on data)

Profile

Anand Ranganathan is a co-founder and the Chief AI Officer at Unscrambl, Inc. He is a data scientist, AI engineer, Big Data developer, architect and researcher rolled into one person. He is leading Unscrambl's product development in several cutting-edge areas, including natural language processing, conversational analytics, automated insights, real-time optimization and decision-making, and automated marketing optimization. He has worked with numerous customers worldwide to design, implement and deploy Big Data, Stream Processing and AI-based solutions. Before joining Unscrambl, he was a Global Technical Ambassador, Master Inventor and Research Scientist at IBM. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He also has over 70 academic journal and conference publications and 30 patent filings in his name.