Could Do-It-Yourself AI Make People More Comfortable with It?

As artificial intelligence makes strides in government, it could be helpful to see for yourself what the tech can do.

By John Breeden II of Nextgov, published October 17, 2018

This is a review from the source of federal technology and cybersecurity news and best practices.

While the Senzing program, which was spun off from an IBM project, won’t look for extraterrestrial life or drive your car, what it can accomplish is pretty fascinating. It’s designed to make connections between elements in any number of databases that no human probably could. It’s even able to compensate for things like typos, people using nicknames, data that was incorrectly entered and even people who lied and gave purposely false information. That is actually surprisingly powerful, especially if clever humans think of ways to gain insight from previously unusable or overlooked data. Senzing is also giving away a lot of functionality in order to show people the benefits of AI. Anyone can download the entire program for free for either Mac or Windows, and it will run on any moderately powerful desktop system. It’s not connected to the cloud or anything like that, so you can even run it on an air-gapped network.

And because this is a true AI, it knew that new information might change its previous assumptions, something that even humans sometimes overlook. Every time I added a new database for consideration, the Senzing AI went back and double checked all of its previous findings. It did that to see if it could make any new connections, but also to see if any previous assumptions might be proven wrong when examined in context with the new data.