How cold hard data science harnesses AI with Wolfram Research

It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the reality of technology from the hype and marketing messages that bombard our inboxes daily. In just the last five years, we’ve probably heard too much about the metaverse, blockchain, and virtual reality, for example. At present, we’re in the midst of a furore about the much-abused term ‘AI’, and time will tell whether this particular storm will be seen as a teacup resident. Artificial Intelligence News spoke exclusively to Jon McLoone, the Director of Technical Communication and Strategy at one of the most mature organisations in the computational intelligence and scientific innovation space, Wolfram Research, to help us put our present concepts of AI and their practical uses into a deeper context. Jon has worked at Wolfram Research for 32 years in various roles, currently leading the European Technical Services team. A mathematician by training and a skilled practitioner in many aspects of data analysis, we began our interview by having him describe Wolfram’s work in an elevator pitch format.

A symbolic representation of the thrown ball, on the other hand, would involve differential equations for projectile motion and representations of elements: mass, viscosity of the atmosphere, friction, and many other factors. “It could then be asked, ‘What happens if I throw the ball on Mars?’ It’ll say something accurate. It’s not going to fail.”

The ideal way to solve business (or scientific, medical, or engineering) problems is a combination of human intelligence, symbolic reasoning, as epitomised in Wolfram Language, and what we now term AI acting as the glue between them. AI is a great technology for interpreting meaning and acting as an interface between the component parts.

“Some of the interesting crossovers are where we take natural language and turn that into some structured information that you can then compute with. Human language is very messy and ambiguous, and generative AI is very good at mapping that to some structure. Once you’re in a structured world of something that is syntactically formal, then you can do things on it.”