Shivon Zilis on the Machine Intelligence Landscape

Achievements like DeepMind's AlphaGo are making headlines in the popular press, large tech companies have started a "platform war" to become the go-to company for A.I., and entrepreneurs are increasingly building machine learning products that have the potential to transform how companies operate. Exciting though the hype may be, the commercial potential of machine intelligence won't be realized unless entrepreneurs and data scientists can clearly communicate the business value of new tools to non-technical executives. And the first step to communicating clearly is to define a vocabulary to think through what machine intelligence is, how the different algorithms work, and, most importantly, what practical benefits they can provide across verticals and industries. Shivon Zilis, a partner and founding member of Bloomberg Beta, is doing just that. She has spent the past few years focused exclusively on machine intelligence, building out a vocabulary and taxonomy to help the community understand activity in the field and communicate new developments clearly and effectively.