Homeland Security wants to 'cut through the hype' of AI, find best uses only

The terms "artificial intelligence," "machine learning" and "robotic process automation" (RPA) get thrown around synonymously, but differentiating between them is important to understanding how best to use them. Brian Campo, deputy chief technology officer at the Department of Homeland Security, clarified that RPA is essentially "automation" -- the act of putting manual tasks into a context or system where the same action can be done automatically and intrinsically. As for AI and machine learning, the difference comes down to how the data is used. "So machine learning is trying to take data and make it intrinsically more informative, trying to take those automated insights and figure them out and find them in new and interesting ways, uncovering things that we wouldn't necessarily be thinking about or something that wouldn't occur to the operator," he said on Federal Monthly Insights -- Cloud and Artificial Intelligence. "Now, artificial intelligence is sort of different than that, in that it's not about driving insights -- it's about actually making impacts to some operational activity."