IT leader Cognizant evolves AI beyond 'hill climbing' ZDNet

"Deep learning is neither deep, nor is it learning," says Babak Hodjat, the vice president of projects for "Evolutionary AI" at IT services giant Cognizant Technologies. Hodjat's critique is part of a fascinating exploration of AI taking shape at IT services firm Cognizant Technology Solutions, a twenty-five-year-old company based in Teaneck, New Jersey that last year made nearly $16 billion in revenue serving some of the biggest companies in the world. For years, this IT giant has talked about "digital transformation," something that is large and significant but also something hard to get one's mind around because it very often seems vague and undefined. And then in December, Cognizant gave a whole new grounding and precision to that digital work by acquiring certain assets from an eleven-year-old AI startup Sentient Technologies. The company, co-founded by Hodjat, has been pursuing a thrilling line of work in what's called "evolutionary computation," where many algorithms, including conventional artificial neural networks, can be tested in parallel for "fitness," to select an optimal network to perform a task.