Don't leave out the human touch in artificial intelligence

Retail is an intensely personal business, and the best artificial intelligence (AI) deployments recognize that fact. Amazon and the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics are co-sponsoring a competition to train machine learning models to predict the delivery routes chosen by experienced drivers. Amazon is providing all information used by existing route optimization algorithms as part of the training data. However, Amazon will also provide more than 4,000 traces of driver-determined routes, which encode the drivers' know-how. Using both sources of information, contestants will be able to build models that identify and predict drivers' deviations from routes computed in the traditional manner.