Tommy Jones is part of a company call In-Q-Tel that is part of the CIA that buys companies much like a venture capitalist.

Tommy believes that Statistics and Data Science are the same thing. Computer Science and Statistics are quickly becoming the most important job skills that anyone can have. He also believes that whoever knows how to code has a big edge over other people.

Its not whether the technology exists or not. Its is the person in charge able to see the worth and implement it or not. For example, during this COVID crisis, we are using digital ways of connecting and working. This technology is not new, but the people in charge did not use it because it was not necessary.

What is the future of natural language processing? Most natural language processing is based off of text, you are counting words in relation to other words. Soon, natural language processing will not be niche to the most expert people. Instead, it would be accessible to more people as a data analytics problem.

  1. Language is hard because of its concepts. You can contrast this to machine learning and recognition. This is only mechanical difficulties. However, language is different in that there is lots of context and history. Not only that, but how we talk (intonation) also changes the meaning. We do not know how to set that problem up.
  2. There is a way for computers to represent language in a mathematical space. Language is structured differently. Right now, we can only use on language one at a time. Now, machine learning is allowing the machines to be multilingual.

What is the most interesting thing you have seen while working with the Intel community? The intelligence community works with low intelligence language. We have lots of ways to count in French but does not really have the same for Somalia. For example, natural language processing product if you only address English, you are missing out on a bigger market that could benefit you and others somewhere else.

TIPS: Don’t shy away from programming to get a tangible sense of how computers work. Its really important to have right brain knowledge in activities. A mistake that he sees technically inclined people is that they forget about the human, and they try to automate humans. Remember that humans are narcissistic people. We created computers to better humans. Keep up in politics that could make us better.