Scott Zoldi

Last month, the Bank of England joined the ranks of those that have expressed interest in machine learning, along with reservations about its potential pitfalls. In Staff Working Paper No. 816: Machine learning explainability in finance: an application to default risk analysis, the authors make the following observations: ML and AI suffer from a black box proble…

There is a lot of controversy in business circles as to whether companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology for unethical purposes, or unknowingly doing so. This post isn’t about that - it's about what ethical AI means for model development. One of the most common misperceptions I hear about bias is, “If I don’t use age, gender or race, or similar f…

Neural networks can significantly boost the arsenal of analytic tools companies use to solve their biggest business challenges. But countless organizations hesitate to deploy machine learning algorithms with a “black box” appearance; while their mathematical equations are often straightforward, deriving a human-understandable interpretation is often difficult. The res…

By any measure, 2018 was the Year of Artificial Intelligence—“31 flavors of AI” and then some. For me, personally, 2018 was a period of intense AI-related creativity; my role as Chief Analytics Officer is tailor-made for my desires to rigorously create exciting new technologies in the context of solving the real-world problems of FICO customers. 2018 was the perfect y…

When people think of AI, they often think of The Terminator or Westworld. They think of a war between robots and people, and usually the people are having a pretty rough time of it. This is not the view shared by most people who work in the industry, although there are things to concern us. At FICO World 2018, I sat down with Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov to discu…

Nearly every day you can read about a new application of artificial intelligence. This field is changing very fast, and not only are the applications expanding, so is the technology. At FICO World 2018, I sat down with Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov to discuss the hot topics in the world of AI, and asked: How is AI evolving? Watch the video below, and for more of…

One of the landmark moments in the history of AI came 21 years ago, when Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer Deep Blue — and then was beaten by it. How did this change the future of artificial intelligence? Did it spell the end of the human race as thinkers and competitors? As a researcher and practitioner in machine learning, I know that each ac…