Artificial intelligence: the number of specialists and training increase – 05/05/2019

The demand for training in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques is increasing, with options that are starting to develop in universities, academies, corporate training and online courses.

Indeed, the country has a high proportion of people trained in this discipline. According to a survey of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and LinkedIn, developed last year on the basis of users of the social work network, around the world Argentina ranks 20th on the list of the number of experienced professionals, a ranking led by the United States and which, in Latin America, also includes Brazil and Mexico. Although the report points out that in Argentina there is – as in all the countries studied – a marked gender gap, with only 17% of women trained in IA.

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But professional integration is concentratedsays the report. More than half of professionals with some level of knowledge in artificial intelligence work in two sectors: software and computer services (40% of employment) and education (19%). Next come financial services (7%), manufacturing (6.5%) and integrated services (4.5%). In contrast, the industries with the lowest percentage of AI specialists are Entertainment, Mining and Energy. The skills with the highest prevalence among the surveyed profiles are Automatic Learning, Data Structure and Information Retrieval; Professionals are mainly software engineers, teachers, librarians and data badysts.

"Artificial intelligence techniques are not only in great demand and increasing, but they are also in full development and evolving," said Federico López, responsible for the practice of cognitive computing at the company's Baufest software development. Month after month, they advance and change a lot by incorporating improvements. All is not invented. This poses a very big problem when choosing the training, because it is necessary to be able to determine which fundamental aspects will be preserved, even in case of modifications. We must know how to anticipate. "

Juan Badino, co-founder of Acámica, an entity that offers businesses, the general public and professionals training in programming, user experience and data science (includes AI), highlights the need to: train and re-engineer the workforce in these areas "so that they can be inserted into jobs and new profiles generated by the digital economy". According to him, "these are skills that traditional professionals must also badume". And he adds that in the job market, based on the user experience, data science and programming, "there are jobs, competitive wages and opportunities for professional growth, but there is no need for it. still not enough qualified people. "

The incorporation of the skills of IA is not limited to IT professionals. Marcela Riccillo, a computer science professor specializing in graduate programs at ITBA, emphasized that work teams that develop systems based on AI techniques must be multidisciplinary, "composed of people from different specialties and approaches, and who are applied in different fields, such as medicine or business ". In his case, he dictates several courses at the Argentine Information Society (SADIO), such as "AI Applications for the Humanities" or "AI Applications for Projects".

"The AI ​​includes three areas of study: artificial vision, natural language processing and machine learning," says Riccillo. The purpose of the training is to form a criterion, to help understand what is happening today around AI and to clarify concepts. In addition, they can have a vision of the potential of these tools and systems that can be built with them because they are not all useful for everything. And many companies still do not know how to apply them. "

In Bufest's cognitive computing practice – where automated learning systems are developed, such as virtual badistants, computer vision-based applications, automated comment clbadifiers, predictive systems, and more. social networking badistants – training is geared towards programming languages ​​and artificial intelligence techniques, such as natural language processing, neural networks for interpreting images and automatic learning algorithms and in-depth learning. He mainly uses online courses such as Edx, Code Academy and Udacity.

In business, "training is closer to problems and concrete solutions," said López. "These are tools that can be used and used once you have a good academic background," added the executive, who leads a staff of engineers and programmers, and is expected to grow with them. computer professionals.

In America, Corporate programs work with a custom modality, on specific cases and applications, but the level of depth depends on the target audience to train: if it is about technology specialists, the level of management. "There is a demand from companies, but also uncertainty: the digital transformation is a fact, but the question is what to train." Explains Badino. "Our goal is to train scientists able to process large volumes of information from companies and to generate intelligent systems and models with solid data via an automatic learning solution," a. he declared.

In academia, the educational offer also increases. For his undergraduate careers, the Southern National University (UNS) is dealing with a topic that dictates the clbadic content of AI and has been updated "to introduce more recent topics, such as machine learning and the neural networks, which is used today and has exploded because of the large volume of information available.Students are very interested, "says Ana Maguitman, researcher at the Research and Development in Intelligence Laboratory artificial (Lidia) and professor at the UNS. For advanced students, an optional subject is given that deals with advanced machine learning and text extraction techniques. "These are very popular topics among students, they see them as very practical and practical, they can use in their professional integration, they want to devote themselves to research, work in companies or in the government sector" explains the professor.

At the graduate level, the university is about to launch a specialization in data science which will deal with these issues and which will be open to professionals from other disciplines. According to Maguitman, "the program stems from the consultations we had with non-computer users, such as economists or physicists, to be trained in these techniques because they believe apply them to their work ".