We will discuss this matter with Mr. Antuan Angelov, Business Development Manager – Cloud Services and Databases, at KONTRAX
Curious, seeking innovative approaches and progressive ideas – we introduce to you Mr. Antuan Angelov, who joined our team three years ago and always has something interesting and new to tell us.
This year, he enrolled at the Technical University in Sofia to pursue a PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence Systems. He is a graduate from the Professional High School of Electrical Engineering and Automation "Kirov", specializing in "Robotics", with a diploma thesis entitled: "Real-Time Clock for Apple". The project involved an automated and computer control of bells at school. Specific shutdown mode (computer sleep) during classes, switching on for the time of breaks when a computer starts and stops the bells as scheduled.
His higher education was in the scope of management, which determined his professional path, but in line with this, his attention was also drawn by the new data managing and analyzing opportunities, which can only be processed with mathematical calculations, programming and approaches known in Artificial Intelligence.
What did provoke you to continue your studies in the field of Artificial Intelligence?
To constantly evolve is important to me and therefore, Artificial Intelligence has awakened my curiosity to discover new technological possibilities, to resolve specific issues, which solutions have been difficult to find so far. First of all, we are talking about a notion in ourselves. It is in our consciousness and evokes specific associations and analogies. These are formed throughout our life experience and accumulated in order to pass on to the next generations and form the common notions through which we communicate with others and the surrounding environment.
There is something attractive and curious about the idea that a machine can understand these same notions: knowledge derives from a living life, full of accumulated meaning and experience.
Our nervous system plays the role of a guardian and a channel to flow these processes and has a key position in the study of Artificial Intelligence. “It's much closer to Freud, the idea of having this thin film of consciousness and deliberate reasoning, as well as all those boiling things from below. The disgusting things below are not a deliberate reasoning, it's something else – something that works by analogy” says Geoffrey Hinton, who developed in 2017 the Capsule Networks* designed to mimic the way observations are made by humans.
In which areas do you see the development of Artificial Intelligence?
Applications of Artificial Intelligence are not limited to the discovery of coincidences, classification or pattern recognition and text.
Technological companies are doing pretty well with the innovations in our everyday life. Artificial Intelligence is not an exception, and is engaged in solving and seeking technological responses to some of the world's biggest problems, how it will change the approach of working in healthcare, medicine and education, for example.
I see a lot of inefficiency in the way data is used by the medical professionals. There is more information in the patient's history than it is used. Not to mention that patient history data is not used at all. In fact, doctors really cannot read the tomographic scans (CT scan) very well. If you ask two radiologists to read one and the same scan you will get two different readings and consequently – diagnoses.
I believe that Artificial Intelligence will improve the work of radiologists – or at least eliminate that part of the job on reading accurately the image.
Recognition is the heart of Artificial Intelligence and of successful diagnosis and treatment. “Ultimately, engineers in Artificial Intelligence will first understand how to train your immune system to attack cancer cells” says Geoffrey Hinton. This will be a turning point for human development.
A project for the society would be a potentially possible priority to establish a single center in order to analyze the huge volume of data collected by hospitals and doctors based on Artificial Intelligence and, in particular, neural networks.
A ‘Digital health’ is not a science fiction but a fact. Whether it's a cardiovascular disease, a cancer researches or a genetic engineering, mankind will have no choice but to incorporate the solutions in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence tools can offer many innovations, including remote monitoring of the patient's heart rhythm by accessing Big Data arrays – patient archives essentially (without violating their personal data). A Toronto-based Deep Genomics Company, for example, develops an Artificial Intelligence that can read and interpret DNA, which will help detect the disease one generation earlier and determine the best treatment when you go to the GP.
Also, I see the penetration of Artificial Intelligence increasingly in the field of education and its potential to introduce more and more interactive methods in learning new knowledge through multimedia, audio and video materials, including filming and/or recording of exams and many other applications that are about to be developed and applied in modern-day classroom. I would like to share that currently, I am also in the role of a mentor of a group of trainees at KONTRAX, students from the Sofia Vocational High School of Electronics “John Atanasoff” in the Specialty of System Programming. They work on their assignments, i.e. to explore the system functions and to create series of commands for the SanBot robot that will be integrated into the learning process, including to make it recognize the teacher in the classroom and to start the projection of a presentation to students about the results of which we will be able to tell soon.
Do you see a threat and how do you look at the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence?
Today, Artificial Intelligence integrates with a fast pace in our daily lives. The time distance between the well-known Mobil phone and iPhone 10 with Face Recognition is less than 10 years, and many prominent scientists are prudent that the technology is moving straight ahead, even prematurely - before being capable to stir it. Stephen Hawking, Elon Mask and Bill Gates have warned everyone about the risks of any unlimited Artificial Intelligence. “I'm afraid that Artificial Intelligence can replace people as a whole” said Hawking recently. It is hard to answer unequivocally, but there is a growing need to raise this issue and in the future, to seek balance between both development of technology and human development.
In the next series of articles and materials on Artificial Intelligence, we will introduce you to new ideas and concepts, as well as the current KONTRAX’s projects in this field.
*Capsule Networks - Geoffrey Hinton seeks to reduce the massive amount of data needed to train traditional neural networks and creates a new technology that requires less data to recognize objects in new situations. You will learn more about the neural networks in our next articles on the topic of Artificial Intelligence published on kontrax.bg.
