How to practice responsible AI

TBK: Episode 30

This episode features an interview with Scott Zoldi. He is the Chief Analytics Officer at FICO where he is responsible for the analytic development of FICO’s product and technology solutions. Scott is involved in developing new analytic products and applications, and has authored more than 100 patents. His current focus is on self-learning analytics to detect cyber security attacks. On this episode, Scott talks about how to attract and retain world-class data scientists, the importance of following a model governance process, and responsible AI.



Headshot of Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer at FICO

About the guest

Scott Zoldi is Chief Analytics Officer at FICO, responsible for the analytic development of FICO’s product and technology solutions. While at FICO, Scott has been responsible for authoring more than 100 analytic patents, with 68 granted and 43 pending. Scott is actively involved in the development of new analytic products and Big Data analytics applications, many of which leverage new streaming analytic innovations such as adaptive analytics, collaborative profiling and self-calibrating analytics.

Quotes

”Responsible AI is really ensuring that you have a level of competence of what it’s learned. You can explain it, you can justify it. And when things start to go off the rail, you know how to react.”

”Machine learning and AI can become callous. Particularly if it’s starting to provide value. Very often people don’t inspect where it could go wrong. Because when AI is wrong, it’s very wrong. Whereas when the human is wrong, it’s typically not tremendously wrong.”

”Standard algorithms and capabilities are very highly valued versus the one-off solution for our customer. Because we see that we can get multiples of usage out of these algorithms and it differentiates our entire company, not just one client at a time.”

”There’s this constant noise and churn in our lives as CAOs. And it’s very easy for that to consume every moment of our workday. Our value is not being a general manager. We can be important people managers and general managers. Our value is actually carving out a bit of time and thinking about how we could make our products, our solutions, the world, the industry, better through collaboration, through science.”

”That’s where you’re going to drive the most value, is what makes you different than the way you see the world and how you want to approach the problems that you’re exposed to.”

Time stamps

[3:22] Scott’s path to CAO
[5:53] The distinction between analytics science and data science
[8:05] The importance of exploration within analytics
[10:04] How Scott applies research findings at FICO
[13:24] About responsible AI
[17:58] Promoting regulation of responsible AI
[21:54] Who owns the operationalization process?
[25:48] How to prioritize responsible AI at your company
[39:28] The best career advice Scott has ever received

Links

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn | Follow Scott on Twitter | Check out FICO
Connect with Rob on LinkedIn | Follow Rob on Twitter

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