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Improve thesis' fluency

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Andras Schmelczer 2022-08-06 20:12:47 +02:00
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docs/thesis/chapters/2_background.tex
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@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ In the following, the context of the problem is presented from three perspective
\section{Accessible AI} \label{section:accessible-ai}
Most companies prefer not to develop new models but instead reuse prior ones \cite{bosch2021engineering} and they are able to do so increasingly easier. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of highly accessible AI libraries. For example, let us consider the domain of natural language processing (NLP). There are various options for finding AI solutions that work out of the box: FLAIR \cite{akbik2019flair} and Huggingface's transformers \cite{wolf2019huggingface} let developers access the state-of-the-art models and methods in only a couple of lines of code (in many cases 2 or 3). Using transfer-learning, Huggingface enables developers to leverage vast amounts of knowledge learned by pretrained models (such as BERT \cite{devlin2018bert} and its many improved variations) and fine-tune them for their specific use case. The API exposing this is also extremely accessible.
Most companies prefer not to develop new models but instead reuse prior ones \cite{bosch2021engineering} and they are able to do so increasingly easier. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of highly accessible AI libraries. For example, let us consider the domain of natural language processing (NLP). There are various options for finding AI solutions that work out of the box: FLAIR \cite{akbik2019flair} and Huggingface's transformers \cite{wolf2019huggingface} let developers access the state-of-the-art models and methods in only a couple of lines of code (in many cases 2 or 3). Using transfer-learning, Huggingface enables developers to leverage vast amounts of knowledge learned by pretrained models (such as BERT \cite{devlin2018bert} and its many improved variations) and fine-tune them for their specific use-case. The API exposing this is also extremely accessible.
It is not just these two packages, the list of readily available tools is vast: SpaCy \cite{srinivasa2018natural}, Gensim \cite{vrehuuvrek2011gensim}, and scikit-learn \cite{pedregosa2011scikit}, XGBoost \cite{Chen_2016} are other great examples. The situation is similar in all subdomains of artificial intelligence: some domain expertise is --- admittedly --- beneficial but not a hard-requirement. This, combined with the exponentially increasing computing power affordably available to consumers and business alike \cite{sun2019summarizing}, results in AI that is accessible by many.
@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ From the previous section, it is noticeable that given enough resources and at t
Given the nature of problems faced and amount of available resources, it is not surprising the both of these high-tech, Fortune 500 companies needed to, and did overcome the problems presented by deploying AI. We can learn from their approaches, nonetheless, using them may be infeasible for individuals and SMEs, thus, the issues remain for the majority of practitioners. Luckily, the open-source scene of AI/ML/DS tools, libraries, frameworks\footnote{The terms \textit{framework} and \textit{library} will be used interchangeably in this work stemming from their vague and often holistic differentiation.}, and platforms is thriving. Additionally, there is a considerable number of closed-source --- usually platforms-as-a-service (PaaS) --- solutions next to them. Let us look at some prominent examples.
IBM's AutoAI \cite{wang2020autoai} promises to provide automation for the entire machine learning lifecycle, including deployment. It is a closed-sourced, paid service which --- from their documentation --- seems to focus mostly on non-technical users by providing them with a UI for authoring models. The restrictions caused by the encapsulation of the entire process can be severe. The challenges of integration were emphasised above \cite{sculley2015hidden}. Additionally, an engineer working on Microsoft's comparable solution, the Azure ML Studio, highlighted that once users gain enough understanding of ML, such visual tools can get in their way, and they may need to seek out other solutions \cite{amershi2019software}. Unfortunately, the main value proposition of Azure ML Studio is also to provide a UI for laypeople, and it has also been set to be retired by 2024. Its successor is Azure Machine Learning which shares many similarities with AWS's SageMaker suite \cite{joshi2020amazon}.
IBM's AutoAI \cite{wang2020autoai} promises to provide automation for the entire machine learning lifecycle, including deployment. It is a closed-sourced, paid service which --- from their documentation --- seems to focus mostly on non-technical users by providing them with a UI for authoring models. The restrictions caused by the encapsulation of the entire process can be severe. The challenges of integration were emphasised above \cite{sculley2015hidden}. Additionally, an engineer working on Microsoft's comparable solution, the Azure ML Studio, highlighted that once users gain enough understanding of ML, such visual tools can get in their way, and they may need to seek out other solutions \cite{amershi2019software}. Unfortunately, the main value proposition of Azure ML Studio is also to provide a UI for laypeople, and it has been also set to be retired by 2024. Its successor is Azure Machine Learning which shares many similarities with AWS's SageMaker suite \cite{joshi2020amazon}.
SageMaker offers the most comprehensive suite of tools and services; most importantly it has a set of features called \textit{AWS SageMaker MLOps}. This provides easy and/or default implementations for multiple industry best practices described in \cite{serban2020adoption,serban2021practices,john2020ai}. Among others, it promotes the use of CI/CD, model monitoring, tracing, model versioning, storing both data and models on shared infrastructure, numerous collaboration tools, etc. Nonetheless, SageMaker does not enjoy universal adoption as indicated by the survey data. The cause of this may be the lack of self-hosting option and its relatively high prices: many companies prefer on-premise hosting for privacy and financial reasons \cite{bosch2021engineering}. Additionally, vendor lock-in, and possibly --- in the case where it is not already used for the project --- the initial effort required for setting up AWS integration could be likely deterrents.