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Christopher Caldwell
CST 300 Writing Lab
16 January 2018
A Path to a Career in Artificial Intelligence

The notion of artificial intelligence in contemporary popular culture often conjures up

Hollywood stereotypes of one sort or another. Either we think of apocalyptic doomsday

intelligences like those from the Terminator franchises, or we think of helpful robots like those

from the Pixar movies like Wall-E or Baymax. However, the reality of getting machines to think

about our world is much different than the image portrayed by the entertainment industry.

Dictionary.com defines artificial intelligence as, “The means of duplicating or imitating

intelligence in computers, robots, or other devices, which allows them to solve problems,

discriminate among objects, and respond to voice commands.” (artificial intelligence. n.d.) These

days, the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, two terms often used

interchangeably, have enjoyed a renaissance of interest thanks to the increasing availability of

large data sets, and an abundance of cloud-based parallel processing services. Tech companies,

from Facebook, to Amazon, to Google, use artificial intelligence in their business processes to

better solve problems that are either too large, too complex, too fast, or too expensive for humans

to solve on their own. For Facebook and Google, artificial intelligence might be used to learn

what ads a user will most likely be interested in. For Amazon, artificial intelligence software

might be used to recommend items the system thinks you would like to buy. However as you

might imagine, there are vastly more uses to artificial intelligence than simply recommender

systems, although that is certainly one use. Any of the aforementioned companies makes

extensive use of artificial intelligence systems, and those investments are predicted to grow

dramatically.

As Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Coursera puts it,

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"AI is the new electricity. About 100 years ago, we started rolling out electricity

in the United States, and it changed every single major industry. ... We now see a

surprisingly clear path for AI to also transform every single major industry.

Everything ranging from much better healthcare to more personalized education

to much more efficient retail and manufacturing to self-driving cars." (Ng, 2017)

Well-known technology powerhouse, Google, is one such company that is investing

heavily in artificial intelligence. In early 2014, Google bought London based AI startup

DeepMind, for $400 million U.S. (Gannes, 2014) Google is also responsible for developing the

open-source machine learning library TensorFlow, used by at least 27 other major companies

including Twitter, eBay, NVidia, IBM, and Uber to streamline their machine learning

applications development and deployment process. (TensorFlow. n.d.) Google and its parent

company Alphabet Inc., have their headquarters in Mountain View CA. USA, named

Googleplex. (Our Location, n.d.) along with branch offices in New York, NY., Ann Arbor, MI.,

Pittsburg PA., Atlanta GA., Austin TX., Boulder CO., Cambridge MA., San Francisco CA.,

Seattle WA., Reston VA., and Washington D.C., as well as over 70 offices across 40 countries.

(Our Location, n.d.) According to Google’s 2016 Annual Report the company had 72,053 full-

time employees. The internet company offers a wide variety of products and services. Chief

among Google’s offerings is its revolutionary web searching functionality offered on its

homepage using Google’s proprietary PageRank algorithm. (Google Fun Facts, 2001) By

offering superior search capabilities, Google is able to drive more traffic to their advertisements,

which appear unobtrusively on their results page, which enabled the generation of $79.4 billion

in revenue via their AdSense, DoubleClick and AdWords product services. (Page, L., & Porat R.,

2017) Google also offers collaboration services through GSuite such as Gmail, Google
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Hangouts, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Forms, Googles Slides,

Google Drive, and Google Groups. In 2006, Google bought YouTube, the online video sharing

service for $1.65 billion. (Press, A. 2006) Furthermore, Google is also branching into the

hardware market, offering a line of smartphones, tablets, and its own line of laptops called

Chromebooks, which run on Google’s Linux based Chrome operating system. Google’s financial

outlook looks to be quite healthy, since according to Google’s 2016 Annual Report, the company

has seen approximately 20% growth, year over year since their inception. (Page, L., & Porat R.,

2017)

Google owes its beginnings as a company to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two

computer science PhD students at Stanford University who in 1996 theorized a better way to

search the world-wide web. The pair came up with the BackRub (later PageRank) algorithm, and

as is now the cliché in Silicon Valley, founded Google in 1998 out of a friend’s garage in Menlo

Park. (Our History, n.d.) Google’s success on the web grew rapidly and steadily over nearly two

decades, with a culture of excellence, openness, and simplicity. In 2003, the company moved

into its current headquarters in Mountain View named Googleplex. And in 2004 became a

publicly traded company on the US stock exchange. (Our History, n.d.) In 2012, Google reported

that it processed approximate 3.3 billion web searches per day. (Zeitgeist, 2012) And Today,

Google Chrome is the world’s most used web browser, in addition to Google.com being the

world’s most visited web-site. (Vaughan-Nichols, 2017)

In 2015, Google restructured itself under a new parent company named Alphabet Inc.

Larry Page stepped up to become CEO of Alphabet Inc, while then Google Product Manager

Sundar Pichai became the new and current CEO of Google. (Walker, 2015) Sundar Pichai earned

his degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in Metallurgical Engineering, a
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M.S. from Stanford University in Material Sciences and Engineering, as well as an MBA from

the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pichai has a reputation for being a skilled and forward

thinking diplomat capable of bridging the gap between people and technology. He was

responsible for overseeing the launch of Google’s Chrome browser in 2008. (Lakshman, 2015)

As a company, Google is known for their open and collaborative company culture, and is

clearly influential given the number of visits and searches that Google receives on a daily basis.

However, Google’s influence on the web has also lead to increased concerns in the minds of

Google’s critics. In 2007, Privacy International, a human rights organization, rated Google as

“hostile” in a report which ranked web companies according to how they handle user’s personal

data. (BBC, 2007) The same year, a paper from the Institute for Information Systems and

Computer Media concluded that Google continues to exert a disconcerting amount of influence

on humanity as a whole, given that it is able to funnel queries towards particular results, while

concurrently gathering vast quantities of information on businesses and global society. (Maurer,

et al., 2007)

In terms of employee satisfaction, Google employees are among the most content in

among all companies. In 2017, glassdoor.com ranked Google as the 5th best place to work. (Best

Places to Work, 2017) Google employees on Glassdoor.com also gave Google an aggregate

rating of 4.4 stars out of 5. And CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded “Highest Rated CEO of 2017”

(Google Career Overview, (n.d.) The company offers its employees such on-site amenities as

three free healthy meals a day from the Googleplex café, physicians, chiropractors, personal

trainers, and massage therapists. Google encourages Google employees to always be learning,

paying employees to pursue personal projects, and matching employee charitable donations.
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(How we care for Googlers, 2018) Google reported strong financial earnings for the 2016 fiscal

year of approximately $90.3 billion dollars. (Page, L., & Porat R., 2017)

For nearly every modern trend in the technology industry, Alphabet Inc. has a company

or project related to it. Some significant trends include machine learning (ML) and artificial

intelligence (AI), so-called big data which are data sets that pose unique processing challenges,

virtual and augmented reality, and internet connected devices also known as the Internet of

Things (IoT). A search of Google’s online job postings indicates that a candidate for the position

of Software Engineer, Machine Learning, must have a BS/BA in Computer Science or related

field, 2 years work or other experience with ML or AI, experience with a general purpose

programming language such as Java, C/C++, or Python, and 4 years of relevant work experience

including software development experience. (Fields of Work, n.d.)

It is the ultimate goal of this paper’s author to achieve employment as an artificial

intelligence / machine learning software engineer. However, this is not immediately achievable

for the author. As such the author has a plan to enter the job market as a full-stack developer,

either in the mobile or web space. A full-stack developer is a software developer that is capable

of creating and integrating software components at all levels of the system. For instance, a full-

stack web developer can create and manage databases, write and maintain procedures that

execute on servers, and create and maintain the interface and logic that users will interact with on

their browsers. The author of this paper intends to use such time and experience as a full-stack

developer to jump-start a career in machine learning at a later date. However, before the author

can be considered hirable as a full-stack developer, the author will complete the CS Fully Online

bachelor’s degree program at California State University Monterey Bay.

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Many software engineering careers require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in

computer science, and the California State University Monterey Bay program helps satisfy that

requirement. In addition, the program teaches the programmatic manipulation of media types,

database management, software design, computer networking, internet programming, graphics

programming, algorithms, and software engineering. The program also prepares the author for a

real-world career in software engineering by giving the author the experience of collaborating

with fellow students to solve real-life software engineering projects. (Program Structure &

Courses, n.d.)

The degree and experience gained by completing the fully online program offered by

California State University Monterey Bay should enable the author to meet the minimum skill

requirements to gain employment locally as an entry level software engineer. However, the

author intends to continue working towards the qualifications needed to become a machine

learning expert. Machine learning is a mathematically intensive discipline. As such, the author

plans to master all of the mathematical material on Khan Academy. The author has taken a

course on Coursera about machine learning, and knows that a strong foundation in calculus,

linear algebra, probability, and statistics, are required to excel in machine learning. Once the

author has mastered the mathematical material offered by Khan Academy, the author will take

placement exams at Mt. San Jacinto to earn course credits towards an Associate of Science in

Mathematics.

In addition to the academic expertise gained through the study of the requisite

mathematics of machine learning, the author has selected a five course specialization program

offered by Coursera on machine learning primarily taught by machine learning expert Andrew

Ng. The course specialization titled, Deep Learning Specialization, offers courses in Neural
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Networks and Deep Learning, Hyperparameter Tuning and Optimization, Structuring Machine

Learning Projects, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Sequence Models. (Deep Learning, n.d.)

The author intends to work on a personal project of interest, that being to emulate the

results achieved by teams such as Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero, and Elon Musk’s OpenAI, whereby

specialized neural networks have essentially taught themselves to play arbitrary video games. In

particular, the author is interested in neural networks that are able to master arbitrary gaming

domains through repeated self-play, such as was achieved by Alpha Zero in December of 2017.

(Klein, 2017)

Through MeetUp.com, the author will get involved in local communities in Southern

California that might have an interest in the author’s skill-set, or in communities through which

the author can network professionally. The author will stay alert for opportunities and donate

time and services to charitable organizations, and open-source projects that might prove

beneficial in attaining the author’s ultimate career goals. Trade shows, such as the GPU

Technology Conference sponsored by NVidia will be attended for the purposes of networking

and staying informed on neural processing hardware innovations and other such industry

developments.

The outlook for the technology industry, especially with respect to artificial intelligence

and machine learning appears extremely fertile. Presently, artificial intelligence is being used to

help doctors find cancer in patient screenings, drive automobiles safely without human input,

help machines understand human speech better, and help machines sound more like natural

humans when they speak. This author believes that the education received at California State

University Monterey Bay will be a pivotal development in a quest to achieve a glorious and

socially responsible career in artificial intelligence.

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References

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6740075.stm

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work/

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