Does software engineering get worse?

Posted on July 20, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Ulrich Junker: “Imho, software engineering gets worse in each decade. Initially, computers were programmed by punch cards and programmers needed to execute their programs on paper to anticipate issues. This was tedious, but very instructive.

Next came PCs with compilers. People could quickly try out their programs. Execution on paper was replaced by the debugger. Interestingly, bug databases started to pop up in this phase. Software companies openly admitted that they shipped buggy software.

Then came open software, IDEs, frequent releases. Many programmers are simply stitching code fragments together and then walk through a debugger to understand the behavior. Bugs were considered inevitable and many bug reports simply constituted requests for feature refinements as most software lacks a clear specification of its behavior.

Now we are getting LLMs for code generation … let us see which kind of software we are getting thanks to them …” Link

Posted in Software Development | Leave a comment

Gartner Says AI Ready For Decision Intelligence Market

Posted on July 19, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

David Pidsley from Gartner wrote today: “Decision intelligence (DI) is not about driving decisions with data; it’s about deriving data from decisions to achieve better business outcomes. Decision intelligence platforms (DIPs) are software used to create solutions that support, automate and augment decision making of humans or machines, powered by the composition of data, analytics, knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of global enterprises will apply decision intelligence practices for logging decisions for subsequent analysis.” David listed the following DIPs: 4Paradigm 第四范式, ACTICO, Aera Technology, Airin, Inc., Cogility Software, Corridor Platforms, CRIF, Decisions, Diwo, Cloverpop, Elemental Cognition, Faculty, FICO, FlexRule, IBM, InRule, Merlynn Intelligence Technologies, o9 Solutions, Inc., OpenRules, Inc., Palantir Technologies, ParetoSC, Quantexa, Rainbird Technologies, Rulex, SAS, Sparkling Logic, Inc, Spindox, Trisotech, Verteego, XpertRule Software. Link

Posted in Decision Intelligence | Leave a comment

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Posted on July 17, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Dan Selman wrote: “The key to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is building your ontology. It doesn’t matter if you are reasoning using a Knowledge Graph, a rules engine or a relational database — you need to do the work of understanding the concepts in your domain, and their properties and relationships.

That is fundamentally different to “find me chunks of text similar to this chunk of text”.

I think folks are getting confused because an LLM can be a useful aid in understand the concepts in a domain, extracting instances of known domain concepts from text, and searching for text based on vector embedding, and they are a Swiss Army knife for data format transformation and text generation.

Let’s use the right tool for the right problem. LLMs are great at many things, but reasoning is not one of them.” Link

Posted in Knowledge Representation, LLM, Reasoning | Leave a comment

5 Submissions for July’s Challenge “Smart Investment”

Posted on July 16, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

We’ve already received 5 submissions for Challenge July-2024 “Smart Investment“:

Posted in Decision Modeling | Leave a comment

The AI Summer

Posted on July 16, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Ben Evans: “Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.” Link

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Leave a comment

Automatically-generated ontology?

Posted on July 16, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Ron Ross: “Automatically-generated ontology? In other words, can existing AI on its own assemble a meaningful, useful ontology from some corpus for a domain of knowledge that currently has no ontology? Based on our experiments and experience, I’d say no (not even close), though yes, it can assist in specifics.” Link

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web | Leave a comment

Decision Modeling and Fairness

Posted on July 8, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Could we achieve fairness in our automatic decision-making? This question was actively discussed in the presentation “How to make optimal decisions (that are unfair, biased and non-objective)” given by Dr. Guido Tack in May of 2024. While Guido used the famous Stable Marriage problem as an example, similar problems are everywhere: allocating teachers to classes, service personnel to customers, nurses to shifts, students to universities, donated organs to patients, etc. Guido pointed out that our decisioning algorithms may introduce bias and unfairness in subtle ways. He is discussing different ways to represent fairness as an optimization objective and makes attempts to achieve it following 3 approaches specified by Corrago Gini, John Rawls, and John Nash. Guido’s conclusion is not very optimistic: each particular problem may requires its own solution. Still this discussion brings some light to quite complex problems in decision modeling and it’s already incentivized our June-2024 Challenge.

Posted in Algortithms, Decision Intelligence, Decision Making, Fairness, Optimization | 1 Comment

James Gosling retires, Java keeps going strong

Posted on July 5, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

== James_Gosling – Wikipedia == Java is strong in 2024 ==

Posted in Computer Scientists, Java, Most Influential | Leave a comment

July-2024 Challenge “Smart Investment”

Posted on July 3, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

We’ve just published a new challenge “Smart Investment”: A client of an investment firm has $10,000 available for investment. He has instructed that his money be invested in particular stocks, so that no more than $5,000 is invested in any one stock but at least $1,000 be invested in each stock. He has further instructed the firm to use its current data and invest in the manner that maximizes his overall gain during a one-year period. Link

Posted in Challenges | Leave a comment

Graph Types and Ontological-Driven Data Structures

Posted on June 30, 2024 by decisionmanagementcommunity

Joe Hoeller wrote about common misconceptions about graphs and AI: “Graphs are essential in various domains, ranging from computer science to bioinformatics. However, distinguishing between different types of graphs and understanding their unique properties and applications is crucial. This article aims to clarify these distinctions by focusing on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), Label Property Graphs (LPGs), Bipartate Graphs, and Semantic Knowledge Graphs” Link

Posted in Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web | Leave a comment