AI vocabulary for the dinner table
Seventeen words from the Data to AI course, each in one sentence you could say at dinner. Print it, stick it on the fridge, and see who can explain one without looking.
Data
A record of something that happened. By lunch, your phone has written down dozens of them about you, and you typed none.
Digital footprint
The trail of data you leave behind, most of it recorded without you typing a thing.
Database
Tables of information, one kind of thing per table, linked by ID numbers so each fact is stored once.
Sample
The part of a group you actually measured. If it isn’t like the whole group, neither is your answer.
Mean and median
The mean is the balance point and the median is the middle value. They only disagree when the data is lopsided.
Standard deviation
How spread out the numbers are. Two teams can both average 60 points, one steady and one all over the place.
Correlation
Two things moving together. It doesn’t mean one causes the other.
A/B test
A fair test: two random groups, one change, then compare what happened.
Machine learning
Teaching a computer with examples instead of rules, so it finds the pattern itself.
Model
The pattern a computer learned from its examples, used to make a guess about something new.
Regression
Drawing the best line through past data to predict a number, like a car’s price from its miles.
Classification
Sorting things into buckets, like spam or not spam, by weighing clues learned from examples.
Overfitting
When a model memorizes its examples instead of learning the idea, then falls apart on anything new.
AI bias
When a model trained mostly on one kind of example gets worse at everyone else.
Neural network
Millions of tiny decision makers, each weighing a few inputs, stacked in layers.
Token
The chunk of text a chatbot reads and writes in. Not letters, which is why one can miscount the r’s in “strawberry.”
Recommendation algorithm
The system that guesses what you’ll watch next from what you and people like you already watched.
From Data to AI, five-minute lessons on how AI works, starting with the data on your phone. pettigrewlab.com/learn/data-to-ai