Edward Snowden Is Crushing Twitter (2019-12-22) – Global Real News

Hola! Today we did a major analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets dive in. First, the simple stuff: as of 2019-12-22, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4192483 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4574 times, has liked 443 tweets, has uploaded 375 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from the top of the page to the bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 19 replies, 237 retweets and 388 likes, their second latest tweet has 18 replies, 317 reweets and 689 likes, their third latest tweet has 8 replies, 185 retweets and 323 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 147 replies, 1,646 retweets and 2,542 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 7 replies, 19 retweets and 497 likes. That gives you an idea of how much activity they usually get.

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple-dozen tweets (including retweets, BTW), the one we consider the most popular, having incited a huge 2169 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That seems to have caused quite a bit of interest, having also had 35572 retweets and 178056 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

What about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet in the recent past (including stuff they retweeted)? We have concluded that its this one:

That only had 7 direct replies, 19 retweets and 497 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a lot of of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people were saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to what they were before, the amount of positive/negative responses and so on. We wont go into that any more, so our conclusion is this: we believe the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is terrific, and the vast majority of people seem to like them.

Thats it for now. Thanks for coming, and leave a comment if you agree or disagree with me. Just make sure to keep it civil.

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Edward Snowden Is Crushing Twitter (2019-12-22) - Global Real News

Lightning Fill In In The Blank – Valley Public Radio

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Now onto our final game, Lightning Fill in the Blank. Each of our players will have 60 seconds in which to answer as many fill-in-the-blank questions as they can. Each correct answer is worth two points. Bill, can you give us the scores?

BILL KURTIS: Mo and Adam each have three. Roxanne has two.

SAGAL: OK. All right, Roxanne, you're in third place. You're up first. The clock will start when I begin your first question. Fill in the blank. On Tuesday, the House approved a $1.4 trillion spending bill aimed at preventing a blank.

ROXANNE ROBERTS: Shutdown.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: As pro-democracy protests continue, the leader of blank met with Xi Jingping to discuss possible solutions.

ROBERTS: In the - Hong Kong - protests.

SAGAL: Yes, leader of Hong Kong.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: This week, a judge in New York threw out fraud charges against former Trump campaign chairman blank.

ROBERTS: Paul Manafort.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Following an uproar on social media, the blank channel will reinstate a commercial they pulled that features a same-sex marriage.

ROBERTS: The Hallmark Channel.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: A woman is suing the Stumble Inn bar in New York City after she blanked.

ROBERTS: She stumbled in and hurt herself.

SAGAL: Yes, she did.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: On Wednesday, rideshare service blank reached a $4.4 million settlement over sexual harassment allegations.

ROBERTS: That's Uber.

SAGAL: Yes.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: On Monday, New Orleans Saints quarterback blank set a new record for touchdown passes.

ROBERTS: Drew Brees - 540.

SAGAL: There you are.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: After a woman in Brazil failed her driver's test too many times...

(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)

SAGAL: ...Her son blanked.

ROBERTS: Her son dressed up as her and took it for her.

SAGAL: That's exactly right, Roxanne.

(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)

MO ROCCA: Stuck the landing.

SAGAL: Tired of his mom not having a license, the man put on a wig, a floral dress and some lipstick and went to the DMV to take the test for her. Unfortunately, he was arrested after officers grew suspicious after the old woman successfully parallel parked and then wouldn't stop dabbing.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: The man is currently in jail awaiting bail. Sadly, he'll be there for his while because his mom can't drive.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Bill, how did Roxanne do?

KURTIS: She got eight right - 16 more points.

(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)

KURTIS: Total of 18.

SAGAL: There you go.

KURTIS: And the lead.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: We have flipped a coin. Mo has elected to go second. Here we go. In a bipartisan vote, the House passed a trade bill meant to replace blank on Thursday.

ROCCA: NAFTA.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: This week, a federal judge ruled the government was entitled to any proceeds from NSA whistleblower blank's new memoir.

ROCCA: Edward Snowden.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: In his first speech to Parliament since a landslide election victory last week, British Prime Minister blank promised to follow through on a speedy Brexit.

ROCCA: Boris Johnson.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Though initial reports blamed Tesla for the fire that started at one of their car charging stations, security cam footage showed that blank was actually responsible.

ROCCA: A gassy driver. I don't know.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well, it was a guy in a Mustang doing doughnuts around the charger. For the first time in 35 years, Eddie Murphy will blank on Saturday night.

ROCCA: Host.

SAGAL: Yes.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Host "Saturday Night Live." This week, NASA scientists said they expected to find proof of blank within the next decade.

ROCCA: Of life on another planet.

SAGAL: Yeah. Alien life.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: This week, an Audi dealership in China...

(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)

SAGAL: ...Filed suit against a man after his kid blanked.

ROCCA: After his kid stole a car and started doing doughnuts.

SAGAL: No, after his kid drew on 10 cars with a rock.

ROCCA: Ouch.

SAGAL: The kid probably thought he was creating a work of art when he doodled the new cars with a rock. But that's not art. Art is when you duct tape a banana to a car.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: The dealership is now suing the dad for damages. But the dad says he's mostly concerned with where he's going to get a magnet big enough to stick all 10 cars on the fridge. Bill, how did Mo do on our quiz?

KURTIS: Well, he got five right - 10 more points. He has a total of 13. We now go to Adam.

SAGAL: And how many does Adam need to win?

KURTIS: Eight, indeed. Eight to win.

SAGAL: Eight. Here you go, Adam. This is for the game. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court struck down the individual mandate, a key provision of blank.

ADAM BURKE: Obamacare.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: On Sunday, officials said the first phase of the new trade deal between the U.S. and blank was completed.

BURKE: China?

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: This week, Boeing announced it was suspending production of the grounded blank plane.

BURKE: 737 Max.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: On Tuesday, a whistleblower claimed the blank church had potentially dodged taxes on billions of dollars in donations.

BURKE: The Mormon Church.

SAGAL: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

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Lightning Fill In In The Blank - Valley Public Radio

NSA has been lying to the courts all along, says whistleblower, as judges give warrantless surveillance the thumbs-up – RT

The National Security Agency can gather the data of US citizens without a warrant - as long as it gathers this data by mistake, a court has ruled. However, this suits the agency just fine, whistleblower William Binney told RT.

The NSA is permitted to gather data on US citizens abroad, or foreign connected Americans at home. The dragnet surveillance operation necessary to gather this information also sucks up data on millions of Americans with no foreign contacts, a process critics say is unconstitutional.

On Wednesday, the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York declared this incidental collection of information permissible. The NSA has maintained that it is incapable of separating properly and improperly gathered data, but former NSA Technical Director William Binney told RT that this is simply untrue.

Theyve been lying to the courts all along, Binney said. Theyve had the capability to sort that stuff out. Its just that they dont want to.

This gives them power over everyone, the ability to look into political opponents like they did with President Trump, he continued.

While the court ruling gives the NSA free rein to suck up data on Americans phone and internet communications, it did not authorize the US other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to dig through this data. However, according to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling issued last year, the FBI accessed this data trove some 3.1 million times in 2017.

Its agents did so without proper warrants, and on persons unrelated to ongoing criminal cases, as explicitly forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In at least one case, the FBI illegally accessed the data of a suspect before seeking a warrant to spy on them legally.

Wednesdays court ruling concerned Agron Hasbajrami, a US permanent resident who was arrested en route to Turkey in 2011. The government claimed that Hasbajrami was travelling to Pakistan to join a terrorist organization. Hasbajrami claims that the government illegally accessed NSA data to build its case against him.

The court did not issue a ruling on this data access, instead punting the decision back down to a lower court to examine the Fourth Amendment implications.

Hasbajramis case is rare, in that he was informed that the evidence against him was collected by the NSA. Defendants are usually kept in the dark when clandestine agencies do the investigating.

The CIA, the FBI, the DEA and other law enforcement people have access to that data to search for common crime within the United States, Binney said. And they use it against US citizens in criminal courts without telling anyone in the court, or anyone else in the court, lawyers included.

So theyre fundamentally violating the rights of thousands of US citizens every year...without any oversight whatsoever.

The existence of the NSAs mass surveillance program was revealed in 2013 by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Though the agency has reportedly ended its phone spying program, the espionage charges against Snowden remain in place, and Snowden himself remains in Moscow, where he has been granted asylum.

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NSA has been lying to the courts all along, says whistleblower, as judges give warrantless surveillance the thumbs-up - RT

The Community Reacts To Edward Snowden On Twitter (2019-12-21) – Global Real News

Hello! Today we did a full on analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets get started. These are the main things: as of 2019-12-21, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4189149 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4565 times, has liked 442 tweets, has uploaded 373 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from top to bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 2,116 replies, 34,373 retweets and 174,269 likes, their second latest tweet has 212 replies, 3,459 reweets and 6,794 likes, their third latest tweet has 19 replies, 202 retweets and 440 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 6 replies, 300 retweets and 885 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 96 replies, 985 retweets and 1,414 likes. That gives you an idea of how much activity they usually get.

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple-dozen tweets (plus retweets), the one we consider the most popular, having let to a very nice 2116 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That happens to to have caused quite a bit of interest, having also had 34373 retweets and 174269 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

Now what about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet in the recent past (again, including retweets)? We reckon its this one:

That only had 0 direct replies, 60 retweets and 98 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a lot of of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people were saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to before, the amount of positive/negative responses and more. We wont go into that any more, so our verdict is this: we say the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is terrific, and the vast majority of people seem to like them.

Well leave it there for today. Thanks for visiting, and drop a comment if you agree or disagree with me. Just make sure to keep it civil.

Originally posted here:
The Community Reacts To Edward Snowden On Twitter (2019-12-21) - Global Real News

Artificial Intelligence – Overview – Tutorialspoint

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Since the invention of computers or machines, their capability to perform various tasks went on growing exponentially. Humans have developed the power of computer systems in terms of their diverse working domains, their increasing speed, and reducing size with respect to time.

A branch of Computer Science named Artificial Intelligence pursues creating the computers or machines as intelligent as human beings.

According to the father of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy, it is The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.

Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a software think intelligently, in the similar manner the intelligent humans think.

AI is accomplished by studying how human brain thinks, and how humans learn, decide, and work while trying to solve a problem, and then using the outcomes of this study as a basis of developing intelligent software and systems.

While exploiting the power of the computer systems, the curiosity of human, lead him to wonder, Can a machine think and behave like humans do?

Thus, the development of AI started with the intention of creating similar intelligence in machines that we find and regard high in humans.

To Create Expert Systems The systems which exhibit intelligent behavior, learn, demonstrate, explain, and advice its users.

To Implement Human Intelligence in Machines Creating systems that understand, think, learn, and behave like humans.

Artificial intelligence is a science and technology based on disciplines such as Computer Science, Biology, Psychology, Linguistics, Mathematics, and Engineering. A major thrust of AI is in the development of computer functions associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning, and problem solving.

Out of the following areas, one or multiple areas can contribute to build an intelligent system.

The programming without and with AI is different in following ways

In the real world, the knowledge has some unwelcomed properties

AI Technique is a manner to organize and use the knowledge efficiently in such a way that

AI techniques elevate the speed of execution of the complex program it is equipped with.

AI has been dominant in various fields such as

Gaming AI plays crucial role in strategic games such as chess, poker, tic-tac-toe, etc., where machine can think of large number of possible positions based on heuristic knowledge.

Natural Language Processing It is possible to interact with the computer that understands natural language spoken by humans.

Expert Systems There are some applications which integrate machine, software, and special information to impart reasoning and advising. They provide explanation and advice to the users.

Vision Systems These systems understand, interpret, and comprehend visual input on the computer. For example,

A spying aeroplane takes photographs, which are used to figure out spatial information or map of the areas.

Doctors use clinical expert system to diagnose the patient.

Police use computer software that can recognize the face of criminal with the stored portrait made by forensic artist.

Speech Recognition Some intelligent systems are capable of hearing and comprehending the language in terms of sentences and their meanings while a human talks to it. It can handle different accents, slang words, noise in the background, change in humans noise due to cold, etc.

Handwriting Recognition The handwriting recognition software reads the text written on paper by a pen or on screen by a stylus. It can recognize the shapes of the letters and convert it into editable text.

Intelligent Robots Robots are able to perform the tasks given by a human. They have sensors to detect physical data from the real world such as light, heat, temperature, movement, sound, bump, and pressure. They have efficient processors, multiple sensors and huge memory, to exhibit intelligence. In addition, they are capable of learning from their mistakes and they can adapt to the new environment.

Here is the history of AI during 20th century

Karel apek play named Rossum's Universal Robots (RUR) opens in London, first use of the word "robot" in English.

Foundations for neural networks laid.

Isaac Asimov, a Columbia University alumni, coined the term Robotics.

Alan Turing introduced Turing Test for evaluation of intelligence and published Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Claude Shannon published Detailed Analysis of Chess Playing as a search.

John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence. Demonstration of the first running AI program at Carnegie Mellon University.

John McCarthy invents LISP programming language for AI.

Danny Bobrow's dissertation at MIT showed that computers can understand natural language well enough to solve algebra word problems correctly.

Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, an interactive problem that carries on a dialogue in English.

Scientists at Stanford Research Institute Developed Shakey, a robot, equipped with locomotion, perception, and problem solving.

The Assembly Robotics group at Edinburgh University built Freddy, the Famous Scottish Robot, capable of using vision to locate and assemble models.

The first computer-controlled autonomous vehicle, Stanford Cart, was built.

Harold Cohen created and demonstrated the drawing program, Aaron.

Major advances in all areas of AI

The Deep Blue Chess Program beats the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

Interactive robot pets become commercially available. MIT displays Kismet, a robot with a face that expresses emotions. The robot Nomad explores remote regions of Antarctica and locates meteorites.

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Artificial Intelligence - Overview - Tutorialspoint

7 Ways An Artificial Intelligence Future Will Change The …

[AI] is going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind. More than electricity. AI oracle and venture capitalist Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, 2018

In a nondescript building close to downtown Chicago, Marc Gyongyosi and the small but growing crew of IFM/Onetrack.AI have one rule that rules them all: think simple. The words are written in simple font on a simple sheet of paper thats stuck to a rear upstairs wall of their industrial two-story workspace. What theyre doing here with artificial intelligence, however, isnt simple at all.

Sitting at his cluttered desk, located near an oft-used ping-pong table and prototypes of drones from his college days suspended overhead, Gyongyosi punches some keys on a laptop to pull up grainy video footage of a forklift driver operating his vehicle in a warehouse. It was captured from overhead courtesy of a Onetrack.AI forklift vision system.

Artificial intelligence is impacting the future of virtually every industry and every human being. Artificial intelligence has acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

Employing machine learning and computer vision for detection and classification of various safety events, the shoebox-sized device doesnt see all, but it sees plenty. Like which way the driver is looking as he operates the vehicle, how fast hes driving, where hes driving, locations of the people around him and how other forklift operators are maneuvering their vehicles. IFMs software automatically detects safety violations (for example, cell phone use) and notifies warehouse managers so they can take immediate action. The main goals are to prevent accidents and increase efficiency. The mere knowledge that one of IFMs devices is watching, Gyongyosi claims, has had a huge effect.

If you think about a camera, it really is the richest sensor available to us today at a very interesting price point, he says. Because of smartphones, camera and image sensors have become incredibly inexpensive, yet we capture a lot of information. From an image, we might be able to infer 25 signals today, but six months from now well be able to infer 100 or 150 signals from that same image. The only difference is the software thats looking at the image. And thats why this is so compelling, because we can offer a very important core feature set today, but then over time all our systems are learning from each other. Every customer is able to benefit from every other customer that we bring on board because our systems start to see and learn more processes and detect more things that are important and relevant.

IFM is just one of countless AI innovators in a field thats hotter than ever and getting more so all the time. Heres a good indicator: Of the 9,100 patents received by IBM inventors in 2018, 1,600 (or nearly 18 percent) were AI-related. Heres another: Tesla founder and tech titan Elon Musk recently donated $10 million to fund ongoing research at the non-profit research company OpenAI a mere drop in the proverbial bucket if his $1 billion co-pledge in 2015 is any indication. And in 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin told school children that Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [AI] will become the ruler of the world. He then tossed his head back and laughed maniacally.

OK, that last thing is false. This, however, is not: After more than seven decades marked by hoopla and sporadic dormancy during a multi-wave evolutionary period that began with so-called knowledge engineering, progressed to model- and algorithm-based machine learning and is increasingly focused on perception, reasoning and generalization, AI has re-taken center stage as never before. And it wont cede the spotlight anytime soon.

Theres virtually no major industry modern AI more specifically, narrow AI, which performs objective functions using data-trained models and often falls into the categories of deep learning or machine learning hasnt already affected. Thats especially true in the past few years, as data collection and analysis has ramped up considerably thanks to robust IoT connectivity, the proliferation of connected devices and ever-speedier computer processing.

Some sectors are at the start of their AI journey, others are veteran travelers. Both have a long way to go. Regardless, the impact artificial intelligence is having on our present day lives is hard to ignore:

But those advances (and numerous others, including this crop of new ones) are only the beginning; theres much more to come more than anyone, even the most prescient prognosticators, can fathom.

I think anybody making assumptions about the capabilities of intelligent software capping out at some point are mistaken, says David Vandegrift, CTO and co-founder of the customer relationship management firm 4Degrees.

With companies spending nearly $20 billion collective dollars on AI products and services annually, tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon spending billions to create those products and services, universities making AI a more prominent part of their respective curricula (MIT alone is dropping $1 billion on a new college devoted solely to computing, with an AI focus), and the U.S. Department of Defense upping its AI game, big things are bound to happen. Some of those developments are well on their way to being fully realized; some are merely theoretical and might remain so. All are disruptive, for better and potentially worse, and theres no downturn in sight.

Lots of industries go through this pattern of winter, winter, and then an eternal spring, former Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told ZDNet late last year. We may be in the eternal spring of AI.

During a lecture last fall at Northwestern University, AI guru Kai-Fu Lee championed AI technology and its forthcoming impact while also noting its side effects and limitations. Of the former, he warned:

The bottom 90 percent, especially the bottom 50 percent of the world in terms of income or education, will be badly hurt with job displacementThe simple question to ask is, How routine is a job? And that is how likely [it is] a job will be replaced by AI, because AI can, within the routine task, learn to optimize itself. And the more quantitative, the more objective the job isseparating things into bins, washing dishes, picking fruits and answering customer service callsthose are very much scripted tasks that are repetitive and routine in nature. In the matter of five, 10 or 15 years, they will be displaced by AI.

In the warehouses of online giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more than 100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans but that will change.

Lees opinion was recently echoed by Infosys president Mohit Joshi, who at this years Davos gathering told the New York Times, People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their workforce. Now theyre saying, Why cant we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?

On a more upbeat note, Lee stressed that todays AI is useless in two significant ways: it has no creativity and no capacity for compassion or love. Rather, its a tool to amplify human creativity. His solution? Those with jobs that involve repetitive or routine tasks must learn new skills so as not to be left by the wayside. Amazon even offers its employees money to train for jobs at other companies.

One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs, says Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and director of the schools Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Shes concerned thats not happening widely or often enough. IFMs Gyongyosi is even more specific.

People need to learn about programming like they learn a new language, he says, and they need to do that as early as possible because it really is the future. In the future, if you dont know coding, you dont know programming, its only going to get more difficult.

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And while many of those who are forced out of jobs by technology will find new ones, Vandegrift says, that wont happen overnight. As with Americas transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution, which played a big role in causing the Great Depression, people eventually got back on their feet. The short-term impact, however, was massive.

The transition between jobs going away and new ones [emerging], Vandegrift says, is not necessarily as painless as people like to think.

"In the future, if you dont know coding, you dont know programming, its only going to get more difficult.

Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA, is a different kind of educator than Nahrstedt. He works with developers who want to learn more about AI and apply that knowledge to their businesses.

If they understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well, they start to make connections and say, Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe thats an AI problem, he says. Thats more often the case than I have a specific problem I want to solve.

In Mendelsons view, some of the most intriguing AI research and experimentation that will have near-future ramifications is happening in two areas: reinforcement learning, which deals in rewards and punishment rather than labeled data; and generative adversarial networks (GAN for short) that allow computer algorithms to create rather than merely assess by pitting two nets against each other. The former is exemplified by the Go-playing prowess of Google DeepMinds Alpha Go Zero, the latter by original image or audio generation thats based on learning about a certain subject like celebrities or a particular type of music.

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. Ideally and partly through the use of sophisticated sensors, cities will become less congested, less polluted and generally more livable. Inroads are already being made.

Once you predict something, you can prescribe certain policies and rules, Nahrstedt says. Such as sensors on cars that send data about traffic conditions could predict potential problems and optimize the flow of cars. This is not yet perfected by any means, she says. Its just in its infancy. But years down the road, it will play a really big role.

Of course, much has been made of the fact that AIs reliance on big data is already impacting privacy in a major way. Look no further than Cambridge Analyticas Facebook shenanigans or Amazons Alexa eavesdropping, two among many examples of tech gone wild. Without proper regulations and self-imposed limitations, critics argue, the situation will get even worse. In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook derided competitors Google and Facebook (surprise!) for greed-driven data mining.

Theyre gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it, he said in a 2015 speech. We think thats wrong.

Last fall, during a talk in Brussels, Belgium, Cook expounded on his concern.

Advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency," he said. For artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy. If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound."

If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society. However, as is the case with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and state use has a detrimental impact on human rights."

Plenty of others agree. In a paper published recently by UK-based human rights and privacy groups Article 19 and Privacy International, anxiety about AI is reserved for its everyday functions rather than a cataclysmic shift like the advent of robot overlords.

If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society, the authors write. However, as is the case with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and state use has a detrimental impact on human rights. In particular, applications of these technologies frequently rely on the generation, collection, processing, and sharing of large amounts of data, both about individual and collective behavior. This data can be used to profile individuals and predict future behavior. While some of these uses, like spam filters or suggested items for online shopping, may seem benign, others can have more serious repercussions and may even pose unprecedented threats to the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression and information (freedom of expression). The use of AI can also impact the exercise of a number of other rights, including the right to an effective remedy, the right to a fair trial, and the right to freedom from discrimination.

Speaking at Londons Westminster Abbey in late November of 2018, internationally renowned AI expert Stuart Russell joked (or not) about his formal agreement with journalists that I wont talk to them unless they agree not to put a Terminator robot in the article. His quip revealed an obvious contempt for Hollywood representations of far-future AI, which tend toward the overwrought and apocalyptic. What Russell referred to as human-level AI, also known as artificial general intelligence, has long been fodder for fantasy. But the chances of its being realized anytime soon, or at all, are pretty slim. The machines almost certainly wont rise (sorry, Dr. Russell) during the lifetime of anyone reading this story.

There are still major breakthroughs that have to happen before we reach anything that resembles human-level AI, Russell explained. One example is the ability to really understand the content of language so we can translate between languages using machines When humans do machine translation, they understand the content and then express it. And right now machines are not very good at understanding the content of language. If that goal is reached, we would have systems that could then read and understand everything the human race has ever written, and this is something that a human being can't do... Once we have that capability, you could then query all of human knowledge and it would be able to synthesize and integrate and answer questions that no human being has ever been able to answer because they haven't read and been able to put together and join the dots between things that have remained separate throughout history.

Thats a mouthful. And a mind full. On the subject of which, emulating the human brain is exceedingly difficult and yet another reason for AGIs still-hypothetical future. Longtime University of Michigan engineering and computer science professor John Laird has conducted research in the field for several decades.

The goal has always been to try to build what we call the cognitive architecture, what we think is innate to an intelligence system, he says of work thats largely inspired by human psychology. One of the things we know, for example, is the human brain is not really just a homogenous set of neurons. Theres a real structure in terms of different components, some of which are associated with knowledge about how to do things in the world.

Thats called procedural memory. Then theres knowledge based on general facts, a.k.a. semantic memory, as well as knowledge about previous experiences (or personal facts) thats called episodic memory. One of the projects at Lairds lab involves using natural language instructions to teach a robot simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe and puzzles. Those instructions typically involve a description of the goal, a rundown of legal moves and failure situations. The robot internalizes those directives and uses them to plan its actions. As ever, though, breakthroughs are slow to come slower, anyway, than Laird and his fellow researchers would like.

Every time we make progress, he says, we also get a new appreciation for how hard it is.

More than a few leading AI figures subscribe (some more hyperbolically than others) to a nightmare scenario that involves whats known as singularity, whereby superintelligent machines take over and permanently alter human existence through enslavement or eradication.

The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI itself begins designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. Elon Musk believes and has for years warned that AGI is humanitys biggest existential threat. Efforts to bring it about, he has said, are like summoning the demon. He has even expressed concern that his pal, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, could accidentally shepherd something evil into existence despite his best intentions. Say, for example, a fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind. (Musk, you might know, has a flair for the dramatic.) Even IFMs Gyongyosi, no alarmist when it comes to AI predictions, rules nothing out. At some point, he says, humans will no longer need to train systems; theyll learn and evolve on their own.

I dont think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that decide to kill us, he says. I think that maybe five or ten years from now, Ill have to reevaluate that statement because well have different methods available and different ways to go about these things.

While murderous machines may well remain fodder for fiction, many believe theyll supplant humans in various ways.

Last spring, Oxford Universitys Future of Humanity Institute published the results of an AI survey. Titled When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts, it contains estimates from 352 machine learning researchers about AIs evolution in years to come. There were lots of optimists in this group. By 2026, a median number of respondents said, machines will be capable of writing school essays; by 2027 self-driving trucks will render drivers unnecessary; by 2031 AI will outperform humans in the retail sector; by 2049 AI could be the next Stephen King and by 2053 the next Charlie Teo. The slightly jarring capper: by 2137, all human jobs will be automated. But what of humans themselves? Sipping umbrella drinks served by droids, no doubt.

Diego Klabjan, a professor at Northwestern University and founding director of the schools Master of Science in Analytics program, counts himself an AGI skeptic.

Currently, computers can handle a little more than 10,000 words, he explains. So, a few million neurons. But human brains have billions of neurons that are connected in a very intriguing and complex way, and the current state-of-the-art [technology] is just straightforward connections following very easy patterns. So going from a few million neurons to billions of neurons with current hardware and software technologies I don't see that happening.

Klabjan also puts little stockin extreme scenarios the type involving, say, murderous cyborgs that turn the earth into asmoldering hellscape. Hes much more concerned with machines war robots, for instance being fed faulty incentives by nefarious humans. As MIT physics professors and leading AI researcher Max Tegmark put it in a 2018 TED Talk, The real threat from AI isnt malice, like in silly Hollywood movies, but competence AI accomplishing goals that just arent aligned with ours. Thats Lairds take, too.

I definitely dont see the scenario where something wakes up and decides it wants to take over the world, he says. I think thats science fiction and not the way its going to play out.

What Laird worries most about isnt evil AI, per se, but evil humans using AI as a sort of false force multiplier for things like bank robbery and credit card fraud, among many other crimes. And so, while hes often frustrated with the pace of progress, AIs slow burn may actually be a blessing.

Time to understand what were creating and how were going to incorporate it into society, Laird says, might be exactly what we need.

But no one knows for sure.

There are several major breakthroughs that have to occur, and those could come very quickly, Russell said during his Westminster talk. Referencing the rapid transformational effect of nuclear fission (atom splitting) by British physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1917, he added, Its very, very hard to predict when these conceptual breakthroughs are going to happen.

But whenever they do, if they do, he emphasized the importance of preparation. That means starting or continuing discussions about the ethical use of A.G.I. and whether it should be regulated. That means working to eliminate data bias, which has a corrupting effect on algorithms and is currently a fat fly in the AI ointment. That means working to invent and augment security measures capable of keeping the technology in check. And it means having the humility to realize that just because we can doesnt mean we should.

Our situation with technology is complicated, but the big picture is rather simple, Tegmark said during his TED Talk. Most AGI researchers expect AGI within decades, and if we just bumble into this unprepared, it will probably be the biggest mistake in human history. It could enable brutal global dictatorship with unprecedented inequality, surveillance, suffering and maybe even human extinction. But if we steer carefully, we could end up in a fantastic future where everybodys better offthe poor are richer, the rich are richer, everybodys healthy and free to live out their dreams.

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7 Ways An Artificial Intelligence Future Will Change The ...

How Artificial Intelligence Is Totally Changing Everything – HowStuffWorks

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Back in Oct. 1950, British techno-visionary Alan Turing published an article called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in the journal MIND that raised what at the time must have seemed to many like a science-fiction fantasy.

"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?" Turing asked.

Turing thought that they could. Moreover, he believed, it was possible to create software for a digital computer that enabled it to observe its environment and to learn new things, from playing chess to understanding and speaking a human language. And he thought machines eventually could develop the ability to do that on their own, without human guidance. "We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields," he predicted.

Nearly 70 years later, Turing's seemingly outlandish vision has become a reality. Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, gives machines the ability to learn from experience and perform cognitive tasks, the sort of stuff that once only the human brain seemed capable of doing.

AI is rapidly spreading throughout civilization, where it has the promise of doing everything from enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate the streets to making more accurate hurricane forecasts. On an everyday level, AI figures out what ads to show you on the web, and powers those friendly chatbots that pop up when you visit an e-commerce website to answer your questions and provide customer service. And AI-powered personal assistants in voice-activated smart home devices perform myriad tasks, from controlling our TVs and doorbells to answering trivia questions and helping us find our favorite songs.

But we're just getting started with it. As AI technology grows more sophisticated and capable, it's expected to massively boost the world's economy, creating about $13 trillion worth of additional activity by 2030, according to a McKinsey Global Institute forecast.

"AI is still early in adoption, but adoption is accelerating and it is being used across all industries," says Sarah Gates, an analytics platform strategist at SAS, a global software and services firm that focuses upon turning data into intelligence for clients.

It's even more amazing, perhaps, that our existence is quietly being transformed by a technology that many of us barely understand, if at all something so complex that even scientists have a tricky time explaining it.

"AI is a family of technologies that perform tasks that are thought to require intelligence if performed by humans," explains Vasant Honavar, a professor and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at Penn State University, in an email interview. "I say 'thought,' because nobody is really quite sure what intelligence is."

Honavar describes two main categories of intelligence. There's narrow intelligence, which is achieving competence in a narrowly defined domain, such as analyzing images from X-rays and MRI scans in radiology. General intelligence, in contrast, is a more human-like ability to learn about anything and to talk about it. "A machine might be good at some diagnoses in radiology, but if you ask it about baseball, it would be clueless," Honavar explains. Humans' intellectual versatility "is still beyond the reach of AI at this point."

According to Honavar, there are two key pieces to AI. One of them is the engineering part that is, building tools that utilize intelligence in some way. The other is the science of intelligence, or rather, how to enable a machine to come up with a result comparable to what a human brain would come up with, even if the machine achieves it through a very different process. To use an analogy, "birds fly and airplanes fly, but they fly in completely different ways," Honavar. "Even so, they both make use of aerodynamics and physics. In the same way, artificial intelligence is based upon the notion that there are general principles about how intelligent systems behave."

AI is "basically the results of our attempting to understand and emulate the way that the brain works and the application of this to giving brain-like functions to otherwise autonomous systems (e.g., drones, robots and agents)," Kurt Cagle, a writer, data scientist and futurist who's the founder of consulting firm Semantical, writes in an email. He's also editor of The Cagle Report, a daily information technology newsletter.

And while humans don't really think like computers, which utilize circuits, semi-conductors and magnetic media instead of biological cells to store information, there are some intriguing parallels. "One thing we're beginning to discover is that graph networks are really interesting when you start talking about billions of nodes, and the brain is essentially a graph network, albeit one where you can control the strengths of processes by varying the resistance of neurons before a capacitive spark fires," Cagle explains. "A single neuron by itself gives you a very limited amount of information, but fire enough neurons of varying strengths together, and you end up with a pattern that gets fired only in response to certain kinds of stimuli, typically modulated electrical signals through the DSPs [that is digital signal processing] that we call our retina and cochlea."

"Most applications of AI have been in domains with large amounts of data," Honavar says. To use the radiology example again, the existence of large databases of X-rays and MRI scans that have been evaluated by human radiologists, makes it possible to train a machine to emulate that activity.

AI works by combining large amounts of data with intelligent algorithms series of instructions that allow the software to learn from patterns and features of the data, as this SAS primer on artificial intelligence explains.

In simulating the way a brain works, AI utilizes a bunch of different subfields, as the SAS primer notes.

The concept of AI dates back to the 1940s, and the term "artificial intelligence" was introduced at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College. Over the next two decades, researchers developed programs that played games and did simple pattern recognition and machine learning. Cornell University scientist Frank Rosenblatt developed the Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, which ran on a 5-ton (4.5-metric ton), room-sized IBM computer that was fed punch cards.

But it wasn't until the mid-1980s that a second wave of more complex, multilayer neural networks were developed to tackle higher-level tasks, according to Honavar. In the early 1990s, another breakthrough enabled AI to generalize beyond the training experience.

In the 1990s and 2000s, other technological innovations the web and increasingly powerful computers helped accelerate the development of AI. "With the advent of the web, large amounts of data became available in digital form," Honavar says. "Genome sequencing and other projects started generating massive amounts of data, and advances in computing made it possible to store and access this data. We could train the machines to do more complex tasks. You couldn't have had a deep learning model 30 years ago, because you didn't have the data and the computing power."

AI is different from, but related to, robotics, in which machines sense their environment, perform calculations and do physical tasks either by themselves or under the direction of people, from factory work and cooking to landing on other planets. Honavar says that the two fields intersect in many ways.

"You can imagine robotics without much intelligence, purely mechanical devices like automated looms," Honavar says. "There are examples of robots that are not intelligent in a significant way." Conversely, there's robotics where intelligence is an integral part, such as guiding an autonomous vehicle around streets full of human-driven cars and pedestrians.

"It's a reasonable argument that to realize general intelligence, you would need robotics to some degree, because interaction with the world, to some degree, is an important part of intelligence," according to Honavar. "To understand what it means to throw a ball, you have to be able to throw a ball."

AI quietly has become so ubiquitous that it's already found in many consumer products.

"A huge number of devices that fall within the Internet of Things (IoT) space readily use some kind of self-reinforcing AI, albeit very specialized AI," Cagle says. "Cruise control was an early AI and is far more sophisticated when it works than most people realize. Noise dampening headphones. Anything that has a speech recognition capability, such as most contemporary television remotes. Social media filters. Spam filters. If you expand AI to cover machine learning, this would also include spell checkers, text-recommendation systems, really any recommendation system, washers and dryers, microwaves, dishwashers, really most home electronics produced after 2017, speakers, televisions, anti-lock braking systems, any electric vehicle, modern CCTV cameras. Most games use AI networks at many different levels."

AI already can outperform humans in some narrow domains, just as "airplanes can fly longer distances, and carry more people than a bird could," Honavar says. AI, for example, is capable of processing millions of social media network interactions and gaining insights that can influence users' behavior an ability that the AI expert worries may have "not so good consequences."

It's particularly good at making sense of massive amounts of information that would overwhelm a human brain. That capability enables internet companies, for example, to analyze the mountains of data that they collect about users and employ the insights in various ways to influence our behavior.

But AI hasn't made as much progress so far in replicating human creativity, Honavar notes, though the technology already is being utilized to compose music and write news articles based on data from financial reports and election returns.

Given AI's potential to do tasks that used to require humans, it's easy to fear that its spread could put most of us out of work. But some experts envision that while the combination of AI and robotics could eliminate some positions, it will create even more new jobs for tech-savvy workers.

"Those most at risk are those doing routine and repetitive tasks in retail, finance and manufacturing," Darrell West, a vice president and founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public policy organization, explains in an email. "But white-collar jobs in health care will also be affected and there will be an increase in job churn with people moving more frequently from job to job. New jobs will be created but many people will not have the skills needed for those positions. So the risk is a job mismatch that leaves people behind in the transition to a digital economy. Countries will have to invest more money in job retraining and workforce development as technology spreads. There will need to be lifelong learning so that people regularly can upgrade their job skills."

And instead of replacing human workers, AI may be used to enhance their intellectual capabilities. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by the 2030s, AI have achieved human levels of intelligence, and that it will be possible to have AI that goes inside the human brain to boost memory, turning users into human-machine hybrids. As Kurzweil has described it, "We're going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value."

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How Artificial Intelligence Is Totally Changing Everything - HowStuffWorks

What Is The Artificial Intelligence Of Things? When AI Meets IoT – Forbes

Individually, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powerful technologies. When you combine AI and IoT, you get AIoTthe artificial intelligence of things. You can think of internet of things devices as the digital nervous system while artificial intelligence is the brain of a system.

What Is The Artificial Intelligence Of Things? When AI Meets IoT

What is AIoT?

To fully understand AIoT, you must start with the internet of things. When things such as wearable devices, refrigerators, digital assistants, sensors and other equipment are connected to the internet, can be recognized by other devices and collect and process data, you have the internet of things. Artificial intelligence is when a system can complete a set of tasks or learn from data in a way that seems intelligent. Therefore, when artificial intelligence is added to the internet of things it means that those devices can analyze data and make decisions and act on that data without involvement by humans.

These are "smart" devices, and they help drive efficiency and effectiveness. The intelligence of AIoT enables data analytics that is then used to optimize a system and generate higher performance and business insights and create data that helps to make better decisions and that the system can learn from.

Practical Examples of AIoT

The combo of internet of things and smart systems makes AIoT a powerful and important tool for many applications. Here are a few:

Smart Retail

In a smart retail environment, a camera system equipped with computer vision capabilities can use facial recognition to identify customers when they walk through the door. The system gathers intel about customers, including their gender, product preferences, traffic flow and more, analyzes the data to accurately predict consumer behavior and then uses that information to make decisions about store operations from marketing to product placement and other decisions. For example, if the system detects that the majority of customers walking into the store are Millennials, it can push out product advertisements or in-store specials that appeal to that demographic, therefore driving up sales. Smart cameras could identify shoppers and allow them to skip the checkout like what happens in the Amazon Go store.

Drone Traffic Monitoring

In a smart city, there are several practical uses of AIoT, including traffic monitoring by drones. If traffic can be monitored in real-time and adjustments to the traffic flow can be made, congestion can be reduced. When drones are deployed to monitor a large area, they can transmit traffic data, and then AI can analyze the data and make decisions about how to best alleviate traffic congestion with adjustments to speed limits and timing of traffic lights without human involvement.

The ET City Brain, a product of Alibaba Cloud, optimizes the use of urban resources by using AIoT. This system can detect accidents, illegal parking, and can change traffic lights to help ambulances get to patients who need assistance faster.

Office Buildings

Another area where artificial intelligence and the internet of things intersect is in smart office buildings. Some companies choose to install a network of smart environmental sensors in their office building. These sensors can detect what personnel are present and adjust temperatures and lighting accordingly to improve energy efficiency. In another use case, a smart building can control building access through facial recognition technology. The combination of connected cameras and artificial intelligence that can compare images taken in real-time against a database to determine who should be granted access to a building is AIoT at work. In a similar way, employees wouldn't need to clock in, or attendance for mandatory meetings wouldn't have to be completed, since the AIoT system takes care of it.

Fleet Management and Autonomous Vehicles

AIoT is used to in fleet management today to help monitor a fleet's vehicles, reduce fuel costs, track vehicle maintenance, and to identify unsafe driver behavior. Through IoT devices such as GPS and other sensors and an artificial intelligence system, companies are able to manage their fleet better thanks to AIoT.

Another way AIoT is used today is with autonomous vehicles such as Tesla's autopilot systems that use radars, sonars, GPS, and cameras to gather data about driving conditions and then an AI system to make decisions about the data the internet of things devices are gathering.

Autonomous Delivery Robots

Similar to how AIoT is used with autonomous vehicles, autonomous delivery robots are another example of AIoT in action. Robots have sensors that gather information about the environment the robot is traversing and then make moment-to-moment decisions about how to respond through its onboard AI platform.

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What Is The Artificial Intelligence Of Things? When AI Meets IoT - Forbes

AI (Artificial Intelligence): What We Can Expect In The New Year – Forbes

AI, Artificial Intelligence concept,3d rendering,conceptual image.

As I covered in a recent post for Forbes.com, this year has seen notable breakthroughs in AI (Artificial Intelligence).They have included innovations about algorithmslike GANs or Generative Adversarial Networksas well as advances in categories like NLP (Natural Language Processing), just to name a few.

Then what can we expect in 2020?Well, it seems likely that the innovations will continue at a rapid pace.

So heres a look at what we may see:

Anand Rao, the Global and US Artificial Intelligence Leader at PwC:

2020 will be the year of practical AI: using cool technology to solve boring problems. Business leaders are recalibrating their ambitions, with just 4% intending to scale AI across the organization. Instead, many are focusing on functional areas like finance, compliance, HR, and tax and universal pain points like extracting data from forms. In our survey, executives ranked using AI to operate more efficiently and increase productivity as the top-two benefits they expect from AI in the coming year.

Sanjeev Katariya, the VP/Chief Architect of eBay AI & Platforms:

From an ecommerce lens, AI will continue to grow, building adaptive and highly personalized markets and bridging borders while extending itself to places on the planet that need to see explosive growthwho in 2020, will gladly join the ecommerce revolution.

Michael Kopp, the Head of Data Science at HERE Technologies:

Deep Learning goes industrial. Dedicated DL chipsets are accelerating trial and error opportunities across industries, allowing diverse fields to build critical new models and AI components that solve real-world data problems.

Bryan Friehauf, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Software, ABB:

In 2020, AI will be the mainstream recommendation engine for the industrial sector. In energy management in particular, there is a huge opportunity. AI can provide facility managers with accurate power consumption predictions, which enables them to take timely action to reduce unplanned consumption spikes through rescheduling or switching off non-critical loads. AI will be the technology that takes simulations to the next level, helping to locate unstable areas of the grid and increase safety for workers in the field.

Steve Grobman, the Chief Technology Officer at McAfee:

In general, adversaries are going to use the best technology to accomplish their goals, so if we think about nation-state actors attempting to manipulate an election, using deepfake video to manipulate an audience makes a lot of sense. Adversaries will try to create wedges and divides in society.

Jake Saper, a Partner at Emergence Capital:

"In 2020, we will see the tech industry shift its focus away from using AI to drive automation and move it towards employing AI for augmentation. We'll realize that human-to-human jobs, which most often include dynamic input and feedback, are at their core still best performed by humans. In those cases, AI is ideally suited to augment, and not replace, human jobs."

Andy Ellis, the Chief Security Officer at Akamai:

What well see in many spaces is folks starting to understand the limitations of algorithmic solutions, especially where those create, amplify, or ossify bias in the world; and companies buying technologies will really need to start understanding how that bias impacts their operations.

Steve Wood, the Chief Product Officer at Boomi, a Dell Technologies business:

Overzealous data analyses have brought many companies face to face with privacy lawsuits from consumers and governments alike, which in turn has led to even stricter data governance laws. Understandably concerned about making similar mistakes, businesses will begin turning to metadata for insights in 2020, rather than analyzing actual data.

Jay Gurudevan, the Principal Product Manager of AI/ML at Twilio:

Well see more enterprises and businesses leverage AI tools and automated communication to better understand the entire customer journey. As consumers become more comfortable interacting with AI agents, Natural Language Processing will become more accurate and advanced and implementation will expand.

Avon Puri, the CIO of Rubrik:

An ecosystem of technologies will emerge that leverage intelligence, such as RPA technologies, and will provide new efficiencies in business processes that werent possible before. Next year is when new intelligent technologies will really take off, and RPA will lead automated intelligence in the enterprise.

Umesh Sachdev, the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore:

Speech analytics tools were an important bridge to support automation, and the same AI aiding humans behind the scenes will aid bots and enable the era of platforms. In 2020, heres where were going to see the most progress: anticipating intent by layering emotion and sincerity with historical data in real time. We'll be able to determine things like the likelihood of person paying their past-due bill.

Rama Sekhar, a Venture Partner at Norwest:

2020 will usher in the year of AI in the Enterprise. AI will get an upgrade from being an ingredient to a first class citizen as CIOs will introduce AI-first initiatives, just as they adopted cloud-first initiatives five years ago. Companies will have to justify why theyre not using AI in their own software, processes, and workflows in 2020.

Stefan Nandzik, the Vice President of Product & Brand Marketing at Signifyd:

In 2020, well see a spate of lawsuits filed by aggrieved consumers who have been wrongly barred from returning goods to retailers, or buying goods from ecommerce merchants, or renting home shares, or benefiting from Uber rides by algorithmically driven screening schemes. And well see the first significant pieces of legislation codifying consumers rights when it comes to AIcreating demand for liable machines.

Dr. Hossein Rahnama, the CEO of Flybits:

Startups are realizing that no matter how good their algorithm is, big companies aren't comfortable just handing over their sensitive datasets and core assets. So as the industry continues to mature over the next year, AI entrepreneurs will recognize that they have to shed their grad school mindset of give me the data and Ill do my work because that is no longer the case. This realization will force AI entrepreneurs to focus on more than just algorithms and shift their attention toward solidifying a data strategy that includes governance, management, encryption and tokenization. Because at the end of the day, without a strong data strategy, your AI strategy means nothing.

Chris Nicholson, the CEO of Pathmind:

One of the most promising areas of AI applications in 2020 will combine different, powerful forms of AI. Deep learning is used in a lot of perceptive tasks that answer the question: what am I looking at? For example, deep learning could recognize a grizzly bear in a photograph. Reinforcement learning is used in a lot of strategic tasks that answer the question: what should I do? For example, should I run away, stand in place or play dead? If you combine the two, then you get a powerful sequence of machine learning decisions you can combine. In this example: Given that I see a grizzly bear ahead of me, I should play dead. (Pro tip: grizzlies can run 35 miles per hour, but they do not eat carrion.) So those combinations of smart perceptions combined with smart actions vastly extend the value of AI. We move beyond simple classification into much higher ROI tasks that have implications for businesses, robotics, self-driving cars and video games.

Dr. Alex Liu, the Chief Data Scientist for IBM and the founder of RMDS Lab:

There will be more exploration of causality, which is the next generation of data analysis. It will be going from what to why. This will be crucial in improving the success rate of AI, which is still fairly low.

Tom (@ttaulli) is the author of the book,Artificial Intelligence Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction.

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AI (Artificial Intelligence): What We Can Expect In The New Year - Forbes

Deciphering Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Information Security – AiThority

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating a new frontline in information security. Systems that independently learn, reason and act will increasingly replicate human behavior. Like humans, they will be flawed, but also capable of achieving great things.

AI poses new information risks and makes some existing ones more dangerous. However, it can also be used for good and should become a key part of every organizations defensive arsenal. Business and information security leaders alike must understand both the risks and opportunities before embracing technologies that will soon become a critically important part of everyday business.

Already, AI is finding its way into many mainstream business use cases. Organizations use variations of AI to support processes in areas including customer service, human resources, and bank fraud detection. However, the hype can lead to confusion and skepticism over what AI actually is and what it really means for business and security. It is difficult to separate wishful thinking from reality.

Read More: How AI and Automation Are Joining Forces to Transform ITSM

As AI systems are adopted by organizations, they will become increasingly critical to day-to-day business operations. Some organizations already have, or will have, business models entirely dependent on AI technology. No matter the function for which an organization uses AI, such systems and the information that supports them have inherent vulnerabilities and are at risk from both accidental and adversarial threats. Compromised AI systems make poor decisions and produce unexpected outcomes.

Simultaneously, organizations are beginning to face sophisticated AI-enabled attacks which have the potential to compromise information and cause severe business impact at a greater speed and scale than ever before. Taking steps both to secure internal AI systems and defend against external AI-enabled threats will become vitally important in reducing information risk.

While AI systems adopted by organizations present a tempting target, adversarial attackers are also beginning to use AI for their own purposes. AI is a powerful tool that can be used to enhance attack techniques or even create entirely new ones. Organizations must be ready to adapt their defenses in order to cope with the scale and sophistication of AI-enabled cyberattacks.

Security practitioners are always fighting to keep up with the methods used by attackers, and AI systems can provide at least a short-term boost by significantly enhancing a variety of defensive mechanisms. AI can automate numerous tasks, helping understaffed security departments to bridge the specialist skills gap and improve the efficiency of their human practitioners. Protecting against many existing threats, AI can put defenders a step ahead. However, adversaries are not standing still as AI-enabled threats become more sophisticated, security practitioners will need to use AI-supported defenses simply to keep up.

The benefit of AI in terms of response to threats is that it can act independently, taking responsive measures without the need for human oversight and at a much greater speed than a human could. Given the presence of malware that can compromise whole systems almost instantaneously, this is a highly valuable capability.

The number of ways in which defensive mechanisms can be significantly enhanced by AI provide grounds for optimism, but as with any new type of technology, it is not a miracle cure. Security practitioners should be aware of the practical challenges involved when deploying defensive AI.

Questions and considerations before deploying defensive AI systems have narrow intelligence and are designed to fulfill one type of task. They require sufficient data and inputs in order to complete that task. One single defensive AI system will not be able to enhance all the defensive mechanisms outlined previously an organization is likely to adopt multiple systems. Before purchasing and deploying defensive AI, security leaders should consider whether an AI system is required to solve the problem, or whether more conventional options would do a similar or better job.

Read More: Artificial Intelligence in Restaurant Business

Questions to ask include:

Security leaders also need to consider issues of governance around defensive AI, such as:

AI will not replace the need for skilled security practitioners with technical expertise and an intuitive nose for risk. These security practitioners need to balance the need for human oversight with the confidence to allow AI-supported controls to act autonomously and effectively. Such confidence will take time to develop, especially as stories continue to emerge of AI proving unreliable or making poor or unexpected decisions.

AI systems will make mistakes a beneficial aspect of human oversight is that human practitioners can provide feedback when things go wrong and incorporate it into the AIs decision-making process. Of course, humans make mistakes too organizations that adopt defensive AI need to devote time, training and support to help security practitioners learn to work with intelligent systems.

Given time to develop and learn together, the combination of Human and Artificial Intelligence should become a valuable component of an organizations cyber defenses.

Computer systems that can independently learn, reason and act herald a new technological era, full of both risk and opportunity. The advances already on display are only the tip of the iceberg there is a lot more to come. The speed and scale at which AI systems think will be increased by growing access to big data, greater computing power and continuous refinement of programming techniques. Such power will have the potential to both make and destroy a business.

AI tools and techniques that can be used in defense are also available to malicious actors including criminals, hacktivists and state-sponsored groups. Sooner rather than later these adversaries will find ways to use AI to create completely new threats such as intelligent malware and at that point, defensive AI will not just be a nice to have. It will be a necessity. Security practitioners using traditional controls will not be able to cope with the speed, volume, and sophistication of attacks.

To thrive in the new era, organizations need to reduce the risks posed by AI and make the most of the opportunities it offers. That means securing their own intelligent systems and deploying their own intelligent defenses. AI is no longer a vision of the distant future: the time to start preparing is now.

Read More: How Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Influencer Marketing

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Deciphering Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Information Security - AiThority