Daily Archives: September 20, 2021

Aberdeen-based Wood and National Energy Resources Australia (NERA) today announced that the pair have teamed up to deliver an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution for offshore asset inspections that could create savings of A$2.8 billion ($2 billion) per year.

The Augmented Machine Vision Solution (AMVS) has been developed through a 12-month, $288,600 partnership, between Wood and NERA, the pair said today in joint statement. NERA is an independent, federally funded, industry growth centre, established to drive expansion in the Australian energy resources sector to develop a solution for the inspection of critical industrial equipment, particularly for subsea oil and gas infrastructure.

By combining Woods deep domain knowledge with cutting-edge AI technology, the AMVS will deliver a safer and faster inspection approach which can provide operators with more accurate and up-to-date information to help maximise the output of their assets. Its a game-changer for inspections that we know are susceptible to human error and inconsistencies, said Azad Hessamodini, president of growth & development at Wood.

Historically, inspections have required technicians to travel offshore to manually review numerous hours of footage recorded by inspection devices. The pair said the new solution uses an AI engine to watch the footage, searching for potential faults and flaws that need to be further inspected or have repairs undertaken. Not only does the new technology flag up any anomalies but it also eliminates the need for technicians to travel to hazardous, offshore sites and is faster and more accurate.

With the reduction in safety risks and the associated process improvements, the solution has the potential to create savings of A$2.8 billion per year for the offshore energy industry. Improvements from better-connected operations can also be realised through faster turnaround times and reduced costs for crew and vessels, said the pair.

NERA chief executive Miranda Taylor said shes delighted NERA is part of this exciting and revolutionary project, developing new skills and solutions in Australia that are already being used around the world to improve safety and reduce costs.

This project is improving the inspection of infrastructure thats long been a highly labour intensive and dangerous activity. Through this project were helping to reduce the need for technicians to spend long hours offshore examining footage of equipment by using software developed by Wood to examine the footage under the control of technicians who can remain safely onshore, she added.

Were excited to see potential opportunities emerging for this solution to be deployed into a number of other fields.

This project is another great example of what can be achieved when Australian companies are provided with the support they need to accelerate the development of technologies growing exports, growing jobs and improving the safety of the workforce, she added.

This is the latest collaboration between Wood and NERA who have previously worked together on the Transforming Australia Subsea Equipment Reliability (TASER) project, which aims to improve subsea equipment design and reduce the requirement for costly and time-consuming interventions in Australias challenging offshore warm water environment. As part of the project, living laboratories were created to assess the effectiveness of innovative coatings, materials and technologies against calcareous deposition and marine organism growth on subsea equipment.

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Wood and NERA celebrate AI tech that could save billions of dollars offshore Australia - News for the Energy Sector - Energy Voice

As schools welcome back students, many educators and administrators are depending on bots to alert them of kids who are at risk of harming themselves or others.

School districts use artificial-intelligence software that can scan student communications and web searches on school-issued devicesand even devices that are logged in via school networksfor signs of suicidal ideation, violence against fellow students, bullying and more. Included in the scans are emails and chats between friends, as well as student musings composed in Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

When the AI recognizes certain key phrases, these systems typically send an alert to school administrators and counselors, who then determine whether an intervention with the student and parents is warranted.

Many school districts have used monitoring software over the past three years to prevent school shootings, but it has evolved to become a tool to spot a range of mental-health issues, including anxiety, depression and eating disorders. School administrators say such surveillance is more important than ever as students return to the classroom after 18 months of pandemic-related stress, uncertainty and loss. Critics say it raises questions about privacy, misuse and students ability to express feelings freely or search for answers.

I asked an expert in childrens mental health to provide some ways to talk to your kids about this before you get a call from the school. Ive compiled them below (in case you just want to skip down for the parenting advice).

Surveillance of student communications and web searches appears to be fairly widespread. In June, the consumer-advocacy nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology conducted online surveys of more than 1,000 third- through 10th-grade teachers, more than 1,600 parents and more than 400 high-school students across the country. The topic was student-monitoring software. According to the results, which the organization plans to release Tuesday, 81% of the teachers surveyed said their school uses some form of monitoring software, and 77% of the students said the same. Of those students, 80% said knowing they were being monitored made them more careful about what they searched online.

In some cases, its unclear whether students understand they are being monitored. Some schools disclose it in tech-use policies or codes of conduct, but how many kids actually read those? The Springfield School District, in Oregon, mentions monitoring in the policy students must sign when checking out school-issued laptops, but the district doesnt trumpet it.

I dont want to be sneaky about it, but if we were really obvious about it, students might not use their school devices," said Brian Megert, special programs director for the district, which this fall began using school online-safety company Lightspeed Systems to monitor student communications. Lightspeeds monitoring software is used in nearly 32,000 U.S. schools at an annual cost of about $2 a student.

From a public-sector perspective, there is no presumed anonymity in anything you do on a school device, on a school network or in a school setting," Dr. Megert added. I have mixed feelings about it, but if were going to err on one side it has to be on the side of safety."

Just last weekend, Lightspeed flagged a Google chat that a student in Dr. Megerts district had with a suicide hotline, as well as chats another student had with peers about plans for self-harm. In both cases, the school contacted the students families and arranged for mental-health services.

The San Marcos Unified School District near San Diego received five legitimate alerts of self-harm from Lightspeed in the first two weeks of school. The districts assistant superintendent, Tiffany Campbell, said that is an unusually high number this early in the school year.

Intellectually we knew how much support our students would need, but its a hard reality to see," Dr. Campbell said.

She said the majority of alerts the district receives are false alarms, in which a problematic phrase is part of an assignment, or just jokes among friends. However, she estimates that 20% to 30% of the alerts indicate potential crises.

Dr. Campbell described a recent case involving a student who kept a personal diary in a Google Doc, stating a desire to die. An administrator was immediately able to call the parent, and the parent immediately got their child help," she said. Thats the type of situation that makes the program worth it."

False alarms might decrease now that Lightspeed has added human reviewers to look at flagged communications and assign them a threat level.

Bark, another online monitoring company, said it detected 5,000 credible self-harm or suicide situations in the second week of September alone. Bark, available to schools at no charge, is used by more than 2,900 school districts and doesnt typically include human review.

Its hard to argue against efforts to save kids lives. But privacy and mental-health experts say such surveillance can be a slippery slope, especially if it ends up being used for reasons other than harm prevention.

Beila Lugo, mental health coordinator for Charles County Public Schools in Maryland, which uses Barks software, said she has had to tell some administrators to back off when they were planning to confront students for inappropriate language or content in some flagged communications. Were not using this for discipline, were using it for monitoring," she said.

Privacy advocates and mental-health experts say this kind of monitoring might take away the only safe space that some kids, especially in poorer families, have to search for help and to communicate with friends.

The school Chromebook is the only device some kids have, and the school Wi-Fi is the only internet connection some have," said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

What You Can Do

Privacy is a developmental milestone for teens," said Hina Talib, an associate professor of pediatrics and an adolescent-medicine specialist at Childrens Hospital at Montefiore in New York. By acknowledging that, she added, we give them choices and respect." Still, she said, there are ways to talk to kids about mental health before you get a call from the school.

Start early. Even very young kids can have thoughts of self-harm. Bark has detected increased expressions of suicidal ideation among elementary-school students so far this school year. Dr. Talib suggests checking in with kids about mental health starting in fifth grade.

Dont be afraid to talk about suicide. Dr. Talib said some parents worry that bringing up the topic of self-harm or suicide could inspire kids to act, but she said that isnt true; kids usually feel relieved to have someone to talk to.

Find a conversation starter. Rather than directly asking children how theyre doing, it can be helpful to find a reason to broach the topic. Kids might be aware that September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. You can talk about that, and ask what kinds of preventive steps they think would be helpful. Parents can also raise the topic in the context of a schools surveillance tech. When kids are asked their opinion, it helps them open up, Dr. Talib said.

Ask about their peers. Instead of making the conversation about them, a good way to get into a discussion is to ask about others. Dr. Talib suggests saying something like, Have you ever heard of anyone who cut themselves and you werent sure what that was about? Im happy to talk to you about it."

Make helplines available. Along with numbers of neighbors or relatives on the fridge, Dr. Talib said, you can post the number to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255) or the Crisis Text Line (Text HOME to 741741) so that your child knows theres someone to call or text if they need help.

Bring in a neutral party. If you suspect your child is struggling but you dont think your child will open up to you, Dr. Talib suggests asking a trusted third party to check in with your childit could be a coach, a teacher or a relative.

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How to detect your childs emotional distress before the schools AI does - Livemint

The pharmaceuticals firm GSK has struck a five-year partnership with Kings College London to use artificial intelligence to develop personalised treatments for cancer by investigating the role played by genetics in the disease.

The tie-up, which involves 10 of the drug makers artificial intelligence experts working with 10 oncology specialists from Kings across their labs, will use computing to play chess with cancer, working out why only a fifth of patients respond well to immuno-oncology treatments.

Dr Kim Branson, the global head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at GSK, said only 20% of patients respond well to the new oncology drugs that harness the bodys immune system to fight cancer.

Sometimes it works like a game buster and it wipes out the cancer. Wed like that to work all the time. This could be transformative, Branson said.

The partnership will use GSKs cancer drugs to start with and initially focus on solid cancers such as thoracic malignancies, gastrointestinal and womens cancers. Hopefully well create a framework that other people can contribute to, Branson said.

GSK and other large drug makers have been investing in AI to mine the vast quantities of data available to develop new medicines, pinpoint why some people are susceptible to certain diseases, and improve and personalise patient care.

AI uses algorithms to carry out tasks, with computers learning through repetitive processes rather than instruction from humans. The team will use a 3D cellular model of a patients disease to study how tumour cells from the patients undergoing treatment interact with immune cells.

What if we could play chess with the cancer? Branson said. Cancer is a tricky thing. You treat with X, then you see resistance. The tumour says, You do that, Im going to respond with this. Were using the predictive power of AI to think of potential strategies to outmanoeuvre disease. Our partnership with Kings can make this a possibility.

The team will monitor for dynamic biomarkers molecules found in blood, other body fluids or tissues that are a sign of disease that can predict resistance during treatment or a later relapse. The research partnership is based on a novel machine learning model that integrates multimodal data, genetic and molecular traits, tumour location, images and biomarker blood tests.

Prof Tony Ng, head of the comprehensive cancer centre at Kings, said that in general half of cancer patients who were clinically diagnosed to have advanced but operable cancers came back within one to two years after treatment, such as chemotherapy, when it was discovered that the cancer had spread to other parts of the body.

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To identify those at high risk, the team will create a digital biological twin of the patient, to test multiple drugs, and multiple doses, at multiple time points.

We are linking up the patient with the twin and can immediately feed back info to the clinical trial or clinical management algorithms, Ng said. The biological twin will not only tell us this person has a high risk, but also what we as oncologists do about it.

Ng added that different parameters besides genomics can be looked at within the twin, such as whether the immune system is suppressed through contact with cancer cells (quantified by new imaging methods), to develop a multimodal monitoring tool. Over the five years, the team hope to create specialist equipment.

Branson said the partnership could, if necessary, use the UKs most powerful supercomputer, developed by the US-based firm Nvidia, which became operational in July. The Cambridge-1 deploys AI methods and is available to a range of organisations, including GSK and Kings.

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GSK teams with Kings College to use AI to fight cancer - The Guardian

Ronen Lavi and Shay Perera have spent years working to develop and deploy AI in one of the most demanding environments in the worldthe elite intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Lavi established and led the AI Lab of Israels Military Intelligence and Perera served there as manager of machine learning and computer vision research and development.

After being awarded a National Security Award in 2018, they left the IDF to launch a startup, as many Israelis with similar experience and skills have done before them. But in their case, it wasnt a cybersecurity or fintech or proptech startup, but a healthcare startup, joining the most recent thriving sector in the booming Startup Nation of Israel.

Navina Founders CEO Ronen Lavi (left), CTO Shay Perera (right)

The rapid digital transformation of the healthcare industry worldwide, the proliferation of healthcare data, the increasing complexity of healthcare (including its administration), the dearth of qualified personneland the Covid pandemichave all contributed to a rising demand for AI solutions, intended to assist with detection, diagnosis, treatment, preventive care and wellness.

The wealth of data that is produced by digitized medical records is what modern AI approaches (deep learning) require so they can learn from examples, automate certain decisions, and provide a helping hand to physicians and healthcare staff. But it also contributes to a data overload that is simply impossible to digest. The intuitive belief that more data is inherently a good thing, is a misguided notion. Without sense-making tools, more data doesnt mean better patient understanding, says Perera, Navinas CTO.

The data overload frustrates physicians and causes burnout. A recent study concluded that physician burnout has negative consequences for physician wellness, patient care, and the health care system and that 50% of physicians in the United States experience burnout, now considered by many experts to be an epidemic.

The data overload lands on overburdened physicians at a critical moment. There are thousands of data points that physicians need to review in a few minutes before seeing the patient, says Perera. The patient portrait Navina provides is a one-page summary, extracting critical information from many sources, including PDFs or images of faxes that the physicians are hard-pressed to search. We teach the machine how to understand the different languages of the different data sources, and how to connect the dots so the physicians get a summary document in one language they can understand, says Perera.

To accomplish this, Navina developed NLP (natural language processing) models which extract and structurethe data into medical ontologies, and using deep learning, Navina analyzes it to associate each piece of information with a specific medical terminology code.

In addition, Navina has developed a proprietary medical knowledge graph, which it uses to connect the different medical ontologies.The knowledge graph is based both on medical literature, and on Navinas state-of-the art datasets, curated by its professional team of medical doctors, and used for training Navinas machine learning models. Once trained, Navinas AI engine can provide links between diagnoses, medications, labs, vitals, consult notes, imaging and more. These medically guided maps allow it to provide alerts regarding missed diagnoses, abnormal results, missing labs, and missing tests.

This is a great example of what AI pioneer Andrew Ng has recently called data-centric AI, urging the improvement in the quality of the data used to train AI programs and building the tools and processes required to put data at the center of developers work. Especially in healthcare, where the data sets are relatively small, the quality of the data and making sense of it are crucial for the success of AI-driven solutions.

Navina is not only data-centric, patient data-centric, it is first and foremost, physician-centric. Addressing the specific pain points and business needs of the intended customers is important for the success of any new venture, but especially so in healthcare. It is a market with numerous individual decision-makersphysicians and medical practices. It is a market that has been notoriously slow to adopt new, computer-based tools.

Lavi, Navinas CEO, says his and Pereras experience in the army with the introduction of new technologies has been a great help for them. The only way to succeed it is to go from the bottom up, to work with your users from day one, he says. With Navina, they started working directly with physicians and found the right design partners, such as the American Academy of Family Physicians. Build it step by step, understand the workflow and the right accelerators, get the physicians on board, put the physician in the center and then get the right economics from it, Lavi adds.

The right economics have a lot to do with the shift in the U.S. to value-based healthcare. This is a healthcare delivery model in which providers are paid based on patient health outcomes and are rewarded for helping patients improve their health, reduce the effects and incidence of chronic disease, and live healthier lives.

In this new model, Navina helps physicians increase their reimbursements by ensuring that the right coding for specific conditions is applied to each patient. For example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS) risk adjustment model calculates risk scores for Medicare Advantage patients. A Risk Adjustment Factor (RAF) is assigned to each eligible Medicare Advantage beneficiary, based on their health conditions and other factors. Higher risk scores represent patients with a greater than average disease burden.

The detection (and coding) of chronic conditions and their treatment, for example, assisted by Navinas AI, could translate into thousands of dollars in additional monthly income for providers (in addition to reducing the administrative burden on physicians and coders).

After three months of deployment at Northern Ohio Medical Specialists (NOMS Healthcare), an independent physician group with over 250 providers and 30 specialties, NOMS has seen a significant increase in HCC-RAF (Risk Adjustment Factor) scores, which is expected to translate into several million dollars in revenue over the upcoming calendar years.

Announcing the results of this deployment, Jennifer Hohman, a family physician and NOMS Board Chair, said that using Navina is like having another physician at my side. A partner who can instantly read through the entire record - including every consult or discharge note - and then give me only the data I need, so that I dont miss anything.

To gain initial feedback from physicians and use it to improve the AI engine, Navina is first targeting medium-size practices, says Lavi, but it is already working with larger ones. Perera credits their success in deploying their software in just three months to their use of AWS resources to accelerate the process, citing AWSs scalable solutions specifically tailored to healthcare and its security and access control functionality.

Jared Saul, Global Lead at AWS for Healthcare & Life Sciences Startups and Investors, concurs: AWS provides the cloud infrastructure and advanced services that help Navina to turn millions of structured and unstructured patient records into clear, actionable diagnostic summaries, which have the potential to make a huge difference for doctors and patients.

Lavi and Perera say they are excited to see their startup participate in the larger movement of healthcare transformation, a movement encouraging data sharing, successful deployment of new and innovative practices, and using AI to improve healthcare delivery.

More:

AI Startup Navina Leverages The Amazon Cloud To Improve Patient Care - Forbes

Artificial Intelligence is jockeying to become the focal point of U.S. technology innovation in coming years, and San Diego is among the cities well positioned to be a frontrunner in this looming AI race.

A new report from the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution ranked more than 360 cities based on their AI economic prowess.

Bay Area metros San Francisco and San Jose- topped the list, according to Brookings, a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. They were followed by 13 earlier adopter cities that managed to claw out a toehold in AI, including San Diego.

Not everywhere should be looking to artificial intelligence for a major change in its economy, but places like San Diego really need to, said Mark Muro, a Brookings fellow and co-author of the report. I think the costs of being out of position on it are pretty high for San Diego, and the benefits of leveraging it fully are really high.

To rank cities, Brookings combined data on federal research grants, AI academic papers, AI patents, job postings and AI-related companies, among other factors.

Besides San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, N.C., are in strong positions. Smaller cities with significant AI footprints relative to their size include Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Boulder, Colo., Lincoln, Neb., and Santa Fe, N.M.

An additional 87 cities have the potential to become players but so far have limited AI activities, according to the study.

For most of us. AI is best known through recommendations that pop up on Amazon or Spotify, when smart speakers answer voice commands, or when navigation apps give turn-by-turn directions.

But AI is much more than that, with the potential to permeate thousands of industries. It could prevent power outages and help heal grids quickly, better route shipping to cut emissions, aid in medical diagnoses, and power navigation for self-driving vehicles.

Muro said Brookings undertook the research after receiving requests from economic development officials.

They watched the digitization of everything during the pandemic, he said. Theyre asking where do we stand on these advanced digital technologies? How do we engage with this?

As with other technologies, artificial intelligence tends to be clustered on the coasts. Of the 363 metro areas in the study, 261 had no significant AI footprint.

This is not everywhere, said Muro. But we think there can be a happy medium where we retain our coastal innovation centers while also taking steps to help other places make progress and counter some of this massive concentration.

In San Diego, companies such as Qualcomm, Oracle, Intuit, Teradata, Cubic, Viasat, Thermo Fisher and Illumina develop artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

But key drivers of the regions AI prowess stems from the military and universities.

The Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) is based locally, creating a magnet for defense contractors and cyber security firms working in AI.

San Diegos affiliation with the military has been extremely important, said Nate Kelley, senior researcher at the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. There are more and more contracts coming, particularly through NAVWAR. Those federal contracts tend to be large, and theyre multi-year. So, theyre less vulnerable to business cycles.

UC San Diego was an early researcher in neural networks, said Rajesh Gupta, director of the Halicioglu Data Sciences Institute. That work helped pave the way for the machine learning engines that banks use to uncover credit card transaction fraud.

Gupta thinks the Brookings report underestimates San Diegos AI capabilities. This summer, a new AI Research Institute at UCSD won a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to tackle big, complicated problems.

Among them: tapping artificial intelligence to cut the time and cost of designing semiconductors; finding ways to improve communications networks; and researching how robots interact with humans to make self-driving cars safer.

The San Diego Super Computer Center also performs research related to AI, and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) has been an early proponent of AI-based smart cities technologies, said Gupta.

We have a $39 million effort going on today basically on grid response and making it intelligent, said Gupta. Its smart buildings, smart parking, smart transportation. These are what will define the metropolitan areas of tomorrow with AI embedded in them.

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San Diego ranks relatively high in national ranking for artificial intelligence innovation - The San Diego Union-Tribune