Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Amber Rudd is urging online giants to take preemptive action using artificial intelligence to stop extremist material from being uploaded to the internet.

The Home Secretary said companies needed to use technological advancements to block inappropriate content from being shared on the web in the first place as she advocated a shiftaway from ministers having to ask for material to be taken down.

Ms Rudd will challenge the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google to do more to tackle extremist content as she attends the inaugural meeting of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in Silicon Valley on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Ms Rudd has urged online messaging services such as WhatsApp to stop using "unbreakable" encryption because of fears that it only benefits terrorists.

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Amber Rudd urges online giants to use artificial intelligence to block extremist material being uploaded to internet - Telegraph.co.uk

For tourists and stay-cationers on Long Island, planning the ideal R&R retreat may be just a few clicks away. So whether youre a history buff or adventure-seeker, a fine-dining aficionado or a cheap-eats fanatic, youll be able to customize a downloadable itinerary that fits your budget and your interest from shore to shore.

This is all thanks to a partnership between Discover Long Island, the regions Hauppauge-based tourism and promotion agency, and Utrip, an artificial intelligence Seattle-based startup that aims to boost tourism in the area.

Its projected that by July 31, travelers can create instant, personalized itineraries by filling out a profile on the Discover Long Islands website or mobile app. The more they tweak their profile with such details as whether theyre planning a lobster-eating spree, a live music binge or pure beach relaxation the more customized the suggestions. Travelers can remove what they dislike and add additional information to help the algorithm create an even more personalized plan. The itineraries can be saved as PDFs and also shared.

We show off a lot of different experiences, said Gilad Berenstein, Utrips CEO.

The program is based on artificial intelligence and the experience of travelers but also the expertise of locals, including, so far, Claudia Fleming and Stephan Bogardus, both chefs at Southold-based North Fork Table & Inn, and Juan Micieli-Martinez, the winemaker at Riverhead-based Martha Clara Vineyards. And there will be others throughout Long Island, according to Jamie Claudio, director of brand development at Discover Long Island.

The platform is part of Discover Long Islands revamped website, creating a more user-friendly infrastructure that drives a focused experience to vacationers, Claudio said.

As more people use Utrip, the system will become increasingly robust, Berenstein said. The platform will also make recommendations based on what others with similar interests have also enjoyed. For example, the system will get to know what families like and dislike, so that parents can better plan. And it will offer many different experiences, not just, say, the Hamptons, which because of its branding, may get the most play when people research travel opportunities online.

Unlike other travel sites, Utrip does not take sponsored posts, so that the recommendations are authentic. There are checks to help prevent anyone from gaming the system so that, for example, a restaurateur couldnt log into the system and then try to flood it with positive ratings without Utrip being alerted, Berenstein said.

And while travelers can weigh in, reviews are not posted, though tips such as, Dont miss a stroll on the boardwalk are there for others to see.

Already, Utrip offers destinations in more than 150 destinations according to its website, and also has a partnership with JetBlue Airways. In February, the company closed a $4 million funding round and added to its board Michael Adler, the ex-Expedia CFO and former Long Islander.

This month the company also added partnerships with Minneapolis and Colorado in addition to Long Island.

As Kristen Jarnagin, Discover Long Islands president and CEO put it, Were able to harness our content in a whole new way.

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Customizing LI tourism with artificial intelligence - Long Island Business News (subscription)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed from a futuristic concept to powerful force which is transforming operations in traditional industries. Top executives are beginning to take note as startups in the field are expanding at an astounding rate.

We use AI to increase Operational Excellence, says CEO Iris Tsidon of Okapi and author of Six Steps to Operational Excellence. Heads of industry know that change is coming and are committed to improving their companies. Our job as entrepreneurs is to show them that this isnt coming in the future, the capabilities are already here now.

According to a white paper by Bell-Hawk systems, real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques originally developed for the USAF and NASA are being applied to manufacturing organizations to enable managers to run their manufacturing plants with less stress and much smaller management teams.

David Brooks on the PBS evening news said "Manufacturing is going through a revolution from a labor intensive, blue-collar industry to a white-collar, Silicon Valley industry." This use of AI to assist managers to efficiently run their operations is part of the transition from manufacturing being a labor intensive business to being highly automated at the operations management level as well as on the production floor.

This revolution is enabling manufacturers in the USA to rapidly design, engineer, and make products to order in response to products ordered over the Internet. In fact, recent research into AI from Accenture Research shows that the technology will be critical to economic growth in existing and developing markets. Accentures CTO Paul Daugherty states, Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform business in ways weve not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century. Our research demonstrates that as AI matures, it can propel economic growth and potentially serve as a powerful remedy for stagnant productivity andlabor shortages of recent decades.

Iris Tsidon of Okapi notes that about 85% of the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) projects in the business world fail. That is a staggering number but when AI is used, the transformation is immediate.

OKAPI was created as an AI based software to address this problem. By transforming the complex technology into a simple and easy to use platform and app, Okapi is able to use use artificial intelligence to analyze and provide our customers the best KPIs for their business. This produces outstanding insights, which can be turned into valuable operational intelligence.

The most important thing is that high level technology becomes accessible at every level of an organization. Its not just for the C-Suite executives, in order for it to be meaningful, it has to help every employee in the organization from the boardroom to the factory floor

While artificial intelligence may seem like a high level concept, in the coming years, we are going to see it translate into tools which will be used through out every level of an organization.

OKAPIConversations is a series of interviews discussing Startups, Artificial Intelligence, Operational Excellence and Business Intelligence and the impact on business andsociety

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Artificial Intelligence from the Boardroom to the Factory Floor - HuffPost

Experts offerdiffering views about where advances in artificial intelligence are leading us to in the long term. However they mostly agree that in the short term we have to get ready for an era where AI accounts for most routine jobs previously thought to be the exclusive domain of human intelligence.

This does not mean that humans will run out of jobsyet. What it does mean, however, is that the dynamics governing the employment landscape are rapidly shifting. Humans will have to become smarter and much faster at obtaining knowledge and acquiring the skills required to perform tasks that have not fallen prey to automation.

Here are some of the trends that are helping us (humans) maintain our edge in a world that is fast being taken over by robots.

Augmented reality, the real-time overlaying of graphical elements on real world imagery, is still in its infancy. Yet much more than games and entertainment, AR is promising to be the computing platform of professional work.

Many industries are using AR to augment efficiency and productivity in of professional settings. By using AR glasses or headsets, engineers, healthcare workers, industry workers, and professionals in many other fields will be able to see real-time information and instructions about the task theyre performing while keeping their hands free to do the job.

For instance, as the following video shows, an AR glass boosts a technicians speed by 34% when wiring a wind turbines control box because it replaces paper manuals with line-of-sight instructions.

AR assistance can help address the skills gap that many industries are currently suffering from by cutting the time and effort required to train the workforce for jobs with high skill requirements.

The practical uses of AR in workplaces has given rise to a new industry of AR applications and hardware, including the Enterprise Edition of the ill-fated Google Glass, which might become a favorite in manufacturing settings.

Ironically, one of the technologies that will help humans survive AI is AI itself. When viewed from a different perspective, AI can become a job enabler by breaking down the complexity of tasks as well as speeding up the learning process.

AI algorithms can collect and analyze information about learners interactions with a course in various ways, and help speed their way through the training by providing personalized content and guidance that addresses their specific pain points. Applying AI in education can be crucial as requirements for professional jobs change at a faster pace and workers need to be constantly learning new skills.

Elsewhere, the automation of complicated tasks by AI algorithms is enabling less-skilled or -experienced professionals to take on tasks that previously required years of education and work experience.

Were seeing this in fields such as healthcare, where AI algorithms are helping clinicians and doctors be more productive at their jobs by providing them with knowledge and suggestions based on patterns obtained from the outcome of thousands and millions of previous diagnoses and treatment processes. Another field is cybersecurity, where AI algorithms are doing the bulk of the work in finding alerts and reducing false positives, while analysts decide which events need to be investigated.

Scientists and thought leaders agree that (for the time being) when humans and artificial intelligence work together, they can accomplish much more than any of them alone. Whether it will remain so in the future is to be seen.

Some believe that the only way we can survive the robot uprising is by becoming cyborgs, including Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla motors, whose eccentric plans include colonizing Mars. Musk, who strongly favors the AI doomsday theory, suggests that to avoid being outsmarted by artificial intelligence, we must merge with machines.

Musks ventures include Neuralink, a company that plans to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain to improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices. Among the things that such technology can accomplish is the direct uploading or downloading of thoughts and knowledge to and from the brain.

While Musks idea might sound outrageous, hes not the only person who wants to enhance humans through technology. Others include Bryan Johnson, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who personally spent $100 million to launch Kernel, a company that aims to build neural tools that will allow the brain to do things that were previously impossible.

The belief that science and technology can help humans evolve beyond their physical and mental limits has very strong advocates, including Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist Party, who ran for U.S. president in 2016 and will be running for governor of California in 2018. Istvan plans to conquer death through science and technology.

Whether robots will obey humans forever, fight and eradicate them or drive them into slavery remains to be seen. In the meantime we need to make the best of the technology that surrounds us.

This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily shared by TNW.

Read next: Hackers kick off #leaktheanalyst campaign by dumping data of $1bn security firm

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How humans will stay competitive in the age of artificial intelligence - TNW

Aida is the perfect employee: always courteous, always learning and, as she says, always at work, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Aida, of course, is not a person but a virtual customer-service representative thatSEB AB, one of Swedens biggest banks, is rolling out. The goal is to give the actual humans more time to engage in more complex tasks.

After blazing a trail in online and digital banking, Swedens financial industry is now emerging as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Besides Aida at SEB, theres Nova, which is a chatbotNordea Bankis introducing at its life and pensions unit in Norway.Swedbankis adding to the skills of its virtual assistant, Nina. All three are designed to sound like women, based on research suggesting customers feel more comfortable with female voices.

There are some frequent, simple tasks that we need to deal with manually today, and in that effort were looking into AI to see how we can deploy it and Aida is one, Johan Torgeby, the chief executive officer of SEB, says.

Chatbots have access to vast amounts of individual client data, meaning they can quickly handle straightforward customer requests. That in turn frees up human employees to deal with more complex services, like coming up with the best mortgage plan to suit a specific customer.

Basically all banks are closing branches, Mattias Fras, head of robotics, strategy and innovation at Nordea, says. This is a way to return to full service again.

Nordeas chatbot will eventually help customers who want investment advice, who want to cancel lost credit cards or to open savings accounts.

Swedish banks have already seen their customer satisfaction scores drop to a20-year lowafter shutting branches and pushing people onto online services. But AI might be part of the cure. According to a recent study by market researcher GfK, there are wide gaps between what consumers hope to receive from banks in terms of service and financial advice, and what they actually get. AI applications such as chatbots hold the promise of filling in these service gaps, given the right data and programming, GfK says.

Swedbank, which already operates its chatbot Nina in Sweden and plans to roll it out to its Baltic markets as well, says one of the benefits to the technology is that it eases users into the new digital age. AI can help our customers become more digitised, for example by guiding a client in paying bills on the Internet, Swedbank spokeswoman Josefine Uppling says.

Petra Stenqvist, a partner at Pond, which looks into innovative business ideas, says its unlikely AI will ever be able to think like humans. It will never be able to replace subjective assessments, she says. But it will be able to contribute to better decision making. And because of the massive amounts of data that AI can store, individuals will be able to find out things about themselves that they didnt even know.

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Swedish banks embrace artificial intelligence as a cure to closures - The Independent

Artificial intelligence is fast changing the world. The premise that intelligent machines will perform tasks more efficiently and at a lower cost than human beings is by no means far-fetched. The challenges facing the workers of the future are multiplying before our very eyes.

Some of the most vulnerable jobs in the transition to automation, robotics and artificial intelligence are related to transport, mechanical work in factories and customer service. But no sector, be it health, finance or even the military, is excluded.

In the study When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts, conducted by researcher Katja Grace from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, 350 artificial intelligence experts predict that AI will outperform human beings within the next ten years in activities such as translating languages (in the year 2024), essay writing at secondary school level (in 2026) and truck driving (in 2027). Writing a bestselling book or replacing a surgeon will come a little later (in 2049 and 2053), but it will come.

The potential conflicts vary considerably according to the level of economic development. In developed countries, there is a concern that new forms of artificial intelligence will compete with humans for jobs, given their increased comparative advantage in areas of cognitive ability. Whereas in emerging and developing countries, concerns around automation are principally associated with the risk that it will replace manufacturing jobs which have been central to past growth strategies. The central theme, of course, in both instances is the risk that jobs will be replaced by technology, senior economist at the ILO, Steven Tobin, tells Equal Times.

Tobin emphasises that, in the past, technological innovation did not lead to the technological unemployment so widely feared. In this sense, the future of work is not pre-determined. It is up to us, particularly the governments and social partners, to forge the kind of future we want. Our task is to manage technological innovation in an effort to seek the best labour market and social outcomes, he adds.

To some extent, automation almost intrinsically means progress, in the sense that it gives human beings greater freedom from the sacrifices that work demands of us. The problem is that the advantages or profits derived from the increased productivity resulting from automation do not necessarily benefit all social groups in equal measure. It depends on the negotiating capacity, on the power held by each social group, warns Juan Torres Lpez, professor of applied economics at the University of Seville.

Tobin points out that recent decades have seen a growing disconnect between growth in productivity and how workers benefit from the profits (in the form of potential wage growth).

In addition, the global rise of non-standard forms of employment, such as temporary or part-time employment, agency work, subcontracting, dependent self-employment or ambiguous employment relationships, could generate even greater insecurity when combined with technological innovation. Such non-standard forms of employment are often linked to greater insecurity for workers. In this sense, better regulation is needed that ensures equal treatment for workers regardless of their contractual arrangement, underlines the ILO.

Another key factor, in addition to effective social protection for workers, is broader and better access to training, to develop their skills. We need to ensure that individuals have access to the right education and skills to take up the new jobs, and that effective social protection measures are there to provide minimum guarantees, explains Tobin.

As with automation, many people rush to make a judgment with respect to robots and the risk that they will take away jobs, adds Tobin The reality is that we dont have a clear answer and further debate and research is required.

For the ILO economist, Germany and Japan, which have managed to introduce robots within companies without compromising jobs, are positive examples. Robots are now able to undertake tasks that are hazardous and dangerous for humans, he points out. The challenge lies in stimulating innovation and cutting costs without compromising the fair redistribution of income, regardless of the workers contractual arrangement.

Barcelona is to launch a programme in September that will run for 24 months, to trial four minimum income schemes in 1,000 households in the Bess district. It is a pilot project with a budget of 13 million euros. The aim is to study what can be done to ensure that all the people residing in the city of Barcelona have access to the minimum level of income needed to live a decent life. It is based on the certitude that the current welfare benefit system is inadequate and too complex to achieve this objective, explains the social rights section of Barcelona city council.

The plan is to examine, in conjunction with the European Union and various universities, the impact, for example, of limiting this type of welfare support and placing conditions on it.

The 1000 households involved will be divided into four subgroups to see how their income is reduced, or not, when they receive supplementary or unexpected income, as well as the impact of being obliged, or not, to take part in specific socio-labour projects.

As the city council points out: Despite the wealth of literature on the subject, there are not many practical studies, to date, that examine, in detail, the best way for this type of income to meet its ultimate goal, which is to reduce inequalities and ensure genuine equality of opportunity. Similar studies are currently underway in the province of Ontario (Canada), the city of Utrecht (Netherlands) and Finland.

At the end of the two-year trial, an assessment will be made of how these policies impact the social protection and the reduction of inequalities. Our rationale is based on the fact that current policies, often too assistentialist or paternalistic, have not helped to curb the rise in poverty and inequality, which is why we believe it would be good to explore basic income in greater depth. It could also contribute to condensing exiting benefits and reducing the amount of bureaucracy, says the city council.

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The future of work in the era of artificial intelligence - Equal Times

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are slowly seeping into the capital markets, though not as quickly as many vendors would have you believe. Even still, these offerings will become ubiquitous and as such, this year we decided to add this category to honor the vendor making the greatest strides in this realm. And the winner of the inaugural best AI technology provider category is AlphaSense.

AlphaSense offers a financial search engine that helps analysts and portfolio managers to find information thats buried in dense text documents, from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings (including footnotes) to broker research reports, pieces of news and conferencetranscripts.

One of the key aspects of AlphaSenses offeringwhich the San Francisco-based firm describes as the Google for company researchis its ability to take a sea of data and narrow it down to specifically what users are looking for, and also alert them to key words that they might not have considered. The vendor has its own financial-world-specific dictionary and thesaurus to help direct portfolio managers and traders toward information that they might have otherwise missed. One portfolio manager told Waters that the platform has cut his search times down on an individual company from four or five hours to 30 or 45 minutes. According to the vendor, two-thirds of the top 50 largest equity-focused hedge funds in the world use AlphaSensesplatform.

In March this year, AlphaSense announced that it had raised $33 million in funding, which includes new investors in the form of Tribeca Venture Partners, Triangle Peak Partners and Quantum Strategic Partners, as well as individual investors, including former Thomson Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer, who had previously acted as an advisor to the vendor prior to hisinvesting.

In the wake of its fundraising, AlphaSense made a number of key hires. First, to expand its content library, it added Bob Magri as the firms chief content officer. It also hired Kevin Broom to serve as executive vice president of product development in order to drive updates across the platform. Weve also made significant increases to our sales team to build into new verticals, including corporate intelligence, notes a spokesperson. Using the funding, AlphaSense will continue to look to build out its platform, including the additions of newlanguages.

Earlier this year, AlphaSense won the best analytics product at the Sell-Side Technology Awards, and took home the same award in 2015 at the Buy-Side Technology Awards.

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Waters Rankings 2017: Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology ProviderAlphaSense - http://www.waterstechnology.com

After recent concerns over the implications of artificial intelligence, a report says that Facebook has shut-down an artificial intelligence system after researchers found out that it had started talking in a language they could not comprehend, reminiscent of the Terminator films.

A report in Tech Times says that the bots started communicating in a language that it created, and which was not English, their earlier preference.

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Bob: "I can can I I everything else."

Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to."

The above is a reported conversation between the bots, unintelligible to humans, but designed to make communication faster between them. The bit is scary since experts like Stephen Hawking have been warning against the same, saying that humans, used to slower evolution, will be fast outpaced by these intelligence bots.

An IBTimes report quotes Dhruv Batra, a visiting Facebook AI research scientist saying: Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves, Batra said. Like if I say the five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isnt so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, CEOs of Facebook and Tesla, respectively, got into a public argument over Artificial Intelligence recently.

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I keep sounding the alarm bell, he reportedly told attendees at a meeting earlier this month. But until people see robots going down the street killing people, they dont know how to react.

In a Facebook live, Zuckerberg called Musk a naysayer, saying that what Musk had said was pretty irresponsible. Musk responded on Twitter.

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Facebook Shuts Down Artificial Intelligence System That Created Language To Talk To Itself - Outlook India

Dont doubt it: Machine learning is hotand getting hotter.

For the past two years, public interest in building complex algorithms that automatically learn and improve from their own operations, or experience (rather than explicit programming) has been growing. Call it artificial intelligence, or (better) machine learning. Such work has, in fact, been going on for decades. (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, for instance, got rolling in 1979; some date the ideas back to the Greeks, or at least to the 1940s during the early days of programmable digital computers.)

More recently, Shivon Zilis, an investor with Bloomberg Beta, has been building a landscape map of where machine learning is being applied across other industries.Education makes the list. Some technologists are worried about the dangers. Elon Musk, for instance, has been apocalyptic about his predictions, as the New Yorker wrote. He sparred this past week with a more sanguine Mark Zuckerberg. (The Atlantic covers it here.)

Investors are nonetheless racing ahead: this week, Chinese language learning startup, Liulishuo, which uses machine learning algorithms to teach English to 45 million Chinese students, raised $100 million to accelerate its work.

To explore what machine learning could mean in education, EdSurge convened a meetup this past week in San Francisco with Adam Blum (CEO of OpenEd), Armen Pischdotchian, (an academic technology mentor at IBM Watson), Kathy Benemann (CEO of EruditeAI), and Kirill Kireyev (founder of instaGrok and technology head at TextGenome and GYANT). EdSurges Tony Wan moderated the session. Here are a few excerpts from the conversation:

EdSurge: Artificial intelligence has been promising to transform education for generations. How close are getting? Whats different now?

Benemann: Theres so much more data than ever before. For us at EruditeAI, data is more precious than revenue. With better data, we can better train our algorithms. But the important point to remember is that the makers of AI are ultimately us, humans.

Pischdotchian: If you think back on the education model of your earlier years, we called it the factory model. Teachers broadly taught same subject to all students. That isnt what were talking about today. Groups such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are looking to overhaul this model. Learning cant be done according to the factory model any more. It isnt sustainable. What will industry require for todays kids to flourish doing what we call New Collar work?

Kireyev: Were seeing a data explosion in education contentboth data for and from students. We can see what students are doing, far more rapidly than in the past. When kids work on Scratch, for instance, their work is web-based: You can see when they start watching a video, when they stop, when theyre bored. You get a lot of insight into their behavior. Transparent data collection is incredibly valuable. And theres greater availability of the technologythings that you can literally use out the box. So more people are trying to do things with AI and machine learning.

Okay, weve heard about the data explosion and about the need to change school models. What else is going on?

Blum: There are two big trends going onand were just at the beginning of this. We work with IMS Global Learning. Technical standards, such as Caliper, andxAPI (or Experience API)are just taking off. And second, there are a whole lot of areas, education is one of them, where you dont have long-term data. So if you want to pick the next best thing [problem] for a student, you have to use a different approach called reinforcement learning. So if I dont have a million data records, I can explore as I go. Its how Google solved the AlphaGo challenge.

What applications do we see of AI in education? Are we using it already?

Pischdotchian: This is about finding patterns in learning experiences. We can take note of say, if one persons stronger in math, how can the system identify the challenge, and then open it up to teachers so they can be better tutors for their students? IBM is working with Sesame Street on thisthe partnership is using universities as testbeds for the development of machine learning. It can also come in handy for teachers: We had a hackathon at MIT and all the classrooms have cameras (and students know that). If a professor is delivering a lecture and he doesnt look up to see whether half the class is asleep, we can use facial recognition to depict emotions (such as boredom) and send the professor a message.

Benemann: Everywhere you look, people are asking what aspect of education (and everything else) can be touched by AI. What does this look like in the classroom? Will it free up the day? Will AI replace the teachers? Will AI help teachers free up their time so they can be guides for the students? Can adaptive platforms (such as ALEKS or Knewton) help students learn the facts and enable the teachers to guides?

Does that suggest that without AI, the adaptive technology on the market, isnt really that adaptive?

Benemann: Its a spectrum. Some tools are adaptive, but theyre saying theyre AI [but we still have a ways to go.]

Kireyev: Instagrok is a visual search engine. Were using machine learning to identify the important facts, concepts and then letting the students pursue learning in any direction. They can synthesize it, organize it. TextGeonome is another project. Were building an infrastructure to do deep AI-based vocabulary development. Were asking: Given a student and grade level, what are the kinds of words they need to learn next?

Blum: At ACT (which acquired OpenEd),were focused on the question of: If youve identified the learning gap, whats the best instructional material to help the student? Not just ACT material; we want to give you the best instructional resource we can find. We use machine learning to pinpoint those.

In some areas, if you dont use machine learning predictive models, youre remiss. Take college admissions offices.

As you shift from statistical evaluation models to deep machine learning [involving neural networks], what hasnt kept pace is explainability. You might have a neural network that you cant explain. So one key challenge as the predictive algorithms get betterand as you get to multilayer neural networksis that explainability falls off. In some heavily regulated markets education and medicine, for instancemore explanatory tools will have to be developed.

Suppose youre at a big university: They use statistical models to pick the incoming class. Now, say you have a neural network or some machine learning program thats better at predicting student outcomes. For sure, there are universities doing this. They wont talk about it because the stakes are so high. But you can be sure theyre using machine learning to pick the incoming class. We will need some kind of summarization tools to explain these choices. Even though deep learning is complicated, for this to get talked about and accepted, well have to come up with some of the big elements of explanation: How did they get there?

There are concerns when words like AI becomes a label used to sell a product. Say Im a teacher, and an edtech company says my math tool is AI-backed. What should I ask?

Blum: The problem ties back to discoverability and explainability. If youre going to slap on the AI label, then I want to know more: Are you talking about supervised symbolic system? Natural language processing? If you just say AI and nothing further, that reduces your credibility. If you use the AI label, its an invitation to have a conversation about whats behind it all.

Benemann: Vendors should talk about student outcomes and teacher practice. Dont talk about AI at all. Its just another way to enable student learning and teacher practice. Youre better off going to the district and saying: Because you use this product I can do a case study and show an increase in efficiency and less wasted time in the classroom.

How do you balance the need for AI tools to have data while safeguarding the privacy and security of sensitive student data?

Blum: Were at a point where theres no such thing as PII (personally identifiable information). If you have enough knowledge you can probably deconstruct who any person is likely to be. So there need to be industry standards. This is an area where it would improve the job of edtech developers if we said, Heres what youre allowed to gather and share. Something Ive raised is the need for better standards on privacy so no one can get sued if they follow the standards.

Benemann: Who owns data? Look at health care. Its a fragmented market, but theres a trend where patients are increasingly owning data. I wonder if we can get to point where students have the data and its up to them (students and their parents) to say, Yes, schools you can have access.

Job automation is a threat that many people are worried about. How will this impact teachersand other professions?

Kireyev: I see role of teacher shifting in wonderful ways. Leadership, guidance...these are things Im excited about getting from teachers. And then more and more teachers can shift into working more deeply with kids, rather than just explain how equations work.

Blum: There have been efforts to do learning goals for vocational tech. But its been underutilized. We need to be a little more forward thinking...what does it mean to be truck driver in 10 years? How does that impact supply chain [across industries?] We need efforts to make vocational education better.

Pischdotchian: Hence the importance of STEAM [science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics] instead of STEM. The right side of brainarts, creativity, psychology, not the analytics and the math, will be ever more important. Psychology. History. Debate class. Humor and drama. These facets are not (amenable to AI), at least in our lifetime.

AI has gotten good at making certain things easy. But thats concerning. Thinking hard about things doesnt come naturally to us. Growth and comfort cannot coexist.

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Real Questions About Artificial Intelligence in Education - EdSurge

If you always have a caramel macchiato on Mondays, but Tuesdays call for the straight stuff, a double espresso, then Starbucks Corporation (SBUX) is ready to know every nuance of your coffee habit. There will be no coffee secrets between you, if you're a Rewards member, and Starbucks.

This fall as Starbucks rolls out more of its new cloud-based Digital Flywheel program, backed by artificial intelligence(AI), the chain's regulars will find their every java wish ready to be fulfilled and, the food and drink items you haven't yet thought about presented to you as what you're most likely to want next.

So targeted is the technology behind this program that, if the weather is sunny, you'll get a different suggestion than if the day is rainy. Or expect suggestions to vary on the weekend or a holiday, as opposed to a regular workday. If it's your birthday, Starbucks will offer a personalized birthday selection. If you patronize a Starbucks other than you're regular haunt, Starbucks will know that too.

Like it or not, what Starbucks has developed represents a smart melding of technology into e-commerce tools that will pay off long term for the company and drive sales, Brian Solis, a principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, told TheStreet in an interview.

"Starbucks is one of the best companies in the world that connects brand, user and consumer experience between digital mobile and the real world," said Solis. " They are still pushing forward, rolling out their Digital Flywheel strategy to be more dynamic to further integrate digital and real world."

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Starbucks Will Soon Use This New Artificial Intelligence to Tempt You Into Buying More Coffee - TheStreet.com