Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Given the speed at which researchers are advancing artificial intelligence, the question has become not if A.I. will become smarter than its human creators, but when?

A team of researchers from Yale University and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute recently set off to determine the answer. During May and June of 2016, they polled hundreds of industry leaders and academics to get their predictions for when A.I. will hit certain milestones.

The findings, which the team published in a study last week: A.I. will be capable of performing any task as well or better than humans--otherwise known as high-level machine intelligence--by 2060 and will overtake all human jobs by 2136. Those results are based on the 352 experts who responded.

Monday night, Elon Musk, who's been a consistent A.I. fear monger, chimed in on Twitter.

The entrepreneur followed up his tweet with an ominous, "I hope I'm wrong." Musk has been a vocal critic of A.I. the past several years, painting nightmare scenarios in which it becomes weaponized or outsmarts humans and leads to their extinction. He co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit that aims to ensure A.I. is used for good, in 2015.

Musk's own firm, Tesla, is one of the companies leading the charge in creating self-driving vehicles. The trucking and taxi industries employ about 2 million Americans, all of whom could soon find their jobs obsolete should vehicles become fully autonomous.

The experts polled in the study predicted that A.I. would become better at driving trucks than humans in 2027. The surveys were completed before robotics startup Otto successfully sent a self-driving truck on a 120-mile journey in October.

A.I. will surpass humans in a number of other milestones, the experts suggested: translating languages (2024), writing high-school level essays (2026), and performing surgeries (2053). They estimated that it would be able to write a New York Times bestseller in 2049.

In May, Google's AlphaGo machine won a game of Go against China's Ke Jie, widely considered to be the world's best player. An A.I. system created by scientists at Carnegie Mellon won $2 million from top poker players in a tournament in January.

It's worth noting that the predicted timelines did not vary based on the experts' levels of experience with artificial intelligence. One variable that did correlate with the predictions was the location: North American experts thought A.I. would outperform humans on all tasks within 74 years, while experts in Asia thought this would take only 30 years. The researchers who published the study didn't provide a potential explanation for the discrepancy.

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Elon Musk (and 350 Experts) Predict Exactly When Artificial ... - Inc. - Inc.com

One of the ways companies fill their ranks with good employees is by scouting passive talent, or people who arent currently looking for new jobs but might be convinced with the right offer. This usually takes hours of networking, but a Tel Aviv-headquartered startup called Workey uses artificial intelligence to streamline the process by matching companies with potential candidates. Workey launched in the U.S. today and also announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by PICO Partners and Magma VC and brings the total Workey has raised so far to $9.6 million, including its earlier seed funding. Workey will use the new capital to expand in the U.S., open an office in New York City, and hire people for its research and development and data science teams.

A LinkedIn study released last year found that recent college graduates are more likely to switch jobs at least twice before their early 30s than previous generations. Workey targets people who are interested in potential opportunities, but dont want to broadcast their curiosity to everyone, including their current employers. Once they sign up for the site, they create an anonymous profile that is used to find positions their background and skills qualify them for.

Workeys recommendation system then matches companies with promising candidates. If a company requests an introduction through the site, users can respond by revealing their full details. Otherwise, all rejections are anonymous. As an example, Workeys co-founders say Yahoo has found several candidates by spending 10 minutes a week on Workey.

Founded in 2015 by Ben Reuveni, Danny Shteinberg, and Amichai Schreiber, Workey has worked with more than 400 companies so far, including Yahoo, Amazon, Dell EMC, and Oracle. In a group interview by email, the trio told TechCrunch that the anonymous platform helps mitigates hiring bias, because companies dont see a candidates race, gender, ethnicity, or religion first. It also allows candidates to see how they stand in relation to the rest of the job market, which can help them during wage negotiations.

Another benefit is combatting the stigma associated with job seekers.

Like it or not, there is much truth to the belief that candidates who are currently working are more desirable than those who are out of a job and full-time job hunting, Workeys founders explained. Passive talent, those who are not actively looking but wouldnt want to miss out on their dream job, are often the most desirable candidates since they typically are already secure in their current position (likely because they perform them well).

Once they do decide to interview for a new job, Workey lets candidates track the status of their application, so they dont spend weeks in limbo waiting for an offer or rejection. The startup works mainly with tech companies right now, because it was invented by engineers for engineers, but can be adapted for other industries. Its free for job candidates and monetizes by charging companies a fee, but its founders claim that they potentially save thousands of dollars by using Workeys AI instead of headhunters or recruitment agencies.

Workey isnt the only career services startup that wants to use AI to streamline the recruitment process, which often takes months. Other companies that have developed AI tools to improve or replace headhunting, job searches, or interviews include Engage, FirstJob, Arya, and Mya. Though their services dont necessarily overlap with Workey right now, its a sign that Workeys competition is likely to increase soon. But its founders insist that one of the most exciting aspects of business today is that there is no future-proofing. Workey will continue to evolve and grow, with a continued investment in R&D to ensure that we provide users with the best possible matches enhancing their careers.

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Career site Workey raises $8M to replace headhunters with artificial ... - TechCrunch

Dive Brief:

AI is hot and it's no surprise Apple is looking to make a play in the space. At HIMSS17 in February, vendors including IBM Watson Health and Nant Health touted AIs potential to increase workflow and improve clinical trial matching, among other uses.

While the industry tries to wrap its collective head around what AI and machine learning are, there's been a flurrly of activity in the space. IBM Watson Health, the de facto spearhead of the AI movement in healthcare, has been on a partnering spree. Novartis and IBM Watson Healthannounced they will use patient data and cognitive computing to look into breast cancer outcomes.IBM Watson is also teaming up with CotaHealthcare and Hackensack Meridian Hospitalon a test AI-enabled decision support in cancer treatment.

With the shift to value-based payment models, providers are looking for ways to increase efficiencies and improve patient outcomes, and AI offers many opportunities to do such as streamlining diagnoses and treatments and providing clinical decision support. By 2021, the AI market in healthcare is expected to reach $6 billion, up from just $600 million three years ago.

Apples ResearchKit, which uses iPhones to collect health information and then makes the data available for research, is showing promise after scientists published data on seizures, asthma attacks and heart disease using the tool. While Apple still faces challenges applying ResearchKits results to a broader population (most consumers of Apple products are younger, well-off and well-educated), the company seems determined to carve out a niche in healthcare and AI could help its efforts.

While on the surface, facial recognition and parsing text don't directly relate to healthcare but natural language processing capabilities and image recognition do fit within areas of need for healthcare such as in medical notes or imaging.

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Apple wants a piece of the artificial intelligence pie - Healthcare Dive

The General Services Administration is piloting a federal blockchain pilot initiative this summer.

Its part of anongoing effort from GSAs emerging citizen technology program to bring agencies togetherto discuss business cases and best practices for piloting and eventuallyadopting new artificial intelligence and advancingtechnologies.

Weve started talking with agencies [and] working with companies, [and] weve started just listening and going around and starting to identify those business cases and those needs that the distributed ledger systems that block chain provides and those technologies provide can impact government, Justin Herman, the lead for the emerging citizen technology program at GSAs Technology Transformation Service,said in an interview with Federal News Radio.

Agencies are beginning to explore blockchain, a shared digital ledger of sorts that can record financial transactions or essentially anything of value. But so far, agencies have only begun to explore it in pockets, and they havent been talking with each other about their discoveries, Herman said.

GSAs Federal Acquisition Service and the State Departments Office of Global Partnerships will hold a forum on the topic this summer. The goal, Herman said,is to begin discussing how and where it might be appropriate to engage with the blockchain industry.

Herman said GSA wants toclearly articulate its business cases to industry. He sees rapid development pilots as the way forward for agencies to start exploring blockchain and other emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence.

GSA is already working with about 30 agencies to explore how they can integrate their public data into artificial intelligence smart assistance devices such as Amazon Alexa,Microsoft Cortona, Google Assistant and IBM Watson.

Its part of GSAs no wrong door approach to digital government services, Herman said.

Whether you make a phone call to the government which millions of people do, tens of millions of people do whether you fill out a web form, whether you Tweet, whether you use a chat bot or Amazon Alexa or something thats installed directly in the system, there is no wrong way for a citizen to make a query and try to access their services, he said during a June 1 panel discussion at the IBM Government Analytics Forum in Washington.

Herman and GSA hope that members of the public willask their smart assistance devices the same questions they might typically call toask a customer service representative at the IRS or Social Security Administration, for example.

Eventually, agencies may be able to reach even more citizens with these technologies, Herman said.

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We knew that [there] were these consumer available products that were the tipping point of creating more self-service, efficient public services, he said. Theres also opportunities to make them more accessiblefor persons with disabilities. Theres the ability to open them up in new ways that put the interaction in the hands of the citizens and not so reliant on the bureaucracy to do it for them.

GSA is pushing these 30 agencies to use existing data to conduct short pilots on smart assistance technologies.

Herman said the short-term goal is to develop a governmentwide compliance framework, which agencies would be able to use to implement their own programs in the future.

These arent programs unto themselves, hesaid of the agency pilots. Its just a month or two to be able to test something out, put together some proofs of concept that willthen allow us to identify the privacy resources, the performance metrics [and] all those components that agencies need in order to responsibly adopt these emerging technologies.

And Herman sees an even bigger potential for artificial intelligence technology in the federal space.

There [are] already calls for us to then start piloting to revolutionize the federal workforce itself, from how we do business with customers, how we do business with citizens and how we work together, he said. This truly is a tipping point. Its beyond the tipping point.Its here.

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GSA exploring blockchain, artificial intelligence as new digital services pilots - FederalNewsRadio.com

Quartz

Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence Quartz Hayes says she didn't realize she had become the face of an artificial intelligence until about a year after the first version of Amelia launched in 2014. She knew something was different about the modeling job when she showed up to the photo shoot and ...

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Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence - Quartz

Startup of the week:

What it is: NewsBotAI, a Facebook Messenger bot built by two UC Berkeley students

What it does:Detects fake news

Why its cool:Made-up and misleading news reports with political agendas floodedsocial media during the recent presidential election,and continue to cause controversy months later some critics have gone so far as tosuggest fake news helped get President Donald Trump elected. Facebook recently rolled outnewfact-checkingmechanisms and ways to flag fake news on the site, but at least one study found those safeguards so far have been ineffective.

Thats where NewsBot comes in.The chat bot uses artificial intelligence to spot fake news, but it also can decipher political biases in legitimate news stories and outlets. To use it, you just send the chat bot a link to a news article and wait for its reply.

NewsBots creator,Ash Bhat, says he also wants his bot to help restorepeoples trust in the reputable news outlets that have been tarnished by the fake news controversy.

It seemed to work as intended when I tested it out. When I sent NewsBot a link to a Dc Gazette article titled Another person investigating the Clintons turns up dead, it warned me that site tends to publish fake news (a verdict it accompanied with a sad-face emoji). When I fed it a Breitbart story titled Hillary Clinton adds DNC to list of groups she blames for election defeat, it ranked the story as legitimate, but right-leaning. The bot ranked the validity of mercurynews.com as generally high. And when I fed it threestories Id written about Trumps travel ban, it ranked them as center, moderate with a slight left bias and left-leaning possibly because the last article included several strongly worded quotes from tech leaders opposed to the travel ban.

Where it stands: NewsBot launched in April and already has several thousand daily users. Bhat says the bot is 85 percent accurate, and is getting better every day.

Only in Silicon Valley:

With so many high-tech fitness trackers on the market, these days it seems like we barely have use for the traditional bathroom scale.

San Francisco-based ShapeScale hopes to change that. The company makes asmart scalethat uses 3-D scanning technology to calculate not just your weight, but your body fat percentage, body composition and the measurements of each body part. Step onto the scale and a robotic arm revolves around you, taking hundreds of pictures that are then stitched together to create a 3-D image of your body. The scale connects to an app where you can see the image, which also indicates where youve been gaining or losing fat, and where youve been adding muscle.

You can preorder the device at shapescale.com for $299.99, plus a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Run the numbers:

Ever sent a text message you wished you could take back? Youre not the only one. More than 70 percent of people have done the same thing, according to a recent study of 1,000 American mobile users sponsored by On Second Thought, an app that lets you edit or delete mistaken text messages after sending them. According to the study, 39 percent of respondents upset someone close to them with a bad text, and 16 percent were bullied or faced professional consequences as a result. And 58 percent knew immediately after pressing send that they had made a mistake.

Quotable:

Hillary Clinton spoke last week at tech blog Recodes Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. When asked whether Twitter has been good or bad for society, she said:

I think it has become victimized by deliberate efforts to shape the conversation, and push it towards conspiracies, lies, false information. And I think its the same problem that Facebook faces, that when you try to be all things to all people and you try to open up your platform so that people can come in, and you want to be influential because you expect people will actually tune you in and read and watch what you have, what do you do to try and contain the weaponization and manipulation of that information? I dont think we know yet.

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Early Stage: Artificial intelligence vs. fake news - The Mercury News

Its pretty clear that the next big battleground for public cloud providers will involve artificial intelligence. Just as companies like Amazon Web Services made it possible for ten-person startups to take advantage of world-class computing infrastructure, so too will the big cloud providers compete to provide artificial intelligence expertise to companies that cant afford to duplicate the advanced machine-learning research already underway.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon AI, is one of the key drivers of AI research for AWS. Cloud rivals like Google and Microsoft have signaled quite clearly that they will attempt to compete for the cloud workloads of the future by pushing the envelope of AI and machine-learning research and abstracting that effort for their cloud customers, and AWS must at least match those efforts to stay on top.

Sivasubramian will be talking about Amazons work in this area at our Cloud Tech Summit this Wednesday in Bellevue, and I recently caught up with him to get a preview of his talk.

In your own personal view, what is the single most exciting component of artificial intelligence research that will blossom over the next five years? Why?

We are entering a golden age of AI and machine learning. We believe AI will revolutionize almost all aspects of technology making it easier to do things that take considerable time and effort today like product fulfillment, logistics, personalization, language understanding, and computer vision, to big forward-looking ideas like self-driving cars.

If you see what is driving this revolution, it is not just the underlying deep learning algorithms that power these AI systems. In fact, some of the classic neural networks have been around for decades. At AWS, we believe the combination of these algorithms, access for cheap ways to store information, process and query data (to train these algorithms), and access to specialized compute infrastructure (e.g., GPU infrastructure, custom ASICs) that can run these algorithms efficiently have spurred the AI revolution.

We believe cloud has spurred a lot of researchers to innovate and experiment on new algorithms in deep learning and you will see more advances in reinforcement learning, auto tuning of models across a wide variety of domains.

What is the greatest obstacle to the widespread adoption of AI research in everyday products?

Today, building these machine learning models for products requires specialized skills with deep Ph.D. level expertise in machine learning. To a large extent, this is one of the primary blockers for broad AI adoption. However, this is changing. There is a broad awareness about the benefits AI can deliver and we have seen various companies making their technologies available in the form of cloud services and open source software to developers.

How do you feel about AI skeptics: not those who deny AI will ever make an impact, but those who believe it will have more of a negative impact on society than a positive impact?

History shows that new technology innovation benefits society and delivers a positive impact to society at large. We believe that AI technology can have a huge positive impact on the world, making jobs less physically demanding and freeing humans to focus on the things that make us unique.

What are the most important infrastructure components that are driving AI research today? What tools (hardware or software) are you lacking that you really wish you had?

AWS is investing in all layers of the stack from core deep learning frameworks (such as Apache MXNet, Caffe, Caffe2, TensorFlow), machine learning platforms, AI application services (such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition). We have heavily invested in optimizing these deep learning frameworks on our compute instance families like GPU and CPU driven instances by working with partners like NVIDIA and Intel.

We are entering the golden age of machine learning that we believe will transform various aspects of technology and products. So, the question is not what we are lacking? It is more which is the best platform for developers to build these AI models? This is where we believe AWS with its breadth of offerings in storage, database, analytics, and compute infrastructure coupled with AI offerings can nurture and accelerate AI research and enable more developers to build real-world AI applications.

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Amazon Web Services' Swami Sivasubramanian on the future of AI in the cloud - GeekWire

As they traveled across America last year, it seems Donald Trump's children saw not only potential voters, but also potential customers.

After years of spinning out hotels laden with gold leaf and marble, Trump Hotels is launching a hospitality brand positioned for a different kind of clientele. At Trump Tower tonight, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., along with Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger, announced the launch of a mid-market hotel chain called American Idea. The new franchisea big departure from the flagship, luxury Trump Hotels and the company's planned upmarket second brand, Scionwill launch with three locations in the Mississippi Delta area. The three-star rooms will range from $80 to $120 a night.

"I'm sure it's going to haunt me, but we kind of look at [the new brand] as flea market chic," said Danziger during the announcement event. "It means that in any given city, there's history," he said, explaining that the decor of each hotel will reflect the heritage and ephemera of its local community.

The younger Trumps said they got the idea to launch the new hotel brand as they traveled the country with their father during the campaign. "There's a market here that we've been missing our entire lives," said Donald Trump Jr. during the announcement event.

By creating a hotel brand for third- and even fourth-tier American cities, Trump Hotels appears to be attempting to avoid headwinds facing the company's other brands. For example, Trump Hotels' international expansion has been curtailed by conflict of interest concerns. "When the president became the president, we said we're not going to do anything internationally. So that kind of forced me into [saying] we're going to be a domestic brand," said Danziger in an interview with Fast Company.

President Trump and his family have been accused on various occasions of viewing their move into politics as a business and branding opportunity. Certainly the theme of the new franchise falls in line with the U.S.A.-first attitude of Trump's campaign, which championed the American yesteryear. During the election, Mississippi swung for Trump.

[Photo: Ruth Reader 2017] AM

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Apple is going large on artificial intelligence at WWDC today - Fast Company

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Artificial intelligence is drawing major investments this year with many Indian start-ups and tech giants betting big on this technology to break into the market.

Tech companies are looking forward to new opportunities in AI to transform their daily operations. With the ongoing global competition in AI and companies racing for it, theres much hype around this technology. This year the tech industry has witnessed significant push for AI with investments in this technology related start-ups and companies reaching to new heights.

Lets take a look at the investment trends in this domain in 2017 and the major investments made.

Niki.ai

An Economic Times report stated that Ratan Tata-backed, AI-based conversational chatbot Niki.ai has raised funding this year from a German multinational software corporation SAP.

The Bengaluru-based start-up was founded in May 2015 by 4 IIT Kharagpur graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi and Nitin Babel. The company also raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Unilazer Ventures, a Mumbai-based VC firm founded by Ronnie Screwvala, in October 2015. This was followed by another seed funding round by Ratan Tata in May 2016.

Absentia Virtual Reality Private Limited

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence and virtual reality start-up Absentia raised $1.2 million (INR 8 crore) funding in Pre-series A Funding round this year.

The funding was raised from venture capital firm Exfinity Venture Partners, whose founding parts are T.V Mohandas Pai, Deepak Ghaisas, Girish Paranjpe and V. Balakrishnan.

The start-up is developing an AI engine Norah AI that allows developers to stretch the boundaries of human imagination, creativity and expression through strategic inbuilt tools on the layers of deep learning and procedural interactive content design.

QorQL

Digital Payment player Paytm has invested an undisclosed amount in Noida-based online health tech start-up QorQL, which uses artificial intelligence and big data to improve a doctors productivity, care quality, and patient experience.

QorQL was launched in 2015 by Sanjay Singh and Dr. Shalini Singh.The start-up basically offers two solutions Qcare and Qhealth. Qcare involves a service where doctors can access patient health data and manage clinics with the help of a few clicks of the mouse. Qhealth, on the other hand, tracks health data, vitals and schedules.

Innefu Labs

Delhi-based AI start-up Innefu Labs raised $ 2 million Series A funding from IndiaNivesh venture capital fund. Innefu, founded in 2011 by Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma, is a research oriented information- security consulting group that specializes in meeting the information security needs of the consumer via specialized products and services.

It serves diverse industry verticals and the prominent among them are Law Enforcement, BFSI, BPOs/KPOs, E-commerce, IT/ITES, Education, Telecom etc. The start-up will primarily use funds to enhance its AI platform for predictive intelligence and facial biometrics.The start-up will utilize funds to enhance its cyber security solutions related topredictive intelligence and biometric authentication.

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How Artificial Intelligence Has Become the Hottest Investment Destination - Entrepreneur

An artificial intelligence company that uses computers, not lawyers, to sift through thousands of legal documents in search of key information is moving part of its operations to Toronto.

ROSS Intelligence co-founder Andrew Arruda calls opening a research and development centre here a "no brainer."

Arruda, one of the University of Toronto graduates who founded the company, was back on campus Monday to announce the news, calling the city "the hub of artificial intelligence development."

While the company's headquarters remain in San Francisco, "Toronto is where we always knew we had to be," Arruda told a crowd who gathered on campus for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

ROSS co-founder Andrew Arruda recounted starting the project in an unheated basement on the U of T campus. Now, the company is based in San Francisco. (CBC)

Last month, the university launched its new Vector Institute, which is aiming to bring the A.I. field's top minds to Toronto, and keep them there. Meanwhile, Mayor John Tory, on hand for the event, said he's hoping to lure more tech companies here.

"We want to be home to disruptive technologies," he said.

Tory also joked that he wished the A.I. researcher existed when he was working as a lawyer.

Arruda never met the mayor while his team was working on the project in an unheated basement of a "student housing house," but their paths crossed recently when Tory was doing a trade mission in Silicon Valley, where ROSS Intelligence had moved to be part of the well-known Y Combinator program for start-up businesses.

Tory said he believes the company made the move to take advantage of the city's "massive" talent pool.

"I've had companies tell me there is no other place on Earth they can find smart, educated people from a diverse a series of backgrounds that help them do their business internationally ... and I think that's the main factor," he said.

While both Tory and Arruda spoke at length about diversity, both down played concerns about tightening immigration rules in the U.S.

"It's always a factor," Arruda said following the announcement, but more so it's about "returning to the forefront of A.I. research and that's happening right here."

Tory said the city's legal department could use A.I. in the future, however Arruda said that will have to wait as the technology hasn't learned Canadian law yet.

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Toronto welcoming artificial intelligence company back from Silicon Valley - CBC.ca