Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Forbes

Elon Musk And Artificial Intelligence Share A Tumultuous Relationship Forbes He may be daring enough to propose colonizing a barren planet with potentially little or no water, but ask him about the future of artificial intelligence, and Elon Musk may just end up losing his cool. In a startling contradiction to Silicon Valley ... and more »

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Elon Musk And Artificial Intelligence Share A Tumultuous Relationship - Forbes

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are dramatically reshaping nearly every sector of the economy and every job. A recent report from digital thought leader McKinsey & Co. indicates that as many as 45 percent of activities performed for pay could be automated right now with current technologies.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the accounting profession where even in smaller firms, software and subscription services can now automatically collect and organize data on everything from payroll and inventory to audits and contract language, and, according to Xero, even perform analysis once the sole province of human intervention on tedious tasks like bank reconciliation.

But while the rise of the machines may invoke fear in some reactionaries, more visionary accounting professionals are asking themselves how human advisors can sustain their relevance and value among emerging supercomputers and automated applications.

How can they win, they wonder, in this new AI landscape?

As the accounting profession moves into the AI age, Roman Yampolskiy, PhD, a professor of computer engineering and computer science at the University of Louisville and a leading researcher on AI, emphasizes the importance of not fully relying on todays software because of the one thing that AI currently lacks: common sense.

Certain functions should not be passed on from our hands to machines, which, I remind you, have no common sense, Yampolskiy said.

Maureen Schwartz, executive director of global public accounting association BKR International, concurs: Even in the age of supercomputers, data will always remain most valuable when interpreted through the common sense of knowledgeable advisors.

Here, according to BKR International, are three ways firms can employ common sense as they explore the potential for automation and AI in the accounting industry:

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How Your Firm Can Win with Artificial Intelligence - Accountingweb.com

MANILA - Automation will impact business process outsourcing (BPO) companies by eliminating low level work, but it will also enhance the effectiveness of the human work force, according to a Filipino businessman and innovator in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

"It really depends on the maturity of the company. If you do mostly transactional work, or repetitive work, then yes you're in danger," said Gian dela Rama, chief executive officer of Innovantage.

"AI moves at a blistering pace. Next year you may actually see solutions that replace a call center agent in voice," Dela Rama told ANC's Early Edition.

"You'll have the Alexas of the world, connected to a CRM (customer relations management), and the voice at the other end might be a bot," he added referring to Amazon's intelligent personal assistant.

Dela Rama however insisted that not all was bad with regards to AI's impact on employment. He said that BPOs that deal with higher level work can actually benefit from AI as it enhances the abilities of their existing workforce.

"It's about providing people, humans with superpowers," he said.

Dela Rama said AI solutions like 'assistive intelligence' can free BPO workers from repetitive tasks and allow them to concentrate on work that really matters.

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Artificial Intelligence to give humans 'superpowers' says AI innovator - ABS-CBN News

It is hardly surprising that Artificial Intelligence was a major focus of Microsofts Build 2017 conference. In fact, given the rapid advancements in all areas of AI technology and the raging debates about if or rather, when robots will take over our jobs, it would be surprising if one of the worlds biggest technology companies werent thinking about these problems in a big way.

When Harry Shum Executive Vice President of Microsofts AI and Research group took to the main stage on Monday, he talked about how soon it will be almost impossible to imagine a technology that doesnt tap into the power of AI in one way or another. What made this possible, he continued, was the convergence of three forces increased cloud computing power, algorithms running off deep neural networks, and access to massive datasets. This means that AI does indeed have the potential to disturb every single industry and process out there.

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But while the disruption does seem inevitable, companies like Microsoft are betting they can make it a positive one, talking about the possibilities it brings to amplify human ingenuity, augmenting peoples capabilities and helping them to be more productive.

Im really glad were having all these conversations about the disruptive power of AI, and its a good thing that were being so thoughtful about the ways in which were designing these systems, because its crucial that they are designed for people, to help them do their jobs better, says Lili Cheng distinguished engineer, general manager FUSE labs.

Microsoft has been creating building blocks for the current wave of AI breakthroughs for more than two decades, and now it wants to leverage that accumulated research with the massive amounts of data available to them through the Microsoft Graph portfolio of products and Azures computing power, moving towards its vision of the Intelligent Cloud.

One of the things weve done with our bot framework and the cognitive services is that we componentized things so that they can be reused into other context. For Cognitive Services there are 29 and you can choose whichever one(s) you choose, explains Cheng.

So by adding a few lines of code, developers can mix, match and customize AI functionalities to suit their needs, spanning functions such as translation, video deconstruction and search, gesture recognition and real-time captioning.

Broadly speaking, therefore, Cognitive Services are plugin functionalities that developers can use to enable systems within their apps to hear, speak, understand and interpret human needs. For example, LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) helps developers to integrate language models to understand users using either prebuilt or customized models. While the Custom Vision Service makes it easy to create your own image recognition service.

The overarching idea is to move towards what the company calls conversational AI, (where instead of humans having to learn about computers, computers will be able to understand humans) and thus enable more fluid and natural interactions between humans and machines.

Clearly when one thinks of conversational AI this includes Cortana Microsofts personal intelligent assistant which is already used by 145 million people across the world, and the company is certainly focusing heavily on making it easier for developers to reach this growing audience by working in partnership with companies like HP, Intel and Harman on IoT devices such as Invoke intelligent speaker.

However, this is an extension of the Cognitive Services offering the company launched back in 2015, which has since attracted over 568,000 developers from more than 60 countries to sign up. Microsoft now wants to redefine itself with AI by infusing it into every product and service it offers, from Xbox to Windows, from Bing to Office.

An example of this was the demo showcased during the keynote which showed how Microsofts translation APIs could provide real-time translation in multiple languages during any PowerPoint presentation. It not only embeds live transcriptions of the presenter into a specific language, but also generates an unique link which lets attendees get further live translations into their own preferred languages all in real time. Other such functionalities include Project Prague an early stage SDK that matches captured user movement against an extensive library of hand poses, allowing the developer to tie app actions to gestures and create a more intuitive user experience through gesture interaction.

The ease with which developers can incorporate these elements into their apps, together with this growing emphasis on natural interaction, means that AI has the potential to become a much more creative tool across the board, not something that can only be leverage and understood by Data Scientists. This democratization of AI is in fact a cornerstone of Microsofts vision, and something Cheng is very keen to enable:

You need to make people laugh, and you need creativity and you need all this stuff because thats what being human is about. This better be a creator platform for writers and other non-technical people. AI cant be just for people with PhDs we want people who are writers, artists or builders to be able to use those tools to get their jobs done better. Were super committed to that. Theres a lot more to AI than writing code, and I think that has to be our goal, to make people want to make the things they live in all day, she concludes.

Read next: How Oculus' "groundbreaking" new VR display avoids causing nausea, headaches and fatigue

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How Microsoft wants us all to get creative with Artificial Intelligence - TNW

Artificial intelligence brings risks along with rewards Columbus Business First Although it may be some time before we commute to work in flying cars or teleport to our company's lunar outpost, a concept once thought to be outside the realm of possibility is now on the verge of transforming the modern workplace working side-by ... and more »

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Artificial intelligence brings risks along with rewards - Columbus Business First

Artificial intelligence is all around us, whether it's to recommend movies you might like or weed out unsavory videos. Smaller companies such as Conversica are joining the likes of Google and Facebook in pursuing AI.

Conversica sells digital assistants to businesses ranging from car dealerships to real estate companies. They work just as an entry-level sales or marketing person would; customers usually don't know they're interacting with software, or a bot, when responding to a sales pitch or seeking help.

Conversica CEO Alex Terry spoke recently with The Associated Press about the future of AI and its impact on jobs. Questions and responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How long did it take to get to a point where people couldn't tell they are conversing with a bot?

A: We have been doing this for seven years, and it's a function not only of time but also the amount of training data. At this point we've had over 215 million messages go through our AI platform, and those messages help us train the system to respond like a person.

Q: How does natural language processing work?

A: Software reads messages that are coming in and understands what the person is saying. Then we figure out what we should do for that particular customer. If you think about Siri or Alexa, those are examples where the computer is listening to a spoken sentence or paragraph and figures out what someone means. Like if I say "what's the weather out today?" you have to understand what's the weather and then some kind of location.

Q: What happens to the people who would have handled these responses?

A: Typically we see our customers hire more people, not less. It's about a 6 to 1 ratio of customers that hire more staff vs. those who use the efficiencies from AI to reduce the size of their team.

Q: What are the biggest challenges right now?

A: On the technical side, it's making sure these experiences are really seamless and genuinely helpful. Our systems are getting smarter all the time. But that isn't our biggest challenge. Our biggest challenge is getting the word out there. People tend to be hesitant to try something that sounds almost like science fiction.

Q: Do you think stuff like Siri and Alexa are helping with this?

A: I think it really is helping. For example, Facebook trying to find fake news, that's a great example of using really powerful technology, pattern matching. I think people using Alexa or Siri or even recognizing that Netflix is using pattern matching to recommend a new movie you might like, it actually makes your life easier and better. People are becoming less fearful of the technology as they see actual benefits in their day-to-day lives.

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Conversica CEO discusses future of artificial intelligence - ABC News

Apple has acquired a data mining and machine learning company Lattice.io, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Apple confirmed the acquisition exclusively to Fortune via telephone on Saturday, and provided the following statement via email: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

There isn't much information publicly available about Lattice, but according to the company's CrunchBase profile, the startup was born out a Stanford research project called DeepDive. The company's technology appears to use machine learning to parse through databases or the web to answer queries.

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Lattice was co-founded by Chris Re, a professor of computer science at Stanford, and Michael Cafarella, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. Cafarella was the co-creator of Hadoop, a widely used big data processing technology. Cafarella was also previously an engineer at telecommunications company TellMe Networks, which was bought by Microsoft in 2007 for $800 million.

According to this 2015 profile on Re, the professor's Deep Dive program is able to understand "dark data," which provides information within images or illustrations.

The company's technology is also similar to Google's Knowledge Graph ( goog ) , which is the search giant's technology that understands relationships between people, places, and things, and it provide answers to questions like "What's the capital of California?"

One source familiar with the matter said the acquisition price was between $175 million and $200 million. Lattice had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Madrona Venture Group and GV, the venture arm of Google-parent Alphabet.

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Apple Just Acquired This Little-Known Artificial Intelligence Startup - Fortune

China's first national laboratory for brain-like artificial intelligence (AI) technology was inaugurated Saturday to pool the country's top research talent and boost the technology. Chinas rapid rise up the ranks of AI research has the world's scientific community taking notice. In October, the Obama White House released a strategic plan for AI research, which noted that the U.S. no longer leads the world in journal articles on deep learning, a particularly hot subset of AI research right now. The country that had overtaken the U.S.? China, of course.

China has a fairly deep awareness of whats happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true, says Ng. He points out that Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation and achieved speech recognition accuracy that surpassed humansbut when Google and Microsoft, respectively, did so, the American companies got a lot more publicity. The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley, says Ng

Approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in January, the lab, based in China University of Science and Technology (USTC), aims to develop a brain-like computing paradigm and applications. The university, known for its leading role in developing quantum communication technology, hosts the national lab in collaboration with a number of the country's top research bodies such as Fudan University, Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as Baidu, operator of China's biggest online search engine.

Wan Lijun, president of USTC and chairman of the national lab, said the ability to mimic the human brain's ability in sorting out information will help build a complete AI technology development paradigm. The lab will carry out research to guide machine learning such as recognizing messages and using visual neural networks to solve problems. It will also focus on developing new applications with technological achievements.

The Daily Galaxy via Global Times and The Atlantic

Image credit: With thanks to AEM.org

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China Creates National Lab to Lead World in Brain-Like Artificial Intelligence - The Daily Galaxy (blog)

Microsoft is working to democratise artificial intelligence. The tech giants plan is to expand the use of AI from smartphone games to factory floors. This is a revolutionary step towards the advancement of artificial intelligence. The term AI is applied when a machine mimics cognitive functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as learning and problem solving. The overall research goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner. In the course of 50 years of research, artificial intelligence has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. AI can now help in search and optimisation, logical reasoning, probabilistic methods for reasoning, neural networks, control theory and many others. In modern age of science and technology, AI is getting a grip in peoples homes: controlling connected devices such as appliances or light bulbs. Digital assistants already boast features such as reminding people of appointments entered into calendars and sounding in with advice to set out early if the traffic is heavy.

Microsoft has been creating the building blocks for the current wave of AI breakthroughs. Their research has gone deep into areas such as machine learning, speech recognition, and enabling machines to recognise what they see. They are trying to use AI for businesses to solve business problems and for app developers to make applications better. The Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) is an apex government body mandated to promote Pakistans IT Industry in local and international markets. The IT industry is the countrys fastest growing export sector. If the country focuses on the new developments in technology, it can flourish more. In view of the abovementioned advancement in the IT industry across the world, the concerned authorities are requested to undertake research and study to create new ways for the growth in the field of artificial intelligence.

Engr Mansoor Ahmed

Faisalabad

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Artificial intelligence - The News International

As the use of artificial intelligence among various industries becomes ubiquitous, some companies have ramped up their hiring since the software has automated tedious processes and eliminated human errors.

While the fears that artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs is not unfounded, some industries have discovered that the software has enabled their current employees to be more productive and successful since they no longer have to focus on mundane tasks. The use of artificial intelligence has been present for many years in online chat boxes thatanswer customer service questions and self-driving cars as the technology mimics and learns human behavior.

The fearthat artificial intelligence will replace a large percentage of jobs is rational, but at the same time, there is a growing acceptance that it has "done a lot of good," said Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica, a Foster City, Calif.-based artificial intelligence-based software company thatengages potential customers in natural, two-way human conversations and is used by sales representatives.

"These services such as Netflix, Pandora and Amazon recommending songs and movies are pretty convenient and already embedded in our daily lives," he said.

As artificial intelligence matures through its various disciplines such as machine learning, image and text classification, natural language processing or speech recognition, the technology is designed to conduct very routine and specific tasks and able to replace some jobs held by humans. While artificial intelligence could replace customer service jobs in some industries; in others it would allow account executives to spend more time on customers' problems instead of on routine and often boring activities, said Terry.

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Why Artificial Intelligence Is Creating a New Category of Jobs - TheStreet.com