Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Forbes

Why Commerce Players Must Invest In Artificial Intelligence Today Forbes There is no way to spell retail without AI. The power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the consumer journey dominated the conversation at Shoptalk this week. In its second year, Shoptalk brought together 5,000-plus players across the full ...

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Why Commerce Players Must Invest In Artificial Intelligence Today - Forbes

Uber has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. Among its many sins, he company's canterkours CEO Travis Kalanick recently argued with a driver over fares.

If you think that Kalanick doesn't really value the company's "driver-partners", you are correct. Uber may be exceptional in its CEOs acerbic temperament, but at least it has plenty of company in another regard: Uber is among many firms working on removing drivers from the equation altogether. Make no mistake: driverless cars are coming.

To this end, I recently sat down withVivek Wadhwa, author ofThe Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future. (Wadhwa worked withformer BusinessWeek technology editor Alex Salkever.) The following are excerpts from our conversation.

PS: What was your motivation for writing the book?

VW: Advancing technologies such as artificial intelligence, robots, sensors, and synthetic biology have made amazing things possible. It has literally become possible to solve the grand challenges of humanityproblems such as disease, hunger, energy, and education. We could, within two or three decades, be in an era of abundance, in which we live long and healthy lives, have unlimited clean energy and education, and have our most basic wants and needs met. At the same time, these technologies are making is possible to create new nightmares: killer viruses, safety and security hazards, and a jobless future. And they are widening the gap between the haves and have nots. The people who are being left out are getting angry and resentful. We are seeing this anger manifest itself in many waysincluding the elections.

I wrote the book to start educating parents, teachers, students, policy makers, and thinkers about the choices we must make to ensure that we head into a utopian future rather than continue on the path of dystopia that we have taken. I honestly see the possibility of creating a Star Trek future300 years ahead of schedule. I also see the possibilities of Mad Max. And I am convinced that we can get this rightif we all learn the possibilities and make sensible choices.

PS: Why have companies made so much progress with driverless and semi-autonomous cars so recently?

VW: Artificial Intelligence, which we had written off as dead is alive and kicking. It is now advancing on an exponential curve. Advances in a new form of AI called machine learning, are allowing the software to program itself. The computer is taught what to learn and how to learn and makes its own decisions. These are modeling the human mind itself using techniques similar to our learning processes. Before, it could take millions of lines of computer code to perform tasks such image recognitionwhich is needed for self driving cars. Now it can be done in hundreds of lines. All that is required is a large number of examples so that the computer can teach itself.

PS: Ive read reports about how traffic in cities may drop considerably. New apartments may replace parking structures. Are there any other potential benefits beyond being able to work in your car while it drives you to work?

VW: We will be far more productive, distance will no longer be a barrierso we can live 150 miles away and still get to work in time, and accidents will largely be a thing of the past. Also the disabled will no longer struggle to find transportation, mothers will be able to send their children to school without worrying about them reaching safely, and everyone will be able to afford to be mobilebecause of the reliability, safety, and lower costs of these technologies. Also, women and children will never worry about getting a cab ride late at night. Driving While Black will no longer be a vicious form of discrimination.

PS: Weve seen taxicab companies violently resist Uber and Lyft. Truckers cant be happy either. Is disruption here inevitable? Why wouldnt they take to Washington?

VW: This is just the beginning. As industries get disrupted, we will have large scale social disorder. People will feel disenfranchised and lose the sense of identity that comes from work. We just arent ready for the changes that are about to happen. I have discussed the core technologies in Driver in the Driverless Car, but am now working on my next book about how we can deal with the jobless future that is inevitable. How will we manage the transition, what sort of policies do we need to develop, and what will the new social order look likethese are some of the things I am now researching.

PS: Is Ubers CEO intent on self-immolation?

VW: Travis Kalanick represents everything that is bad about the technology industry: the greed, sexism, arrogance, and lack of ethics and values. This is why I teach: to show my engineering students the good they can do with technology and to inspire them to use it to uplift humanity rather than destroy it by becoming like Kalanick and others who lack a sense of social purpose.

This is how I conclude my book. It summarizes in a different way, the questions you are asking:

I showed you a broad range of technologies and asked you to view them through a lens or filter to assess their value to society and mankind. I asked you to consider whether they had the potential to benefit everyone equally, what the risks and the rewards were, and whether the technology more strongly promote autonomy or dependence. It is fairness and equality that are at the heart of these questions. Industry disruption is going to happen; tens of millions of jobs are going to disappear; our lives will change for the better and for the worse. If we manage it equitably and ease the transition and pain for the people who are most affected and least prepared, we can get to Star Trek: we can be living in an era in which every one of us has food, shelter, education, and light, and is connected to all. We will have better lives if we can adapt quickly enoughpsychologically, socially, ethically, and legallyand adjust to a world that changes literally before our eyes, every day, every minute.

At the end of the day, I believe that you will figure this out and we, as a collective race, will figure this out. Despite my fears, I know that humanity will rise to the occasion and uplift itself because it always has. We wouldnt have gotten this far if we did not have it in us to rise to great occasions.

Of the Star Trek future, Captain Picard once said: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity. That is the future that we must build together.

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Artificial Intelligence and Driverless Cars: An Interview with Vivek Wadhwa - Huffington Post

In a changing competitive landscape where skilled nursing facilities, home health, assisted living and long-term care organizations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves, drive better care, and reduce the number of adverse events within their patient populations, healthcare analytics has a big role to play. But one expert said that analytics is only one piece of a much larger puzzle that is required to get the post-acute care field in order.

Analytics is an old-fashioned term for what folks are doing today, said Terry Sullivan, MD, chief medical information officer at Onpointe, a post-acute care provider organization. There is analytics, there is artificial intelligence, there is Big Data, and there is machine learning. They all come together in cognitive machines and cognitive clinical capabilities. Its the summation of those four things.

Sullivan said that if a post-acute care provider organization does not have analytics, is not measuring something, and is not using an electronic health record, it should close the door and leave town.

The world is moving faster than that, he said. In using analytics and artificial intelligence and these other pieces, they are demonstrating where they are at, which is crucial for them to be 21st century players in a competitive marketplace.

Learn more at theBig Data & Healthcare Analytics Forumin San Franciso, May 15-16, 2017. Register here.

These technologies analytics, AI, Big Data and machine learning enable providers to optimize the patient journey so they and their partners are capable of taking on financial risk, Sullivan explained.

At the end of the day, if you are not capable of taking risk and performing in an optimum way, then you are not going to be very competitive, he said. The technology is part of it. One part is you align with the right financial partners, so you are in either a risk situation, a bundle situation, you are aligned with somebody so you are not in a fee-for-service model. Then you have to have an operational model that connects to the people above you who are referring to you and below you who you are referring to. And you have to have an IT capability that allows you to optimize the patient journey.

Healthcare organizations require all of those things to perform, because without high-quality information an organization cannot really participate in the continuum of care and will not be competitive, Sullivan added.

At a minimum the information would involve an EHR that has connections to the referring group above you and to the group below you who you are referring to, he said.

One of the four components of Sullivans technology requirements, artificial intelligence, can help post-acute care organizations drive market differentiation and care quality, he said.

Today, patient care is driven by usual and customary practice; things like length of stay, place of stay, are driven by historical practice on average, people stay a certain amount of time at a certain location, he explained. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, then onto cognitive machines, you for the first time are becoming truly patient-centered not facility-centered. In the old days, I keep patients two or three weeks. In the new paradigm, I keep the patient there only until they can safely move to the next level of care because cognitive machines allow me to know more information about the patient that allows me to make that decision when they can safely move to the lower level and less expensive level of care.

Sullivan will discuss his experience using these technologies at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum, May 15-16, 2017, in San Francisco, during a session entitled Post-Acute Care: When Productions Move Outside the Hospital.

Twitter:@SiwickiHealthIT Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com

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CMIO says analytics, artificial intelligence, Big Data and machine learning are becoming IT requirements - Healthcare IT News

Strategy matters in war. But behind every good strategy is good data. Take Korean War veteran and US Air Force officer John Boyd as an example.

He was tasked with analysing the outcome of dogfights aerial battles between fighter planes conducted at close range and come up with a way to save the lives of more American pilots. He did.

What Boyd created was a framework for decision-making that is known as the OODA loop. OODA refers to the recurring cycle of four actions: observe, orient, decide and act. He discovered that the pilots who came out of dogfights most successfully were those who had processed the loop as quickly and as often as possible.

Their experience of reacting to lots of different situations meant they could best adapt their battle strategies to unfolding events.

The theory of the OODA loop is central to the activities of Sentient, which is the worlds most funded artificial intelligence (AI) company

What Boyd was telling us was that surviving, learning and adapting were key to winning, says Antoine Blondeau, the co-founder and co-chairman of Sentient Technologies. Since then, that framework has been pervasive within the US armed forces. If you train, train and train, you go through that loop as often as possible.

The theory of the OODA loop is central to the activities of Sentient, which is the worlds most funded artificial intelligence (AI) company and the inventor of the technology behind Siri, Apples intelligent personal assistant.

When it builds a decision-making system, it aims to embed AI at every stage of the OODA loop. It does this by using deep-learning neural networks that have algorithms inspired by the function and structure of the human brain.

And as far as decision-making mechanisms go, there is no better example than the human brain. We humans are a winning design, Mr Blondeau points out. We are a species that has adapted very, very well to our environment to the point of domination.

In the space of a few milliseconds, artificial intelligence is in effect emulating an evolutionary process that took place over millions of years. But applying that approach at scale requires going through the OODA loop as often as possible, which in turn requires a huge amount of computing power.

The next stage of AIs evolution is the involvement of AI systems in the development of other AI systems

This explains why Sentients neural networks rely on the rapid mathematical calculations of 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). Most personal computers do not need more than one GPU.

Sentient is focused on developing commercial AI technology for three particular sectors: e-commerce, financial markets trading and insurance. Theres a lot of interest in implementing AI within the world of insurance, says Mr Blondeau, not only for risk prediction and developing better models of risk, but also for universal intelligence problems understanding the what and the how that make customers buy.

Last year Sentient launched Ascend, its own universal intelligence product. Ascend is essentially a self-evolving website that retailers can use to give their customers a personalised shopping experience. It tests different images, messaging and button placements to come up with the best combination for a particular shopper.

The result of this degree of personalisation is a striking uplift in sales, according to Mr Blondeau, who cites the example of a US mobile phone reseller that has already rolled out the technology. You can get a 40pc increase in lead generation and a 30pc increase in conversions within a few weeks. Thats the power of evolution within this loop, where the system is learning every minute.

The next stage of AIs evolution is the involvement of AI systems in the development of other AI systems. Needless to say, Sentient is already working on this technology, which Mr Blondeau predicts will help to dramatically reduce the cost of developing smart systems in future.

Yet he does note that there needs to be an ethical debate around regulating for augmenting but not replacing humans.

You can quickly evolve to intelligent systems that are addressing complex problems quickly and efficiently, with a feedback loop that operates not just at the application level but at the network structure level as well, says Mr Blondeau. We call that neuro evolution. Its effectively a marriage of deep learners and evolution.

While the decision-making ability of AI has the potential to be of huge benefit to humans, relieving us of the burden of having to make certain decisions ourselves, Mr Blondeau believes that aspect of the technology is widely misunderstood.

People think of AI as big data, he says. Then they think of it as insights and predictions. At Sentient, we tend to think of it as making decisions. Whatever data and insight humans gain every day is in order to make decisions. So true AI has to be able to make decisions not just look at data or predict trends. It has to be part of the decision-making process. Ideally AI is a decision-maker.

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Artificial intelligence: the role of evolution in decision-making - Telegraph.co.uk

How Artificial Intelligence Helped to Create a Gaud-Inspired Thinking Sculpture

IBM and New-York-based design studio SOFTlab have teamed up to create the first thinking sculpture, inspired by Gaud and developed with IBMs Watsoncognitive technology for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

In order to help design the sculpture, Watson was taught about the history and style of Gaud and the architecture of Barcelona through volumes of images, literary works, articles, and even music. From these references, Watson helped to uncover critical insights on patterns in Gaud's worklike crabs, spiders, and color palettesthat the design team didn't initially associate with Gaud. The resulting four-meter-tall sculpture features a structural surface made of over 1200 unique aluminum parts, and is unmistakably reminiscent of Gauds work both in look and feel, yet entirely distinct.

The sculpture was on display from February 27 to March 2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where it interacted with visitors by changing shape in real-time, in response to sentiments from Twitter. To learn more about the sculpture, ArchDaily was given to opportunity to speak with IBM Watson Manager Jonas Nwuke.

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Sabrina Santos: Why was Gaudis work in particular chosen to inspire the project?

Jonas Nwuke: Architects at SOFTlab knew Mobile World Congress 2017 would be hosted in Barcelona, which sparked them to create something they had never done before. The SOFTlab team worked with Watson through the inspiration of legendary Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi to create a sculpture alive with data. Antoni Gaudi was an iconic architect that shaped the city of Barcelona with his avant-garde architecture that was light years ahead of its time. In turn, the city of Barcelona heavily shaped the work he created. SOFTlab wanted to work with Watson to bring this approach from the past to the present.

SS: Approximately what percentage of the project decisions were made by Watson, as opposed to IBM and SOFTlab designers?

JN: Watson acted as a guide throughout the design process, uncovering insights from Gaudis work to inspire the architects, rather than making decisions on its own. Watsons ability to process volumes of information from images and documents sparked new ideas and helped the architects to reimagine their construction. Our vision for Watson has always been to use cognitive computing to augment, rather than replace, human intelligence.

SS: Besides the crab and spider references, were there any other particularly interesting ideas or connections that Watson created?

JN: Watsons analysis of thousands of Gaudi-inspired works helped the team pick unique, transformative colorsultramarine blue, jade green, yellow and orangewhich in turn helped SOFTlab select the iridescent dichroic film that brings the sculpture to life. Gaudis work brings about clear themes like waves, undulations and arches. With Watson, the designers were able to see themes that werent as obvious previously, such as candy and shells, in addition to crabs and spiders. These elements helped inspire the hanging chains and funnels of the sculptures design.

SS: How long did it take for Watson to review the images, documents, colors, and so forth?

JN: The entire project took a little over one month to complete.

SS: Were any of these tools (images, documents, colors, etc.) more influential than others, or do the various mediums integrate evenly as inspiration?

JN: Watson reviewed thousands of images, literary works, articles and even music surrounding Gaudi and Barcelona. With this, Watson was able to integrate these mediums evenly to become a Gaudi expert that could help the team understand a century of inspiration to re-inspire the design process.

SS: Who is creating the sculpture this week in Barcelona? How long will this take?

JN: Over a dozen SOFTlab designers worked over one week to install the sculpture at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

SS:What are the measurements and materials of the sculpture?

The height on the sculpture is 4 meters. The structural surface is made of over 1200 unique aluminum parts. This surface was clad in 3M Dichroic film which has an iridescent quality and was chosen based on suggestions from Watson and inspired by Gaudi's interest in similar colors. This material in combination with data controlled lighting produces a range of coloration and cast light. The Dichroic film was then clad in petal like laser cut aluminum panels that are inspired by some of the tiled forms used by Gaudi. The gravity driven cables underneath are made of 100 meters of ball chain.

SS: How will Tweet tones influence the height of the sculpture (for example, do positive Tweets make the sculpture extend lower?)?

JN: The sculpture is responsive to social sentiment and uses the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer API to identify and react to sentiment from Twitter. The tone and sentiment extracted from the tweets will be reflected in the sculpture, which is comprised of 3 funnels representing distinct topics. Each funnel is comprised of rings that will shift in height based on a given 'big 5' personality trait. One funnel contains one ring that addresses how open people are to Artificial Intelligence at Mobile World Congress. The Openness score for each tweet related to AI will drive the ring height. As the confidence Watson determines in peoples openness changes, the height of the ring changes as well. The second funnel contains three rings that react to Watsons confidence level in how open people are to the top 3 trending topics of the moment. The third funnel has 5 rings addresses the collective buzz of the event. Each ring represents a 'big 5' personality trait (Passion, Joy, Excitement, Curiosity & Encouragement) and confidence scores will drive ring height.

SS: How do you envision Artificial Intelligencelike Watsonbeing influential to the architectural world in the future?

JN: We envision Watson will serve as an assistant to other architects, acting as an extension of the creative process in the future. Cognitive technologies have the ability to uncover facts and answer questions, and can be applied to invent and explore new frontiers, such as architecture. For example, beyond architecture, Watson is helping professionals in many creative industries. At the 2016 Met Gala, IBM and Marchesa unveiled a cognitive dress worn by model Karolina Kurkova that served as an innovative collaboration with cognitive woven into every step of the creative process from concept, to R&D, from design and alteration to the finished product. In music, Grammy award-winning music producer Alex Da Kid collaborated with IBM Watson to inspire his breakout song as an artist, Not Easy. For this partnership, Watson analyzed the last five years of culture and music data to uncover new emotional insights to augment Alexs creative process. We believe Watson will continue to serve as a resource for creative professionals looking for inspiration.

Learn more about the project here.

News via IBM.

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How Artificial Intelligence Helped to Create a Gaud-Inspired Thinking Sculpture - ArchDaily

Forbes

New ARM Chip Architecture Promises Big Boost To Artificial ... Forbes ARM, which designs the chips that power virtually every smartphone in the world, is anticipating a world where artificial intelligence will be running on every ... ARM's next-gen chip design puts the focus on artificial intelligenceTechCrunch ARM Unveils New Chip Design Targeted at Self-Driving Cars, AIBloomberg ARM DynamIQ: Expanding the possibilities for artificial intelligenceDesign and Reuse (press release) The Tech Portal -The Bitbag -Evening Standard -ARM Community all 46 news articles »

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New ARM Chip Architecture Promises Big Boost To Artificial ... - Forbes

Forbes

Take A Look At How An Algorithm And Artificial Intelligence Are Evolving Machine Communications Forbes Today in 2017, in what sounds like a scene from the lab in Westworld, a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, Open AI Lab, is teaching AI to create its own language; and the Human to Robots Lab at Brown University has created an ...

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Take A Look At How An Algorithm And Artificial Intelligence Are Evolving Machine Communications - Forbes

Forbes

How We Can Embrace The Replacement Of Jobs By Artificial Intelligence Forbes What kind of existential problems does AI bring about? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Bruce Gibney, Venture Capitalist, Author of A ...

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How We Can Embrace The Replacement Of Jobs By Artificial Intelligence - Forbes

MinuteHack (registration) (blog)

Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Frontier MinuteHack (registration) (blog) In a modern economy, the website is a foregone conclusion. Whatever your business model, your end customer expects you to have some representation on the internet. If you are a consumer-facing business, chances are a mobile app is just as vital to your ...

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Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Frontier - MinuteHack (registration) (blog)

Researchers are using Darwin's theories to evolve AI, so only the strongest algorithms survive Quartz Modern artificial intelligence is built to mimic naturethe field's main pursuit is replicating in a computer the same decision-making prowess that humankind creates biologically. For the better part of three decades, most of AI's brain-inspired ...

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Researchers are using Darwin's theories to evolve AI, so only the strongest algorithms survive - Quartz