Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Irish companies are seen to be particularly aware of the changing role for AI with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying they believe it will revolutionise the way they gain information from and interact with customers

As many as three quarters of Irish companies believe artificial intelligence (AI) will have a major impact on their industry in the coming years, with 25 per cent expecting it to completely transform their sector.

Thats according to Accentures annual Technology Vision 2017 report, which reports on the most disruptive tech trends for businesses.

The survey of more than 5,400 business and IT executives across 16 industries and 31 countries, including Ireland, indicates that AI is moving far beyond being a back-end tool to take on a more sophisticated role within companies.

Irish companies are seen to be particularly aware of the changing role for AI with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying they believe it will revolutionise the way they gain information from and interact with customers. Almost three quarters of those surveyed also expect AI interfaces to become their primary interface for interacting with the outside world.

However, the rise of AI is not without challenges with 41 per cent of Irish companies expecting compatibility issues to impact take-up within firms. Other potential problems cited included privacy issues, a lack of sufficient usable data and the newness of such technology.

When it comes to AI investment over the next three years, the most significant areas where Irish businesses plan to invest capabilities are in natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, and in embedded AI solutions such as IPsofts Amelia in call centre services, or IBMs Watson embedded in healthcare diagnostics.

The research indicates that many Irish organisations are racing to keep up with advances in technology, with one in five surveyed saying their industry is facing complete disruption and a further 48 per cent experiencing moderate disruption over the next three years.

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Irish companies preparing for artificial intelligence revolution - Irish Times

Artificial intelligence is not going away. But we have a choice whether to embrace it or fear it. PHOTO: ambermb

The argument against artificial intelligence (AI) is driven by fear. Fear of the unknown fear of intelligence.

According to Stephen Hawkings we do have reason to beware of the consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) including the possibility of the end of the human race.

The rise of the machines wont be happening imminently. After all, AI is still in its infancy. The most realistic fear today is that AI will take peoples jobs.

Undoubtedly technology is taking peoples jobs in droves. Anytime you self-checkout in the grocery store you might be conveniencing yourself but youre also doing something that just 15 years ago someone would have been paid to do for you.

The trend is also happening in casual type restaurants such as Red Robin, where machines are on the table that do everything but bring you the food itself.

Airlines use self-serve kiosks to print luggage tags and boarding passes. Banks use intelligent automated voices to route calls and do practically everything unless you specifically ask for a representative.

It doesnt exactly take a forward thinker to envision a time when cars are self-driving. And with the technological advancement of drones, its not hard to imagine that commercial planes will one day be pilotless.

While Moores Law implies technology doubles every two years, the reality is humans are notoriously slow at adopting it.

Weve been trained to think of new technology as cost prohibitive and buggy. We let tech savvy pioneers test new things and we wait until the second or third iteration, when the technology is ready, before deciding to adopt it.

While AI seems like a futuristic concept, its actually something that many people use daily, although 63 percent of users dont realize theyre using it.

Google is a great example of machine learning that many people use every day and it truly does make life easier. Marketers use artificial intelligence for a variety of functions, not the least of which include personalization. The reason that Netflix or Amazon are able to give you personalized suggestions is because the technology that runs their software uses AI.

While the fear of job loss is understandable, there is another point to make: because of artificial intelligence many people are currently doing jobs that werent available even just a few years back.

Lets circle back to marketers for example. The technological know-how is now a full-time job, so alongside designers and copywriters is a new breed of marketer that is trained to purposefully promote content to a uniquely tailored audience.

Even so, when you Google which new jobs will AI produce, you only get a list of articles saying AI will eliminate jobs.

Of course, fear typically drives more clicks than positivity, so its not surprising that more articles focus on the negative aspects of AI than the good that many people proclaim will come from it.

Were currently in a situation where the new US Presidential administration that has made a mantra out of saving American jobs.

To date, the jobs the administration is focusing on are jobs that will be taken over by intelligent machines in the not-to-distant future.

Retaining jobs is important, but with a strategy around educating people on the coming technology, long-term retention of jobs would be a lot more realistic. Manufacturing is becoming less about screwing parts together and more about robotic maintenance and foresight.

No leader should want to stop this advancement, but a leader should recognize the future and see to a long-term solution rather than a short-term one.

The previous administration did study the impact of AI on our economy. The White House study, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy doesnt sugarcoat the fact that AI will take peoples jobs as many as 47 percent in the next decade. It also goes on to emphasize that these jobs will be replaced with others, and that a focus on education and investments in the industry are vital.

AI informed intelligence software will always learn from current scenarios. It is only as good as the programmers, according to Kitty Parr, founder and CEO of Social Media Compliance (SMC), in ComputerWeekly.com. If thats the case, certainly programmers have a bright future.

Even software companies not at the scale of Google or Amazon are already using AI and creating jobs at the same time. Take my company, censhare, a Munich-based digital experience company. We've been running a semantic network, a fancy term for AI, since 2001. Besides the jobs at censhare that AI produces, its customer base needs people who can run the software as well.

You can extract from the above paragraph that there are many companies on the forefront of this new technology and they all need developers, marketers, sales, support, leadership and everyone else involved in running a company.

Intelligent machines arent going to start running companies, people will continue making the glue that holds corporations together.

Artificial intelligence is not going away.

We have a choice whether to embrace it or fear it.

People who embrace it from the start will inevitably end up ahead, while those who choose to fear or even ignore it will be left playing catch-up. The latter is who will end up losing jobs while the former will continue doing what they love, just maybe in a slightly different way.

Douglas Eldridge has worked in marketing/communications since 2003. As marketing manager for censhare US, he is tasked with strategizing and implementing digital marketing efforts in the US, utilizing both inbound and outbound methods.

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Why the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence Outweigh the Risks - CMSWire

The rapidity of recent Chinese advances in artificial intelligence indicates that the country is capable of keeping pace with, or perhaps even overtaking, the United States in this critical emerging technology. The successes of major Chinese technology companies, notably Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group and Tencent Holding Ltd.and even a number of start-upshave demonstrated the dynamism of these private-sector efforts in artificial intelligence. From speech recognition to self-driving cars, Chinese research is cutting edge. Although the military dimension of Chinas progress in artificial intelligence has remained relatively opaque, there is also relevant research occurring in the Peoples Liberation Army research institutes and the Chinese defense industry. Evidently, the PLA recognizes the disruptive potential of the varied military applications of artificial intelligence, from unmanned weapons systems to command and control. Looking forward, the PLA anticipates that the advent of artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the character of warfare, ultimately resulting in a transformation from todays informationized () ways of warfare to future intelligentized () warfare.

The Chinese leadership has prioritized artificial intelligence at the highest levels, recognizing its expansive applications and strategic implications. The initial foundation for Chinas progress in artificial intelligence was established through long-term research funded by national science and technology plans, such as the 863 Program. Notably, Chinas 13th Five-Year Plan (201620) called for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, which was also highlighted in the 13th Five-Year National Science and Technology Innovation Plan. The new initiatives focus on artificial intelligence and have been characterized as the China Brain Plan (), which seeks to enhance understandings of human and artificial intelligence alike. In addition, the Internet Plus and Artificial Intelligence, a three-year implementation plan for artificial intelligence (201618), emphasizes the development of artificial intelligence and its expansive applications, including in unmanned systems, in cyber security and for social governance. Beyond these current initiatives, the Chinese Academy of Engineering has proposed an Artificial Intelligence 2.0 Plan, and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Peoples Republic of China has reportedly tasked a team of experts to draft a plan for the development of artificial intelligence through 2030. The apparent intensity of this support and funding will likely enable continued, rapid advances in artificial intelligence with dual-use applications.

Chinas significant progress in artificial intelligence must be contextualized by the national strategy of civil-military integration or military-civil fusion () that has become a high-level priority under President Xi Jinpings leadership. Consequently, it is not unlikely that nominally civilian technological capabilities will eventually be utilized in a military context. For instance, An Weiping (), deputy chief of staff of the PLAs Northern Theater Command, has highlighted the importance of deepening civil-military integration, especially for such strategic frontier technologies as artificial intelligence. Given this strategic approach, the boundaries between civilian and military research and development tend to blur. In a notable case, Li Deyi () acts as the director of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and he is affiliated with Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Concurrently, Li Deyi is a major general in the PLA who serves as deputy director of the Sixty-First Research Institute, under the aegis of the Central Military Commission (CMC) Equipment Development Department.

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China May Soon Surpass America on the Artificial Intelligence Battlefield - The National Interest Online

Forbes

Go Big With These Two Artificial Intelligence Stocks Forbes AI plays a critical role in the future of automobiles. The best way to invest in the AI revolution today is through big companies with scale and a proven capacity to bring lab work to life. Nvdia (NVDA) invested $2 billion in a deep-learning AI chip ...

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Go Big With These Two Artificial Intelligence Stocks - Forbes

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In five questions or less, an industry expert defines and explains a technology, term or trend with this installment seeing Heather Richards, CEO of Transversal, tackle Artificial Intelligence.

HR: AI is a broad term describing machines that operate with some degree of intelligence. It can refer to a machine that mimics human thought processes or to a machine that achieves a level of creative autonomy, for example by being able to learn things beyond its original programming. AI encompasses many methods and applications, including natural language processing, problem solving, playing games and even recognizing emotions. In our business, self-service knowledge management, it helps make user interactions more intuitive.

HR:Most AI applications are designed for specific tasks. At a basic level, the designer maps out how an intelligent entity might solve a problem, and breaks down that process into steps that can be expressed as computer calculations. AI often uses nonlinear processing techniques, such as neural networks, to approximate more closely how a living mind works. It requires significant processing power and sometimes large volumes of background data to enable the computer to form judgements. Thats why AI has leapt forward during the past decade alongside the upsurge in data storage capacity.

HR:Deep learning and cognitive computing are both divisions of AI. Deep learning is a technique that enables a machine to learn more like a person does, by using a neural network of multiple layers through which calculations pass in succession with a cumulatively sophisticated result. Cognitive computing describes AI that mimics human thought processes in order to facilitate interactions between a person and a computer. For example, a cognitive application might understand input in natural language, or deduce what a user wants by interpreting disparate clues.

HR:Luckily, robots are still some way from overthrowing humanity! The effects of more benign automation are going to vary between sectors. In our business, we want AI to help employees rather than replace them. If routine, repetitive requests are handled by automated knowledge management, users can solve problems faster and employees can give more time to issues that need personal attention. AI can thus reduce effort and make work more interesting, but the human factor is still very much required.

HR:Many AI functions are small things, invisibly embedded in larger applications, that people might not even notice much less find a threat. Regarding the news-worthy manifestations of AI, like robots and self-learning machines, there is of course concern about how such machines might behave were they to become more powerful than their builders. Industry thought leaders are already developing guidelines about the ethics of AI and how AI should be steered for the benefit of humanity. From our perspective, though, AI is simply a helper. It doesnt supplant anyone; it makes for a more effortless experience.

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Artificial Intelligence Explained - Computer Business Review

By Shirley Siluk / CIO Today. Updated January 26, 2017.

On Friday, Apple filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court for the Southern District of California alleging that Qualcomm's practices have cost Apple nearly $1 billion in damages. That complaint came on the heels of two other lawsuits -- one seeking more than $145 million in damages -- against Qualcomm that Apple filed last week in China.

Qualcomm is also facing allegations of unfair and anticompetitive practices by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The FTC filed a complaint against the chipmaker in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Jan. 17.

'Dominance through Excessive Royalties'

The complaints center on Qualcomm's pricing and patent royalty arrangements for its broadband processors that enable mobile phones to connect with cellular networks. Qualcomm's modem chip design was used to help establish standards for the telecom industry. In return for that standardization, Qualcomm committed to licensing those technologies to other companies on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.

However, Apple's complaints contend that Qualcomm is charging it royalties for "technologies they have nothing to do with." That statement, contained in an email Apple sent to a number of press outlets last week, continued, "The more Apple innovates with unique features such as TouchID, advanced displays, and cameras, to name just a few, the more money Qualcomm collects for no reason and the more expensive it becomes for Apple to fund these innovations."

Apple said in the email, "Qualcomm built its business on older, legacy, standards but reinforces its dominance through exclusionary tactics and excessive royalties. Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined."

Most recently, Qualcomm has gone even further, withholding "nearly $1B in payments from Apple as retaliation for responding truthfully to law enforcement agencies investigating them," Apple added.

Apple's two complaints in China make similar allegations, according to a report yesterday by Reuters. Those lawsuits accuse Qualcomm of abusing its dominant position in the global chip industry and failing to license its technologies fairly as it had agreed to do.

'A Commercial Dispute over Price of IP'

In a statement issued yesterday, Qualcomm said it had not yet seen the two lawsuits filed in China. The statement included comments from Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Don Rosenberg.

"These filings by Apple's Chinese subsidiary are just part of Apple's efforts to find ways to pay less for Qualcomm's technology. Apple was offered terms consistent with terms accepted by more than one hundred other Chinese companies and refused to even consider them," Rosenberg said. "These terms were consistent with our NDRC Rectification plan. Qualcomm is prepared to defend its business model anywhere in the world."

During yesterday's Q1 2017 earnings call, in which Qualcomm reported year-over-year revenue growth of 4 percent and Q1 revenues of $6 billion, CEO Steven Mollenkopf noted, "Apple's complaint contains a lot of assertions. But in the end, this is a commercial dispute over the price of intellectual property. They want to pay less than the fair value that Qualcomm has established in the marketplace for our technology, even though Apple has generated billions in profits from using that technology."

In December, the Korea Fair Trade Commission imposed a fine of 1.03 trillion won ($880 million) on Qualcomm for what it called an "unfair business model" for licensing technology at the handset rather than chip level. In 2015, the European Commission also launched two antitrust investigations into "possible abusive [behavior]" by Qualcomm in connection with its pricing and licensing practices for modem chipsets.

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Apple Joining Google, Amazon, Facebook on Artificial Intelligence - CIO Today

Emanate Wireless, a vendor of systems that continuously monitor key clinical assets at healthcare facilities, introduced at HIMSS17 two new temperature sensors for its PowerPath Temp Solution. Emanate expects commercial shipment of both new temperature sensors to begin in the second quarter.

These two sensors add value to our current offering by supporting additional types of devices, and by making installation faster, which leads to cost savings for our customers, said Neil Diener, co-founder and CEO of Emanate Wireless.

The first new temperature sensor is an expanded range device capable of measuring down to -200 Celsius. This ultra-low temperature sensor enables the PowerPath Temp Solution to be used to monitor Cryogenic freezers and other deep freezers used in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. The expanded range sensor works with all PowerPath Temp Monitors.

The second new temperature sensor is a wireless Bluetooth Low Energy device. The wireless sensor makes it simple to deploy the PowerPath Temp Solution: Just plug in the monitor in-line with the AC power cord of the refrigerator to monitor AC current and the operation of the refrigeration unit, then place the wireless sensor inside the refrigerator to monitor temperature, the vendor said. This gets rid of the need for temperature cabling the wireless sensor communicates with the monitor device using Bluetooth Low Energy.

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Emanate Wireless unveils artificial intelligence-powered ... - Healthcare IT News

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions what has become known as the 10,000-hour rule, which states that to become world-class in any field you must devote 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Whether or not you believe the 10,000-hour figure, many would acknowledge that to become an accomplished legal professional requires considerable legal, communicative and, particularly in in-house environments, interpersonal skills that are often acquired after a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years.

Enter artificial intelligence (AI)

There has been much hoopla about AI-based legal systems that, some might have you believe, may soon replace lawyers (no doubt causing a degree of anxiety among some legal professionals). There is some misunderstanding among many lawyers, and much of the public, about what AI systems are presently capable of. Can a legal AI, based on current technology, actually think like a lawyer? No. At best, todays AI is an incomplete substitute for a human lawyer, although it could reduce the need for some lawyers (Ill get to all that later).

However, something we should think seriously about right now is the long-term implication of the introduction of AI into the legal environmentnotably the potential loss of legal wisdom.

Why doesnt AI think like a human?

Lets explore whyAI doesnt actually mimic the human brain. As an example, lets look at automated translation systems such as those available from Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Such systems might appear to work the way human translators do, but what they actually do is match patterns derived from analyses of thousands, if not millions, of pages of text found on the web, employing a technology known as statistical machine translation. For instance, if such a system wants to know how to translate the English greeting hello into French, it scans English and French translations on the web, statistically analyses the correlations between hello and various French greetings, then comes to the conclusion that the French equivalent of hello is bonjour.

Current AI is good at this kind of pattern matching, but less so at cognition and deductive reasoning. Consider the human brain: not only does it store a large number of associations, and accesses useful memories (sometimes quickly, sometimes not), it also transforms sensory and other information into generalisable representations invariant to unimportant changes, stores episodic memories and generalises learned examples into understanding. These are key cognitive capabilities yet to be matched by current AI technology.

Thus, while present AI-based legal systems might analyse judicial decisionsfor example, to help litigators gain insights to a judges behaviour or a barristers track recordthey do so by scrutinising existing data to reveal patterns, and not by extrapolating from the content of those decisions the way an experienced human legal professional might.

The temptation to make redundant

AsAI systems become more capable, the temptation grows to use such systems not only to supplement but also to eliminate the need for some personnel. An AI system weak in cognition but strong in pattern matching probably could not replace an experienced professional in terms of drawing inferences, deductive reasoning or combining different practice areas to arrive at more comprehensive solutions. However, it could perform certain tasks such as searching for patterns of words in documents for evidence gatheringthat have hitherto been delegated to lower level staffsuch as paralegals, trainees, and junior associatesand do so better than any human could.

While one might argue that the introduction of AI systems will lighten the workload of legal professionals and thereby improve their quality of life, it also potentially diminishes the need for junior legal staff, which would only exacerbate the oversupply problem in the legal profession.

Shrink now, suffer later?

If fewer junior legal professionals are hired, this implies a smaller population of lower level staff, thus a smaller feeder pool for more senior positions. And, as more tasks are automated, this could deprive junior legal professionals of opportunities to gain important experienceie, get their 10,000 hours. Will this result in fewer quality, experienced legal professionals in the future?

And the future of legal AI?

There are yet two more (albeit related) things to think about.

First: the development and maintenance of a good AI system requires both technical and legal competency. Put another way, a legal AI system programmed by systems experts ignorant in the law will be seriously, if not fatally, flawed. Thus, if we want to continue to develop more capable legal AI systems, good content providersie, good lawyerswill be needed.

Second: as laws, the legal business and social environments in their respective jurisdictions evolve, developments that might not have been anticipated just a few years earlier will emerge. Only the very best legal and other minds will be able to cope with some of these developmentsand update the relevant legal AI systems accordingly. For example, when the US passed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011, it introduced new review procedures for existing patents with the intent of improving patent quality. It also had the effect of introducing several unintended consequences, including the use of such procedures by hedge funds to invalidate patents for the purpose of affecting the stock price of the companies holding the patents and the negative impact the AIA has had on inventors. Updating an AI system to properly incorporate these developments requires not only a deep understanding of US patent law but also a perspective on patents, finance and the impact of patent policy and procedures on innovationsomething that can only really be appreciated after years of experience. Moreover, this is something that could not have been programmed into an AI system half a decade ago, and such content could probably not have been provided by a less capable, less experienced legal professional to an AI developer.

So what, if anything, can be done?

Sadly, there are no easy answers. Graduating fewer lawyers might alleviate the problem of oversupply, but would also result in unemployment at educational institutions.

While the government (or government-backed NGO) could establish some sort of training centre for under-employed junior lawyers, where these professionals could offer services pro bono to build their experience, this also smacks of government interference in the private practice market. But we need to start thinking of solutions now. The introduction of AI into the legal profession and the potential prospect of putting more lawyers out of work could have profound implications for legal AI systems and the profession as a whole.

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Legal artificial intelligence: Can it stand up in a court of law? - Robohub

Forbes

Alan Turing Predicts Machine Learning And The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Jobs Forbes This week's milestones in the history of technology include Alan Turing anticipating today's deep learning by intelligent machines and concerns about the impact of AI on jobs, Clifford Stoll anticipating Mark Zuckerberg, and establishing the FCC and NPR.

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Alan Turing Predicts Machine Learning And The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Jobs - Forbes

When Binny Bansal, co-founder of Indias largest retailer Flipkart was studying at IIT-Delhi, nobody at his institute was interested in the subject of artificial intelligence. Because nothing was happening in India, Mr. Bansal told his co-panelists Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani during a fireside chat at an event in Bengaluru.

That was 15 years ago and a lot has changed since. On Monday, Mr. Nadella, who leads the worlds largest software maker, announced a strategic partnership with Flipkart, where the e-commerce company would adopt the company's cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure.

Flipkart said that it planned to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics capabilities in Azure to optimise its data for innovative merchandising, advertising, marketing and customer service.

AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems and machine learning and gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

We are on the right ladder this time, I don't think we are going back to AI winter, said Mr. Nadella at the event where the audience consisted of hundreds of start-up founders, investors and industry experts. He said that the real challenge in AI is understanding of the human language, which still doesn't exist. (We) don't have anything that says we have the ability to write like Rabindranath Tagore, said Mr. Nadella.

Last March, Mr. Nadella faced a public communication fiasco when Microsofts teen-girl-inspired chatbot named Tay which had been programmed to interact with Twitter users mimicked racist and misogynistic lines, which other Twitter users had prompted her to repeat.

Tech entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani said that he was excited about the advent of technologies like AI and the cloud. He said that there was a challenge of taking the country from $2,000 per capita income to $20,000 and there was also a need to fix sectors like healthcare, education and financial services.

He said the classical way of getting more doctors or building education infrastructure would take time. The only way to square the circle is by using AI and cloud to deliver personalised health, education and financial services to a billion people, said Mr. Nilekani. Through his social enterprise EkStep, he said that he aimed to fix the learning challenges of Indias 200 million children using AI and smartphones.

Microsoft also runs an accelerator in Bengaluru which counts AI startups such as Uncanny Vision, Flutura and Altizon among its portfolio companies.

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Nadella woos India Inc. with artificial intelligence - The Hindu