Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Business quiz: What do these company name abbreviations stand for: AT&T. 3M. NCR. Geico. Did you know them all? If so, well done. The answers: American Telephone & Telegraph, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, National Cash Register, and Government Employees Insurance Co.

Now, heres the hard question: What do all these names have in common? Answer: None of them accurately express what those companies do today.

Think about that. Each of these companies had the good sense to follow new technologies and new business opportunities even if they were inconsistent with their very name.

Then, on the other hand, ask yourself why Blockbuster doesnt own the streaming video market. How did it lose to upstart Netflix? Why doesnt Kodak, a brand that used to be virtually synonymous with photography, dominate the digital camera market? In both instances, it is because the entrenched leader failed to see that a new technology had transformed the entire industry.

Most of the time, the technology that the big company fails to adopt is isolated to its industry. But every now and then, something comes along that is so transformative, virtually every company must adopt it very quickly, or perish. The replacement of animal power with mechanical power is one example, as is the electrification of industry and the assembly line as a means of manufacturing. Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be another one, for the implications of this technology are every bit as transformative as electricity.

Can that really be seen with such certainty? Absolutely. A business is simply the product of two factors: decisions and execution. Companies that succeed make better decisions and execute better than their competitors. Thats it.

It is hard to exactly quantify, but most employees at a company make a few hundred business decisions a daywhich emails are most important to answer, which meetings to attend, how to prioritize their time, and so forth. Marketing people figure out what message to deliver to what audience through what channels. Salespeople decide which leads to call on with what offers. Programmers decide how to solve coding problems, product people decide what to bring to market, and so on.

So every person in the company makes, lets call it, 200 business decisions a day. If your company has 1,000 employees, that is 200,000 decisions a day, or a million decisions every week.

And every one of them can be made better using AI.

Let me repeat that: Every business decision employees make can be made better using AI trained on the relevant data.

Imagine if SmallCo aggressively uses AI to make its key business decisions while BigCo doesnt; who do you think wins in the long run? If every week, BigCo makes a million decisions based on their gut and SmallCo makes decisions using AI based on data, which would you bet on? Week after week, the power of better decisions compounds until at some point, BigCos executives will look around and find their products and their company irrelevant. They will wonder how they lost, but the simple truth will be that someone else made better decisions.

AI is still in many regards a nascent technology. Only in the past few years have the tools to implement it across the enterprise come to market. While with many technologies it makes sense to take a wait and see approach, this is not one of them. The power to make better decisions is not something you want to equivocate on. I am sure that when steam power came along, some old-timers thought their animal-powered factories worked just fine. But in the blink of an eye, that whole world changed and those who did not make the transition fast enough did not have the time to recover and catch up.

I hate to say it, but most large companies fail to make the right changes in time. Of the original companies that made up the Dow Jones industrial average, only one remains on the index. And that one is General Electric, another company that transformed beyond the limits of its name. Those other companies had every advantage imaginable, but they failed, because the world changed, and they did not.

Join us next week in San Francisco as we explore how to implement AI in your enterprise today.

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The Peril of Inaction with Artificial Intelligence - Gigaom

Forbes

Artificial Intelligence Is Coming To Police Bodycams, Raising Privacy Concerns Forbes But with all that footage comes a tsunami of data that's becoming increasingly difficult to sift through. Taser International, one of the largest manufacturers of police bodycams, wants to bring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to ... Taser to bring artificial intelligence to police on-body camerasThe Stack all 14 news articles »

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Artificial Intelligence Is Coming To Police Bodycams, Raising Privacy Concerns - Forbes

Forbes

Nvidia Beats Earnings Estimates As Its Artificial Intelligence Business Keeps On Booming Forbes Nvidia continued to see demand for its graphics processors in the emerging world of artificial intelligence in its fourth quarter earnings reported Thursday. In its fourth quarter earnings release, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported revenue ... To keep up its freakish growth, Nvidia needs to convince the world it's a leader in AIQuartz all 126 news articles »

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Nvidia Beats Earnings Estimates As Its Artificial Intelligence Business Keeps On Booming - Forbes

Forbes

Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Become A Threat To Humanity? Forbes Also, there is a complete fallacy due to the fact that our only exposure to intelligence is through other humans. There are absolutely no reason that intelligent machines will even want to dominate the world and/or threaten humanity. The will to ...

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Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Become A Threat To Humanity? - Forbes

Wall Street Journal (blog)

Wells Fargo Innovation Group to Focus on Artificial Intelligence, Payments and APIs Wall Street Journal (blog) Wells Fargo & Co., still grappling with fallout from a sales-practices scandal, is reorganizing its payments, virtual solutions and innovation group as the bank looks to increase its use of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The ... and more »

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Wells Fargo Innovation Group to Focus on Artificial Intelligence, Payments and APIs - Wall Street Journal (blog)

SAP S/4HANA is going multi-tenant public cloud. Can SAP bring AI to its customer base?

SAP is planning to step up its machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts in hopes that its applications will have a broader reach when it comes to automating processes such as employee approvals, payment processing, and sales discounting.

At the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, SAP is outlining its public cloud versions of its S4/HANA enterprise resource planning suite. The ERP cloud suites come in three versions focused on project management, finance, and enterprise management and are hosted in SAP data centers.

Darren Roos, president of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, said in an interview that SAP does plan to support other public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other key players.

But the S/4 HANA public cloud coming out party is a bit of a diversion from what SAP plans to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning in its roadmap. SAP is just starting to talk about machine learning and AI at a time when rivals and the broader enterprise technology ecosystem have dominated the conversation.

Consider:

How to Implement AI and Machine Learning

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started.

Add it up and SAP's S/4HANA launch and analyst meeting in New York is about the machine learning and AI roadmap as much as it is ERP. SAP CEO Bill McDermott previewed the focus on AI on the software company's fourth quarter earnings call. McDermott told analysts:

Roos acknowledges that SAP hasn't been beating the drum for machine learning just yet. Why? SAP wanted to highlight a bevy of use cases. "The use cases are really just beginning whether it's matching invoices to payments with machine learning to eliminate human error or advising users on how to match hiring plants with markets and budgets," said Roos. "We've invested in specific machine learning use cases. The reality is that machine learning doesn't have any real value until you get it to the user and the application."

SAP's approach to AI will revolve around bringing functionality to customers via its public cloud offerings. SAP will develop its own tools, but it also isn't going to be shy about partnering. "I don't think where the machine learning or AI capabilities come from is relevant. SAP will partner to leverage AI and machine learning to enhance our applications," said Roos. "We don't think about where the engine comes from as much as how it impacts the customer."

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SAP aims to step up its artificial intelligence, machine learning game as S/4HANA hits public cloud - ZDNet

Meet Botlr, a towel-delivering assistant thats already being experimented with at Aloft Hotels. Photograph: Savioke

In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. And the odds of us puny humans making a comeback are not very good.

A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of todays work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years. (McKinsey helpfully offers a search portal to find out how likely youll be given the boot by a bot.)

Bottom line is robots want our jobs. And no one is going to build a wall around them or tariff them out of existence.

In a way this is nothing new. Technology has been replacing human labor since the invention of the wheel. Typically, though, machines have stepped in to perform relatively low-skill, low-wage, highly repetitive work. The least digitizable jobs have belonged to recreational therapists, members of the medical profession, social workers, teachers, and managers. The reason: computers are not yet as good as humans at things like personal interaction and off-the-cuff decision making.

But thats changing.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and inexpensive computing power, jobs that once werent considered good candidates for automation suddenly are.

For example, a decade ago researchers thought the complexity of navigating an automobile around obstacles and through traffic was beyond the reach of silicon. Now virtually every auto maker (as well as companies like Apple) is working on a driverless car.

The number and types of jobs that computers can do has expanded enormously in just a few years, ranging from the predictable to the absurd.

The tasks least likely to be replaced by a computer, according to a widely cited 2013 Oxford study on job digitization, are those requiring the highest degrees of social and creative intelligence. But even there the digitized writing is on the LCD wall.

For years, computers have been creating art, music and literature just usually not very good art, music and literature. Robot poetry and computer-generated music have become genres unto themselves, but so far theyve failed to have much impact on the already dismal employment prospects for human poets and musicians. Last February, the first algorithmically authored musical, Beyond the Fence, debuted in Londons West End though to less than stellar reviews.

Still, there are glimmers of a future where algorithms and artists compete head to head. The winner of the 2016 RobotArt competition, National Taiwan Universitys TAIDA, creates pointillist-style compositions that would not look out of place hanging next to a Seurat.

Last April, a computer-generated novel titled, appropriately enough, The Day a Computer Writes a Novel, was in the running for Japans Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The judges were unaware the book was produced via AI.

Kulitta, music composition software written by Yale computer science lecturer Donya Quick, has fooled musical sophisticates into thinking its original phrases were composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, according to a report in Yale News.

Are all of these people capable of acquiring new skills? And even if they are, do they want to do it?

But for the time being or at least until algorithms learn how to suffer for their art humans will continue to have the upper hand when it comes to creativity.

Highly creative jobs are probably pretty safe for a while, says Tom Davenport, co-author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. There have been a few attempts to have computers write screenplays and TV scripts, and they have been uniformly horrible thus far.

There are other hopeful signs.

Instead of being replaced wholesale, most people in high-skill positions will likely find themselves working alongside their inanimate colleagues, not unlike the way we use computers instead of typewriters and calculators. McKinsey estimates that 60% of todays occupations have at least some portion that can be automated.

This is already happening in fields such as medicine, law and banking. When not writing cookbooks or kicking ass at Jeopardy, for example, IBM Watson is helping doctors diagnose medical conditions and analyze MRIs. Electronic discovery platforms such as Symantecs eDiscovery and Kroll Ontrack help attorneys sift through thousands of documents in a few hours. And AI-driven services such as FutureAdvisor or Wealthfront help consumers make investment decisions, freeing up human financial advisers to work on more high-net-worth accounts.

Davenport says there are five paths for surviving in a workplace dominated by robots. You can move up in the organizational chain to monitor the computers work or make high-level decisions about what to computerize. You can focus on parts of your job computers arent good at, or find a new career where computers are less likely to dominate. Finally, he says, you can choose to work on creating the technology that will automate the 21st century.

Michael Jones, assistant professor of economics at the University of Cincinnati, believes the problem of displaced workers can be overcome with education and training though what positions workers should be trained to fill is not entirely clear. No one knows what new jobs will look like in 10 or 20 years, just as no one anticipated the position of drone repair technician in the 1990s.

Automation can not only create advantages for society as a whole but also for individual workers, if they can retool their skills and use technology to complement their job, not replace it, Jones says. But are all of these people capable of acquiring new skills? And even if they are, do they want to do it?

Jones adds that traditional vocations like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters are likely to be less affected by digital disruption. And while easily automated jobs will be increasingly rare, they probably wont go away entirely, says JP Gownder, vice-president and principal analyst for Forrester.

I believe for the most part people value the human touch, but it may become a bit of a luxury good, he says. Imagine a world 15 or 20 years from now where most people get their manicures from robots. Rich people might still want to get one from a real person.

And if you happen to be one of the unlucky millions who lose their job to an algorithm? A robot recruiter such as Entelo or Gild might be able to help you find a new one.

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Actors, teachers, therapists think your job is safe from artificial intelligence? Think again - The Guardian

In June last year a fascinating aerial battle took place.It didnt take place in the actual skybut rather in the virtual one, which was appropriate considering it was a battle of man against machine.

The man in question wasnt an ordinary pilotbut a retired US Airforce pilot, Gene Lee, with combat experience in Iraq and a graduate of the US Fighter Weapons School.The machine he was battling was a simulated aircraft controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI).

What was surprising about the outcome was that the artifical AI emerged as the victor.What was more surprising was that the computer running the software wasnt a multimillion dollar supercomputerbut one that used about $35 worth of computing power.

Welcome to the fast-moving world of AI.

Its an area that has attracted significant media focus, and justifiably so.Experts in the field see the deployment of AI as the dawn of a new age.Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu Research, is one of the gurus in the field.

AI is the new electricity, he says. Just as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same.

Most of the current applications of AI focus on recognising patterns.Software is "trained"with vast amounts of information, usually with help from people who have manually tagged the data.In this way, an AI may start with images that have been labelled as cars, then, through trial and error guided by programmers, eventually recognise images of cars without any intervention.

Extraordinary breakthroughs This simple explanation of AI belies the extraordinary breakthroughs achieved with this approachand is illustrated by an experiment conducted by an English company called DeepMind.

In 2015,DeepMind revealed that its AI had learned how to play 1980s-era computer games without any instruction. Once it had learned the games, it could outperform any human player by astonishing margins.

This feat is a stark contrast to the battle waged almost two decades ago when an IBM computer beat Russian grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess in the mid-1990s. To beat him,the computer relied on a virtual encyclopaedia of pre-programmed information about known moves. At no point did the machine learn how to play chess.

Winning simple computer games clearly wasnt enough to prove the abilities of DeepMind, so a more challenging option was found in the game called Go.Its an incredibly complex Asian board game with more possible moves than the total number of atoms in the visible universe.

To learn Go, the AI played itself more than a million times. To put this in perspective, if a person played 10games a day every day for 60years, they would only manage to play around 180,000 games.

Despite the bold predictions of expert Go players, when the tournament ended in 2015, it was the DeepMind AI that had beaten one of the worlds best players.

The ability to "learn"can be easily leveraged into the real world.While gaming applications may excite hard-core geeks, DeepMinds power was unleashed on a more useful challenge last year increasing energy efficiency in data centres.

By looking at the information about power consumption such as temperature, server demand and cooling pump speeds the AI reduced electricity requirements for a Google data centre by an astonishing 40%. This may seem esotericbut around the world data centres already use as much electricity as the entire UK.

Potential implications Once you start to consider the power of AI, the feeling of astonishment evaporates and is replaced with an unsettling feeling about the potential implications.For example, at the end of last year a Japanese insurance company laid off a third of one of its departments when it announced plans to replace people with an IBM AI. In this example, only 34 people were made redundantbut this trend is likely to accelerate.

At this stage, its useful to put this development in contextand consider what jobs might be replaced by AI.Andrew Ng has a useful rule of thumb If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.

Whats important about this quote is the term near future. Once you extend the timeline out longer, researchers have theorised that the implications of AI on the workforce are significant. One study published in 2015 estimated that across the OECD an average of 57% of jobs were at risk from automation.

This number has been disputed heavily since it was publishedbut it doesnt really matter what the exact percentage will be.What is important to keep in mind is that AI will change the nature of jobs forever, and its highly likely that work in the future will feature people working alongside machines. This will result in a more efficient workforce, which will in turn likely to lead to job losses.

However, its not just the workforce that could change.The potential for this technology dwarfs anything humans have ever invented, and, just like the splitting of the atom, the jury is out on how things will develop.

One of the worlds experts on existential threats to humanityNick Bostrom at Oxford University surveyed the top 100 AI researchers. He asked them about the potential threat that AI poses to humanity, and responses were startling. More than half of them responded that they believed there is a substantial chance that the development of an artificial intelligence that matches the human mind wont end up well for one of the groups involved. You dont need to work alongside an AI to figure out which group.

The thesis is simple Darwinian theory applied to the biological world leads to the dominance of one species over another. If humans create a machine intelligence, probably the first thing it would do is re-programme itself become smarter. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, people could become subservient to machines with intelligence levels that were impossible to comprehend.

The exact timeframe for this scenario is hotly debated, but the same experts polled by Bostrom thought that there was a high chance of machines having human-level intelligence this century perhaps as early as 2050.

To paraphrase a well-worn clich, we will live in interesting times.

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Keeping an eye on artificial intelligence - The National Business Review

Your Alpha Doggs editor is Bob Brown, Network World Online Executive Editor, News.

Network World | Feb 8, 2017 2:03 PM PT

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Activity on the tech labs front is happening faster than we can get to it these days, so here are a few "in case you missed it" items...

The state of Ohio, JobsOhio and the Ohio State University are putting $45 million into an expansion of the Transportation Research Center's (TRC) 540-acre Smart Mobility Advanced Research and Test (SMART) Centerin the Columbus area. Research will focus both on connected and driverless vehicles within this section of the 4,500-acre TRC expanse.

This first phase of SMART expansion will include the industry's largest high-speed intersection, an urban network of intersections (i.e., roundabouts, or what we in the Northeast call rotaries), a rural network that includes wooded roads and a neighborhood network for slower speeds.

MORE: 10 cool connected car features

TRC provides the largest independent vehicle testing facility in North America, according to TRC CEO Mark-Tami Hotta.

Research at TRC goes hand-in-hand with research elsewhere in Ohio, including along a Smart Mobility Corridor between the TRC and Columbus that has been primed with fiber-optic cabling and sensors that were enabled through previous funding. New tech can be tested in real-life traffic situations there, according to JobsOhio, which notes two additional smart highway projects are now being funded, too.

These labs are going to have quite the name to live up to. Lexalytics, a Boston-based text analytics software and services provider, has established what it's calling Magic Machines AI Labs with the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center for Data Science and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications.

At UMass (which counts Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin among its grads), Lexalytics will work with faculty and students in areas such as analyzing, visualizing and exploiting data, and overall, making the AI building process easier. Lexaytics has specialized in handling unstructured data, but is no slouch on the structured side either.

At Northwestern, Lexalytics will look to identify and test real-world applications for Magic Machines AI technologies. Perhaps frighteningly, they'll be looking to advance ways marketers can use AI in their jobs.

Research at the labs will fall into categories such as swarm intelligence/emergent behavior, adaptive AI, transfer learning and meta-learning (see fuller explanations at the Magic Machines AI Labs website).

Speaking of UMass Amherst, the school is boasting of its new cluster of 400 graphics processing units (GPUs), which it says should attract a slew of Ph.D. students and researchers in areas such as AI, computer vision and natural language processing.

The cluster, which will process huge data sets via neural network algorithms, is housed at the Masachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Mass., and was enabled by a five-year $5M grant from the state and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative last year. That grant represents a one-third match to $15M in funds from the MassMutual Foundation for data science and cybersecurity research.

The "Gypsum" cluster of GPUs is installed on 100 computer nodes, with storage and backup systems, and will be used for deep learning research on a variety of applications.

MORE: Open-source oriented RISELab emerges at UC Berkeley to make apps smarter & more secure

Bob Brown is a news editor for Network World, blogs about network research, and works most closely with our staff's wireless/mobile reporters. Email me at bbrown@nww.com with story tips or comments on this post. No need to follow up on PR pitches via email or phone (I read my emails and will be in touch if interested, thanks)

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In the Labs: Connected vehicles in Ohio, artificial intelligence in Illinois and Massachusetts - Network World

Tech giant rolls out new software which crams its virtual assistant inside the LG Watch Style and Watch Sport

Google has unveiled the second generation of its smartwatch software, which will place artificial intelligence (AI) in the companys wearables for the first time.

Android Wear 2.0, which will begin rolling out to all current Android Wear smartwatch users in the coming weeks as an update, will include Google Assistant, the tech giants AI virtual helper which responds to voice commands.

PA:Press Association

Google also revealed the first two new devices that would run the software the LG Watch Style and Watch Sport as the tech giant looks to take on the Apple Watch.

While traditional watches tell the time, Android Wear watches make the most of your time, Android Wears engineering chief David Singleton said.

In an instant, you can check when and where youre meeting a friend, whether youll need an umbrella tonight, or how many minutes youve been active today-all without reaching for your phone.

Today, were launching Android Wear 2.0 to give you watch faces that do more, better ways to work out, more ways to stay in touch, new ways to use apps, and on-the-go help from Google Assistant.

As part of the Google Assistant integration, users will be able to add items to their shopping lists, set reminders and make restaurant reservations directly from their watches.

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Google Android Wear 2.0 update puts artificial intelligence inside your wristwatch - The Sun