AI – Page 58 – Impact Lab

AI, Big Problems, government, Science & Technology News, security

EU introduces AI strategy to build ‘ecosystem of trust’

February 26, 2020

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission

The European Commission today unveiled a sweeping set of proposals that it hopes will establish the region as a leader in artificial intelligence by focusing on trust and transparency.

The proposals would lead to changes in the way data is collected and shared in an effort to level the playing field between European companies and competitors from the U.S. and China. The EC wants to prevent potential abuses while also building confidence among citizens in order to reap the benefits promised by the technology.

In a series of announcements, EC leaders expressed optimism that AI could help tackle challenges such as climate change, mobility, and health care, along with a determination to keep private tech companies from influencing regulation and dominating the data needed to develop these algorithms.

“We want citizens to trust the new technology,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. “Technology is always neutral. It depends on what we make with it. And therefore we want the application of these new technologies to deserve the trust of our citizens. This is why we are promoting a responsible human-centric approach to artificial intelligence.”

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AI, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine, new technology, Science & Technology News

AI-formulated medicine to be tested on humans for the first time

February 25, 2020

It took less than a year to develop the drug, which is designed to treat OCD.

A drug designed entirely by artificial intelligence is about to enter clinical human trials for the first time. The drug, which is intended to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, was discovered using AI systems from Oxford-based biotech company Exscientia. While it would usually take around four and a half years to get a drug to this stage of development, Exscientia says that by using the AI tools it’s taken less than 12 months.

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AI, Business, Employment, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

The Human and machine workforce leading digital transformation

February 24, 2020

When it comes to digital transformation, humans—believe it or not—play an integral role. In fact, companies that make strong use of the combined human/machine workforce have a far greater chance of success in digital transformation. Accenture calls these combined people/bot workspaces “future systems”—systems that seamlessly integrate humans and robots to create business goals that are limitless, agile, and “radically human.” I consider the companies that harness the power of humans and machines will be the ultimate winners of the future of work.

The good news: these systems are already happening. The bad news: only 8% of those surveyed by Accenture seem to be using them right now, despite the fact that revenue growth in future system companies is 50% higher than those in average or laggard adoptees.

If your company has not already implemented some type of combined human/machine workforce, it will be hard—in fact, nearly impossible—to catch up. That’s because the power of AI and machine learning amplifies the skills, insights, and capabilities of leading users to the nth degree.

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AI, communication, Internet, Science & Technology News

AI can automatically rewrite outdated text in Wikipedia articles

February 23, 2020

It’s good to be skeptical of Wikipedia articles for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of outdated info — human editors can only do so much. And while there are bots that can edit Wikipedia, they’re usually limited to updated canned templates or fighting vandalism. MIT might have a more useful (not to mention more elegant) solution. Its researchers have developed an AI system that automatically rewrites outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles while maintaining a human tone. It won’t look out of line in a carefully crafted paragraph, then.

The machine learning-based system is trained to recognize the differences between a Wikipedia article sentence and a claim sentence with updated facts. If it sees any contradictions between the two sentences, it uses a “neutrality masker” to pinpoint both the contradictory words that need deleting and the ones it absolutely has to keep. After that, an encoder-decoder framework determines how to rewrite the Wikipedia sentence using simplified representations of both that sentence and the new claim.

The system can also be used to supplement datasets meant to train fake news detectors, potentially reducing bias and improving accuracy.

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AI, brain hacking, Games, military drones, Science & Technology News

US Army to study gamers’ brains to build AI military robots

February 23, 2020

A group of experts wants to study the brain waves and eye movements of people playing a video game in order to build an advanced AI that could coordinate the actions of military robots.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, awarded a team from the University of Buffalo’s Artificial Intelligence Institute a $316,000 grant for the study.

Although swarm robotics is inspired by many things, including ant colonies, researchers believe that humans have a lot of potential to improve AI learning systems. The study of 25 video game players will include real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, Stellaris and Company of Heroes.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Science & Technology News

Meet Ella: New Zealand Police unveil first artificial intelligence officer

February 19, 2020

The police have unveiled their first AI officer, with hopes she’ll soon be smiling and blinking out of screens in stations all around New Zealand.

Ella, the artificial intelligence cop at the centre of the police’s new digital services, was revealed at the police national headquarters in Wellington this morning.

Ella, which stands for Electronic Lifelike Assistant, is part of two new digital kiosks police have designed to help reduce queues in stations and to provide a modern way to connect with the public.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

8 powerful examples of AI for good

February 17, 2020

Amid the cacophony of concern over artificial intelligence (AI) taking over jobs (and the world) and cheers for what it can do to increase productivity and profits, the potential for AI to do good can be overlooked. Technology leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Huawei and Google have entire sections of their business focused on the topic and dedicate resources to build AI solutions for good and to support developers who do. In the fight to solve extraordinarily difficult challenges, humans can use all the help we can get. Here are 8 powerful examples of artificial intelligence for good as it is applied to some of the toughest challenges facing society today.

There are more than 1 billion people living with a disability around the world. Artificial intelligence can be used to amplify these people’s abilities to improve their accessibility. It can facilitate employment, improve daily life and help people living with disabilities communicate. From opening up the world of books to deaf children to narrating what it “sees” to those with visual impairments, apps and tools powered by artificial intelligence are improving accessibility.

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AI, Big Data, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

An algorithm that can spot cause and effect could supercharge medical AI

February 15, 2020

The technique, inspired by quantum cryptography, would allow large medical databases to be tapped for causal links

Understanding how the world works means understanding cause and effect. Why are things like this? What will happen if I do that? Correlations tell you that certain phenomena go together. Only causal links tell you why a system is as it is or how it might evolve. Correlation is not causation, as the slogan goes.

This is a big problem for medicine, where a vast number of variables can be interlinked. Diagnosing diseases depends on knowing which conditions cause what symptoms; treating diseases depends on knowing the effects of different drugs or lifestyle changes. Untangling such knotty questions is typically done via rigorous observational studies or randomized controlled trials.

These create a wealth of medical data, but it is spread across different data sets, which leaves many questions unanswered. If one data set shows a correlation between obesity and heart disease and another shows a correlation between low vitamin D and obesity, what’s the link between low vitamin D and heart disease? Finding out typically requires another clinical trial.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Internet of Things, Science & Technology News

How AI is helping reinvent the world of manufacturing

February 14, 2020

Throughout each industrial era, the companies best able to embrace change have become the most likely to succeed. This dates back to the development of steam and combustion engines through to electricity, microprocessors and now artificial intelligence.

In The Future Computed: AI and Manufacturing, Microsoft Senior Director Greg Shaw explores how AI, automation and the internet of things (IoT) present new challenges and opportunities.

Here are some of the manufacturers already demonstrating how the latest tech advances are changing the way they work.

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AI, Automation, Employment, Science & Technology News

There’s a new obstacle to landing a job after college: Getting approved by AI

January 30, 2020

San Francisco (CNN)College career centers used to prepare students for job interviews by helping them learn how to dress appropriately or write a standout cover letter. These days, they’re also trying to brace students for a stark new reality: They may be vetted for jobs in part by artificial intelligence

At schools such as Duke University, Purdue University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, career counselors are now working to find out which companies use AI and also speaking candidly with students about what, if anything, they can do to win over the algorithms. This shift in preparations comes as more businesses interested in filling internships and entry-level positions that may see a glut of applicants turn to outside companies such as HireVue to help them quickly conduct vast numbers of video interviews.

With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance.

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AI, Amazon.com, communication, Science & Technology News

Amazon’s AI automatically dubs videos into other languages

January 28, 2020

Ever wish you could automatically dub foreign film dialogue into another tongue? Amazon is on the case. In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers from the tech giant detailed a novel “speech-to-speech” pipeline that taps AI to align translated speech with original speech and fine-tune speech duration before adding background noise and reverberation. They say that it improves the perceived naturalness of dubbing and highlights the relative importance of each proposed step.

As the paper’s coauthors note, automatic dubbing involves transcribing speech to text and translating that text into another language before generating speech from the translated text. The challenge isn’t simply conveying the same content of the source audio, but matching the original timbre, emotion, duration, prosody (i.e., patterns of rhythm and sound), background noise, and reverberation.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Law Enforcement, new technology, Science & Technology News

AI can help find illegal opioid sellers online. And wildlife traffickers. And counterfeits.

January 26, 2020

Tablets suspected by the Drug Enforcement Administration to be fentanyl. Don Emmert/Getty Images

The government is investing in an AI-based tool that could help catch illegal opioid sales on the internet. But the same approach could find lots of other illicit transactions.

An estimated 130 people die from opioid-related drug overdoses each day in the United States, and 2 million people had an opioid use disorder in 2018. This public health crisis has left officials scrambling for ways to cut down on illegal sales of these controlled substances, including online sales.

Now the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, is investing in an artificial intelligence-based tool to track how “digital drug dealers” and illegal internet pharmacies market and sell opioids (though online transactions are likely not a large share of overall illegal sales).

New AI-based approaches to clamping down on illegal opioid sales demonstrate how publicly available social media and internet data — even the stuff you post — can be used to find illegal transactions initiated online. It could also be used to track just about anything else, too: The researcher commissioned by NIDA to build this tool, UC San Diego professor Timothy Mackey, told Recode the same approach could be used to find online transactions associated with illegal wildlife traffickers, vaping products, counterfeit luxury products, and gun sales.

Continue reading… “AI can help find illegal opioid sellers online. And wildlife traffickers. And counterfeits.”