AI – Page 66 – Impact Lab

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Food, Science & Technology News

AI trained on decades of food research is making brand-new foods

March 8, 2019

IRON CHEF

IBM’s AI scientists teamed up with McCormick & Company’s food developers to enhance food research.

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You may not think that Tuscan chicken’s creamy, garlicky flavor is due for a high-tech upgrade, but advanced artificial intelligence is on the case all the same. An AI algorithm is about to analyze and improve that and other classic recipes before designing some brand-new foods as well.

And if it goes well, we can expect AI to play a bigger role in developing the foods we eat every day. Right now, some big names are working to amass the expertise of all the world’s food experts, head chefs, and flavor scientists into a single artificial intelligence algorithm that concocts new foods better and faster than any mere human.

Continue reading… “AI trained on decades of food research is making brand-new foods”

AI, Augmented Reality, Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Ideas, Science & Technology News

Magic Leap wants to build AR “Layers” over the entire earth

March 5, 2019

Augmented reality startup Magic Leap wants to merge the digital and the physical worlds.

In October, CEO Rony Abovitz first shared the idea of the “Magicverse,” a series of digital layers that would exist in AR over the physical world.

On Saturday, the company elaborated on the concept with a blog post and new interview — and its vision of the future is one in which the line between the physical and digital realms blurs until it almost disappears.

Continue reading… “Magic Leap wants to build AR “Layers” over the entire earth”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk, Science & Technology News

AI transforming the world

March 1, 2019

The world is fast evolving, with Artificial intelligence (AI) at the forefront in changing the world and the way we live. This article is Part 1 of a 2 part series.

An important question: What is AI? For many people, it remains unclear what this technology is all about, so this is a good place to start the conversation. AI is a branch in computer science that deals with the intelligent behavior of machines. It is an ingeniously simulated ability of a machine to imitate human behavior and our conventional response patterns. This is made possible with specific algorithms that make the AI function in a specified scope of activities (according to what the algorithm codes for). This means that with AI, many of our everyday activities can now be carried out effectively by programmed machine technology.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

The Big Apple is getting tough on biased AI

February 27, 2019

New York City has a new law on the books demanding “algorithmic accountability,” and AI researchers want to help make it work.

Background: At the end of 2017, the city’s council passed the country’s first bill to ban algorithmic discrimination in city government. It calls for a task force to study how city agencies use algorithms and create a report on how to make algorithms more easily understandable to the public.

Rubber, meet road: But how to actually implement the bill was left up for grabs. Enter AI Now, a research institution at NYU focused on the social impact of AI. The group recommends focusing on things like making sure agencies understand the technology better, and providing a chance for outside groups to look at algorithms.

Why it matters: The federal government has fallen way behind in setting up rules or guidance for AI. What happens in New York could lead the way for the rest of the US.

Via Technology Review

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Corporate Manipulation, Insurance, Science & Technology News

Very risky business: the pros and cons of insurance companies embracing artificial intelligence

February 25, 2019

The enabling technology for insurers to use AI is the ‘ecosystem’ of sensors known as the internet of things.

It’s a new day not very far in the future. You wake up; your wristwatch has recorded how long you’ve slept, and monitored your heartbeat and breathing. You drive to work; car sensors track your speed and braking. You pick up some breakfast on your way, paying electronically; the transaction and the calorie content of your meal are recorded.

Then you have a car accident. You phone your insurance company. Your call is answered immediately. The voice on the other end knows your name and amiably chats to you about your pet cat and how your favourite football team did on the weekend.

You’re talking to a chat-bot. The reason it “knows” so much about you is because the insurance company is using artificial intelligence to scrape information about you from social media. It knows a lot more besides, because you’ve agreed to let it monitor your personal devices in exchange for cheaper insurance premiums.

This isn’t science fiction. More than three-quarters of insurance executives believe artificial intelligence will revolutionise the industry within a few years. By 2030, according to McKinsey futurists, artificial intelligence will mean your car and life insurance premiums could change based on whether you decide to take one route or another.

Continue reading… “Very risky business: the pros and cons of insurance companies embracing artificial intelligence”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Employment, Science & Technology News

Here’s when machines will take your job, as predicted by A.I. gurus

February 25, 2019

An MIT study predicts when artificial intelligence will take over for humans in different occupations.

While technology develops at exponential speed, transforming how we go about our everyday tasks and extending our lives, it also offers much to worry about. In particular, many top minds think that automation will cost humans their employment, with up to 47% of all jobs gone in the next 25 years. And chances are, this number could be even higher and the massive job loss will come earlier.

So when will your job become obsolete? Researchers at the University of Oxford surveyed the world’s best artificial intelligence experts to find out when exactly machines will be better at humans in various occupations.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, Science & Technology News

The AI text generator that’s too dangerous to make public

February 19, 2019

IN 2015, CAR-AND-ROCKET man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.

The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.

“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.

Continue reading… “The AI text generator that’s too dangerous to make public”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, IBM

IBM AI fails to beat human debating champion

February 17, 2019

Harish Natarajan triumphed over the bot in a rapid-fire challenge.

After suffering defeat to AI at Go and Dota 2, the battle between man and machine was starting to look a little one-sided. But a human has finally notched up a win against our future robot overlords. Champion debater Harish Natarajan triumphed in a live showdown against IBM’s Miss Debater AI at the company’s Think Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The 2012 European Debate winner and IBM’s black monolith exchanged quick retorts on pre-school subsidies for 25 minutes before the crowd hailed Natarajan the victor. You can watch the debate in full below.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Science & Technology News

AI won’t take your job, people will

February 8, 2019

AI, specifically “augmented intelligence,” is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let’s explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, communication, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

The big deal about an AI model that can talk like you

February 6, 2019

Meryl Streep is pitch perfect as the narrator of the Norah Ephron novel Heartburn. In the audiobook version, Streep’s classic delivery brings alive the emotional turmoil as well as the self-deprecating wit of Rachel Samstat, who has just found out about her husband’s affair. In the Harry Potter audiobooks, it’s singer-actor Jim Dale who creates the magic.

Now let’s say you are discomforted by American and British accents. You prefer to hear Heartburn and the Potter books in voices you can relate with. You want to switch the genders of the narrators. You want the Muggles speaking in the voice of your favourite Bollywood actor. You want to be the narrator.

Those are real options a Bengaluru startup expects to offer as it develops an artificial intelligence model for cloning voices. It reckons there is massive business opportunity in impersonating voices, and not just from the growing popularity of audiobooks. Think voiceovers for ads, narrations for education-technology platforms, real-time translations, automated responses, voice assistants, smart speakers.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, DNA, Medical Breakthrough

Face-scanning A.I. can help doctors spot unusual genetic disorders

January 25, 2019

Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”

The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.

The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do

January 25, 2019

Generative adversarial networks are not just good for causing mischief. They can also show us how AI algorithms “think.”

GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are the social-media starlet of AI algorithms. They are responsible for creating the first AI painting ever sold at an art auction and for superimposing celebrity faces on the bodies of porn stars. They work by pitting two neural networks against each other to create realistic outputs based on what they are fed. Feed one lots of dog photos, and it can create completely new dogs; feed it lots of faces, and it can create new faces.

As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s become more important with our increasing reliance on algorithms.

Continue reading… “A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do”