Retailers Spending $ On AI

Retailers are planning to spend more on AI, with customer service and sentiment analytics receiving the most attention.  A key tool for retailers seeking to improve their customer experience will be applying AI to understand customer reaction to the products purchased and the service received.

Breaking down retail spending in 2022, three types of technology tools lead the list in a study customer service and sentiment analytics by 54%, AI-based automated marketing by 30% and demand forecasting by 16%.

AI-backed demand forecasting is rapidly becoming a key tool for retailers. For example, major, specific shopping days like the Black Friday phenomena, make understanding customer demand and correct planning more important than ever.

With the rise of the internet, many thought that physical stores would become outmoded and irrelevant, but this has not occurred, although some retailers are under pressure by the rise of e-commerce. Many are, of course, with Toys R Us entering bankruptcy protection last fall as a prime example, while still others are expanding their physical presence including many direct-to-consumer brands. 

 

 

Judges in Various States Rely On Artificial Intelligence To Determine Jailtime

 

Cleveland and a growing number of other local and state courts, judges are now guided by computer algorithms before ruling whether criminal defendants can go free have to stay locked up awaiting trial.

A bipartisan bail reform movement has found an alternative to cash bail: AI algorithms that can scour through large sets of courthouse data to search for associations and predict which people are most likely to flee or commit another crime.

Experts say the use of these risk assessments may be the biggest shift in courtroom decision-making since American judges began accepting social science and other expert evidence more than a century ago.

Critics, however, worry that such algorithms could end up superseding a judges’ own judgment, and might even perpetuate biases in ostensibly neutral form.

States such as New Jersey, Arizona, Kentucky, and Alaska have adopted these tools. Defendants who receive low scores are recommended for release under court supervision.

Among other things, such algorithms aim to reduce biased rulings that could be influenced by a defendant’s race, gender or clothing — or maybe just how cranky a judge might be feeling after missing breakfast.

The AI system used in New Jersey, developed by the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation, uses nine risk factors to evaluate a defendant, including age and past criminal convictions. But it excludes race, gender, employment history and where a person lives.

It also excludes a history of arrests, which can stack up against people more likely to encounter police — even if they’re not found to have done anything.

An investigative report by ProPublica found that a commercial system called Compas used to help determine prison sentences for convicted criminals, was falsely flagging black defendants as likely future criminals almost twice as frequently as white defendants.

Other experts have questioned those findings, and the U.S. Supreme Court last year declined to take up a case of a Wisconsin man who argued the use of gender as a factor in the Compas assessment violated his rights.

Advocates of the AI approach argue that the people in robes are still in charge. Others worry the algorithms will make judging more rote over time. Research has shown that people tend to follow specific advisory guidelines in lieu of their own judgment, said Bernard Harcourt, a law professor at Columbia.

Artificial Intelligence & Sales

Bank  tellers are becoming fewer with each day.  ATM machines have taken the over -and there is no doubt that the automated systems have proved to do a much perfect job than humans. Companies are investing in technology –basically to replace salespeople and other replaceable labor force. Salespeople making strange six and seven figures will be removed if they cannot prove their worth to remain in the employment. That’s because artificial intelligence has confirmed to be far much stronger than man’s intelligence

Robotic Lawyers On The Rise

The list of occupations that will be decimated by artificial intelligence and automation is becoming larger and larger with drivers, translators and shop assistants under threat from the rise of the robots,.Now you can add lawyers to the list.

A contest that took place last month pitched over 100 lawyers from many of London’s ritziest firms against an artificial intelligence program called Case Cruncher Alpha.

Both the humans and the AI were given the basic facts of hundreds of PPI (payment protection insurance) and asked to predict whether the Financial Ombudsman would allow a claim.

In all, they submitted 775 predictions and the computer won hands down, with Case Cruncher getting an accuracy rate of 86.6%, compared with 66.3% for the lawyers.

Case Cruncher is not the product of a tech giant but the brainchild of four Cambridge law students. They started out with a simple chatbot that answered legal questions – a bit of a gimmick but it caught on.

Two judges oversaw the competition, Cambridge law lecturer Felix Steffek and Ian Dodd from a company called Prediction, which runs one of the world’s biggest databases of legal cases. He says the youthful Case Cruncher team chose the subject for the contest well.

Ian Dodd thinks AI may replace some of the grunt work done by junior lawyers and paralegals but no machine can talk to a client or argue in front of a High Court judge. He puts it simply: “The knowledge jobs will go, the wisdom jobs will stay.”

New Anatomy App Allows You To See Your Organs

Ed Barton and his UK-based startup Curiscope created a blend of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Using an anatomy VR app and the company’s Virtuali-Tee, a t-shirt, they are allowing people to see inside of their own chest cavities. This technology works using a highly-stylized QR code printed on the front of the t-shirt. When you scan the code with the corresponding app, you can explore throughout the chest cavity, including the heart and lungs.

 

 

New Technology For Booking Travel

Instead of entering a hotel search and receiving a page with hundreds of options, new data-driven travel agents—using humans, AI or both—are tailoring options based on a traveler’s personal preferences. These new agents use chatbots or messaging to communicate with travel bookers. Elaine Glusac, writing at The New York Times, offers these examples of data-driven travel planners.

Pana caters to frequent travelers. For a monthly fee, Pana is available 24 hours. It uses member profiles and past trips to funnel travel requests to human agents.

Mezi uses chatbots to handle travel booking. If a complicated issue arises then humans get involved; afterward they train the bots to handle it in the future. The more you book with Mezi, the more it learns about your preferences.

Savanti Travel helps frequent travelers cut costs while gaining status with travel companies. It doesn’t operate on commission to avoid the urge to find more expensive bookings.

Hello Hipmunk is a travel-planning messaging system. It runs through Facebook Messenger, Skype or Slack, and lets you topic hop as if you were talking to a human. It can offer tips such as on the cheapest times to travel.

Flightfox specializes in complicated itineraries. The service books flights only; for a fee, agents find the best prices and send you links so you can do the booking yourself. It also uses points systems to find the best deals.

The Future Of Healthcare & What They’re Saying

 

By 2019, 3D printing is expected to be a crucial tool in up to 35 per cent of surgeries.

In 2021, artificial intelligence (AI) is due to assist doctors in treating patients.

AI ‘chatbots’ are expected to outperform humans at some surgical procedures in 2030.

And in 2035, our senses will be able to be upgraded with implants that detect X-rays.

In the future, patients will still need specialists with expert knowledge but the difference is that advanced AI systems will assist healthcare practitioners by providing clinical and medical solutions; sometimes eliminating the need to see a doctor at all.

 

Microsoft Research Developing Classroom Technology To Assess Children’s Reading Ability

Microsoft Research is developing technology which may end up in the next version Microsoft’s classroom software. In a recent publication, Microsoft Research describes an AI-driven system which could help teachers automatically assess reading performance for students, saving them time and allowing more individual attention to students who need it the most. Their research paper, “Automatic Evaluation of Children Reading Aloud on Sentences and Pseudo words,” automatically predicts the overall reading aloud ability of primary school children (6-10 years old), based on the reading of sentences and pseudo words.

 

Voice Imitation & Fake Videos ?

 

Just imagine a world where anyone could create a photo-realistic and make who ever they want to say whatever they want. Add to that the ability to write a script and have a machine recite it back with the perfectly indistinguishable intonation of the person featured. Well it’s here!

A Montreal-based AI startup has recently revealed a new voice imitation technology that could signal the end of trusting your ears, meaning pretty soon there could be a cloud of doubt over literally every “recording” you see and hear.

Three PhD students at the University of Montreal developed Lyrebird, a deep learning algorithm that reportedly needs only a 60-second sample of a person’s voice to be able to generate a synthesized copy. While the company touts applications such as speech synthesis for people with disabilities, it’s clear this technology is opening a Pandora’s box of future complications.

Lyrebird has a dedicated “Ethics” page on its website, openly discussing the potentially dangerous consequences of the technology. The company intends to release the technology publicly and make it available to anyone, with the idea being that demonstrating so visibly how voices can be artificially faked. We will all learn to become skeptical of audio recordings we hear in the future. Everyone will learn to become skeptical of audio recordings we hear in the future.

Adobe revealed aproject in late 2016 called VoCo.

 

 

 

IBM’s Has A Five Year Plan to Remake Healthcare

A silicon wafer designed to sort particles found in bodily fluids for the purpose of early disease detection.

IBM’s research labs are already working on a chip that can diagnose a potentially fatal condition faster than the best lab in the country, a camera that can see so deeply into a pill it can tell if its molecular structure has more in common with a real or counterfeit tablet, and a system that can help identify if a patient has a mental illness just from the words they use.

More work have to be done before the systems are ready for rolling out commercially. The next few years could also see IBM using artificial intelligence and new analytical techniques to produce a ‘lab on a chip’ — a pocket-sized device that would be able to analyse a single drop of blood or other bodily fluid to find evidence of bacteria, viruses, or elements like proteins that could be indicative of an illness.

 Digital manufacturing and 3D printing type technologies can put sensors in custom designed probes, which would effectively do the analysis and tell the medical professionals what they’re looking for.Rather than having to wait days or weeks after a blood test for a virus to be cultured enough for it to be identified, these tiny labs on a chip could pick up the smallest traces of the organism.

Perhaps its greatest use, however, could be allowing people to know about health conditions before any symptoms begin to show.

While analyzing the contents of a drop of blood at a nanoscale level will need huge AI processing power, the real challenge for IBM in bringing labs on a chip to market is in the silicon. Mental health, however, is one area where artificial intelligence will chew up vast quantities of data and turn it into useful information for clinicians. Over the next two years, IBM will be creating a prototype of a machine learning system that can help mental health professionals diagnose patients just from the content of their speech.

Speech is already one of the key components that doctors and psychiatrists will use to detect the onset of mental illness, checking for signs including the rate, volume, and choice of words. Now, IBM is hoping that artificial intelligence can do the same, by analyzing what a patient says or writes — from their consultations with a doctor or the content of their Twitter feeds.

IBM already has form with such tools: one of the first commercial uses of Watson, Big Blue’s cognitive computing system, was as a doctor’s assistant for cancer care. Now the company is working with hospitals and other partners to build prototypes for other cognitive tools in healthcare. IBM hopes using machine learning will make the process faster and give an additional layer of insight.

 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Robot Jarvis

Over the last year, though, Zuckerberg has spent between 100 and 150 hours on his home project. Zuckerberg’s project consist of coding with the creation of Jarvis. Morgan Freeman is the voice of Jarvis. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan use a custom iPhone app or a Facebook Messenger bot to turn lights on and off, play music based on personal tastes, open the front gate for friends, make toast, and even wake up their one-year-old daughter Max with Mandarin lessons.

More Here

Artificial Intelligence & Dubai Police Dept

 

In addition to its fleet of supercars, the Dubai Police are now enlisting the help of Crime Prediction software(Credit: Abdullah AlBargan via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0))

The Dubai Police department not only have luxury cars, they also have artificial intelligence crime prediction software.

The Dubai Police is the latest to have AI backup, in the form of Space Imaging Middle East’s (SIME) new Crime Prediction software.

SIME’s software is said to work like others already in use: machine learning algorithms are fed existing data and intelligence from police databases to identify patterns that human crime analysts might miss. The system can then use those patterns to determine where crime may be likely to occur next, and inform a police force where to best deploy officers and other resources. The idea isn’t just to go there and arrest suspicious-looking people, but to use a larger police presence in an area to deter crime from happening in the first place.

Does It Work? Police departments in various US cities have been using systems like Predpol, HunchLab and Series Finder for years, with mixed results and uneasy moral implications. After using HunchLab for 12 months, the St Louis County Police department expects a drop in this year’s crime statistics, but the results are hard to measure as a direct effect of predictive policing.

SIME hasn’t given many details on exactly how its system works or if it’s built to overcome some of these issues, but others like HunchLab are actively trying to be transparent about its inner workings.

The White house Report On Artificial Intelligence & America’s Employees

The White House released a new report this week entitled Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy, as part of an admirable but very flawed initiative to understand the impact of the new technology on American employees.

The White House said, “Accelerating AI capabilities will enable automation of some tasks that have long required human labor”. The report says some low wage jobs will become obsolete. Research consistently finds that the jobs that are threatened by automation are highly concentrated among lower-paid, lower-skilled, and less-educated workers. This means that automation will continue to put downward pressure on demand for this group, putting downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on inequality.  Robots are taking orders and making food; customers are growing accustomed to the lack of human interaction.

These transformations will open up new opportunities for individuals, the economy, and society, on the other hand, has the potential to disrupt the current livelihoods of millions of Americans. Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality over the long-run depends not only on the technology itself but also on the institutions and policies that are in place. 

The advent of computers and the Internet raised the relative productivity of higher skilled workers. Routine-intensive occupations that focused on predictable, easily-programmable tasks—such as switchboard operators, filing clerks, travel agents, and assembly line workers— were particularly vulnerable to replacement by new technologies. Some occupations were virtually eliminated and demand for others reduced. Research suggests that technological innovation over this period increased the productivity of those engaged in abstract thinking, creative tasks, and problem-solving and was therefore at least partially responsible for the substantial growth in jobs employing such traits. Shifting demand towards more skilled labor raised the relative pay of this group, contributing to rising inequality. AI is not a single technology, but rather a collection of technologies that are applied to specific tasks, the effects of AI will be felt unevenly through the economy. Some tasks will be more easily automated than others, and some jobs will be affected more than others—both negatively and positively. Some jobs may be automated away, while for others, AI-driven automation will make many workers more productive and increase demand for certain skills. Finally, new jobs are likely to be directly created in areas such as the development and supervision of AI as well as indirectly created in a range of areas throughout the economy as higher incomes lead to expanded demand. Recent research suggests that the effects of AI on the labor market in the near term will continue the trend that computerization and communication innovations have driven in recent decades. Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent.

The report suggests three broad strategies for addressing the impacts of AI-driven automation across the whole U.S. economy:

1. Invest in and develop AI for its many benefits;
2. Educate and train Americans for jobs of the future; and
3. Aid workers in the transition and empower workers to ensure broadly shared growth.

 

 

Artificial Intelligence & Fake News

Research into artificial intelligence and deep-learning neural networks is now expanding into multimedia manipulation, a field that may have deep implications for news and social media in coming years. AI researchers have been successfully creating 3D face models from still 2D images, generating sound effects from silent video, and even mapping the facial expressions of actors onto other people in videos. So far, these technologies have only been used to make amusing YouTube videos, but in the future they could be used to generate completely believable fake news.

Smile Vector, a Twitter bot that can make any still photo of a person’s face smile. The app uses a neural network powered by deep learning to automatically morph the expressions on a still photo.

it is believed that this new technology will be useful in the creative industries, allowing anyone from furniture designers to video game developers to use in new ideas. . The creators of a program called Face2Face have released a demo video showing the facial expressions of an actor being realistically projected onto the faces of Trump, Putin, and Obama. The new Adobe VoCo software allows a user to re-write any recorded speech or use this technology to have any celebrity or world leader appear to be saying something that they did not in reality.

 

Facebook Creating Artificial Intelligence To flag Offensive Live Videos

Facebook  is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams,  using artificial intelligence to monitor content.

The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site.

Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts. Facebook has been increasingly using artificial intelligence with “an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to their policies.

Facebook Will Have Artificial Intelligence filters IN Photos

The new software uses deep neural networks to transform photographs and live video into images that resemble famous artworks. This is different from other products that achieve a similar result by farming out the calculations to algorithms running on the cloud, Facebook’s offering will actually perform all the computation on your phone.

More On AI & Facebook 

Ethnicity Of Developers & AI

Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab told President Obama that” it may upset some of his students at MIT, but one of his concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us. They think AI is an answer to “all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us… Everybody needs to understand how AI behaves is important… because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI”.

Pondering questions:

If a health care AI system is designed by white males will it skew towards protecting the health of that group?

If the government uses AI systems for future services will it be fair to everyone?

AI systems learn from studying human behavior;However, there are large differences between people. For example: AI systems serving a Hispanic community will require AI systems trained on that population. It will require ethnic profiling.

Similarly, the best AI systems will understand women’s needs and will learn from profiling that population.

Questionable Issues: Will AI systems for African-Americans have to be developed by African-Americans in order to be accepted? Women for women, etc?

 

Artificial Intelligence, Racism & The Whitehouse

 

Artificial intelligence is currently being used by law enforcement across North America to identify convicts at risk of re-offending and high-risk areas for crime. However,recent reports reveal that  AI will disproportionately target or otherwise disadvantage people of colour. 

Example: If a data set contains a bunch of faces of mostly white people, or if the workers who assembled a more diverse dataset (even unintentionally) rated white faces as being more attractive than non-white faces, then any computer program trained on that data would likely “believe” that white people are more attractive than non-white.

Read The Report Here

More On It Here

View my Archives about AI & Beauty pagents

Japanese Robot Writes Novel & Almost Wins Prize

 A Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn’t win the competition’s final prize, this time.

The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or “Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi” in Japanese. Although the narrative did’nt win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, however, it did come close.The novel was written by a very human team that led the AI program’s development. Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI “write” the novel autonomously. One of the team’s two submissions to the competition made it past the first round of screening, despite a blind reading policy that prevents judges from knowing whether an AI was involved in the writing process.

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X-Ray Vision Technology

Scientists are working on  a new technology that could give us ‘X-ray’ vision with the ability to track moving humans hiding in closed rooms or behind walls. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are using low-cost wi-fi technology to develop the system that spots movement of people in rooms or behind walls.

Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science say they wanted to create a device that is low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors. This new system, called “Wi-Vi”, is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power wi-fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall. As a wi-fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any humans on the other side.  The system uses two transmit antennas and a single receiver. The two antennas transmit almost identical signals, except that the signal from the second receiver is the inverse of the first. As a result, the two signals interfere with each other in such a way as to cancel each other out. Since any static objects that the signals hit – including the wall – create identical reflections, they too are cancelled out by this nulling effect.In this way, only those reflections that change between the two signals, such as those from a moving object, arrive back at the receiver,” researcher Fadel Adib said.

When the person moves behind the wall, all reflections from static objects are cancelled out, and the only thing registered by the device is the moving human.