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From vision to reality: the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare sector – Health Europa

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

It has been a landmark year for Artificial Intelligence. What was once the reserve of science fiction is now becoming an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. From voice-controlled digital assistants in our homes to customer service chat bots, AI is now entrenched in the mass market. Most significantly, it has also been a year in which AI in healthcare has put down roots for a more radical transformation.

AI and machine learning have been quietly revolutionising the health sector for years by delivering everything from robotic surgery and 3D image analysis to intelligence biosensors that allow diagnoses and treatments to be managed remotely. But while the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating, it has also catalysed technological developments in and awareness of healthcare AI. In the first quarter of 2020 alone, almost $1bn was invested in AI-focused healthcare start-ups and a recent projection shows the global industry growing at a rate of 44% until 2026.

The potential uses of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare sector are vast, and the technology is rapidly gaining momentum with investors as a result. With its applications ranging from disease prevention and diagnostics to acute care and long-term disease management, the industry is reaching a tipping point in 2020 and AI is finally becoming mainstream.

Yet it still seems we have only scratched the surface; and like any revolution witnessed in real time, the possibilities are seemingly limitless. For healthcare providers and associated organisations, it remains a real challenge to turn vision into reality. To move from testing to regular use, and to change the patient experience more fundamentally, organisations wanting to engage with AI must approach the issue strategically.

The technology behind Artificial Intelligence is evolving at breakneck speed, but the real test of an organisation is how it can harness and implement that technology for its own ends. The pressure of the pandemic has no doubt accelerated innovations, but before we look at how they can be put into practice, it is useful to consider what AI actually is and what it looks like in a healthcare setting.

At its core AI is machine learning, which is comprised of three cognitive nodes: computer vision, natural language processing and data inference. Computer vision is the eyes of AI, as it is capable of recognising visual patterns, objects, scenes and activities in digital imagery far quicker humans. Natural language processing refers to the technology that recognises and understands spoken language. Structured data inference is the technology that uses data, most often numerical, to solve problems. We have seen exciting developments for healthcare in all three in 2020.

Take natural language processing, which has come under the spotlight during the pandemic as healthcare providers have been forced to move operations online. The telehealth industry has grown exponentially because it has enabled providers to automate and streamline basic services in order to free up resources to deal with the crisis. In France, for instance, telemedicine appointments increased from 10,000 to a staggering 500,000 per week during the initial peak of the pandemic.

Recent developments in AI show that telehealth can be more than a platform for consultation. One startup, Vocalis Health, is exploring the use of voice data as a biomarker for disease progression. Using AI, the technology can detect signs of pulmonary hypertension in specific segments of speech, which can be recorded into a smartphone. Similar efforts are being focused on voice-based COVID-19 screening apps and also on using data to track neurological conditions like Parkinsons disease. The potential for this is significant and it promises to elevate telehealth to whole new level.

Huge strides in healthcare AI have been made by larger operations too, such as Alphabets AI subsidiary DeepMind. In November, DeepMinds AlphaFold project revealed it had in large part resolved a half-century-old challenge for scientists by understanding how a protein folds into a unique three-dimensional shape. This paves the way for a much greater understanding of diseases and the creation of designer medicines. On a wider scale, it even can help break down plastic pollution. Once more, the implications are enormous and not only for research scientists but for the role of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare sector as a whole.

AIs ability to solve incredibly complex problems using huge sets of data far surpasses our own; and for the decades ahead, the sky really is the limit for the businesses pioneering change so how can a healthcare provider think about effectively building-in such developments into strategy?

Artificial Intelligence is a vast field with many potential applications. There is no single, fool proof blueprint for its implementation, so healthcare organisations looking to harness its potential must make choices that fit their financial and technical capabilities.

The first key question that providers should ask themselves before embarking on their AI journey is: do we have the capacity to build out these capabilities in-house? Having the internal resources, proprietary data and capital to develop AI solutions in-house comes with obvious benefits in terms of control, but businesses will need to decide for themselves whether its realistic given their goals and timeline.

Next, should we consider partnerships or acquisitions? Even with the best resources and in-house capabilities, partnerships can rapidly increase the development and deployment of AI systems and tools. Investments in AI start-ups or acquisitions of smaller companies can also give an organisation fast access to development phases and provide greater expertise and capabilities.

Finally, businesses will need to think about which key enablers will accelerate their AI strategy. This means thinking about everything from building or acquiring new technologies, to leadership alignment and team allocation.

We know that AI can transform many aspects of healthcare; and as we have seen this year, it is evolving rapidly on a global scale. However, healthcare providers engaging with AI face specific challenges, especially when implementing it.

Data is AIs raison dtre: without a continuous supply of data, AI technology simply could not have achieved what it has to date. However, it can also be a nuisance for organisations which are grappling with the challenge of dirty data, which is not yet standardised and remains disparate. Privacy protocols and security requirements present additional barriers to progress, but as they concern protections for patient rights, these are hills that must be climbed. Consent for the use of patients data and the need to address perceived bias in algorithms are additional ethical issues of which all organisations must be wary.

Necessity is the mother of invention, which explains in part why so much ground has been made this year. However, the healthcare business model could do more to incentivise innovation. While there is a broad range of industry players in this sector, larger technology companies are known to lure talent away from start-ups, who also face difficulties scaling up their products without partnerships.

These challenges are certainly real, but they are by no means insurmountable. While the success of engaging with AI relies on careful preparation, it is an innovation that is not just worth pursuing, but one that will be integral to healthcares story in the years to come. As such, organisations need to prioritise AI initiatives and plan for implementation. On a basic level, this means ensuring leadership is on board and the right talent is being supported.

Many organisations throughout the healthcare chain are already deep into their digital transformation journey. While some of these will have well-developed AI strategies in play, others will not. It is worth bearing in mind that the road to AI-enabled healthcare is long, which makes having a strategy to turn vision into reality key to a successful journey.

Overall, approaches may vary and will be dependent on specialism and sub-sector. But what sets healthcare ahead of other industries is the universal recognition of the power of AI and machine learning, and the sheer scale from start-ups to multinational companies involved.

The medical landscape of tomorrow is likely to look very different, but it is down to healthcare organisations across the board to steer their own path in a future defined by Artificial Intelligence.

This article is from issue 16 ofHealth Europa.Clickhere to get your free subscription today

Needed: People To Put The Intelligence In Artificial Intelligence – Forbes

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

People put the intelligence in artificial intelligence

Is the digital workforce ready to take over? Well, not quite. Artificial intelligence may be capable of assuming many tasks, but it will be some time, if ever, that it could replace jobs on a widespread basis. It simply has too many limitations.

Instead, we need to acquaint a generation of workers with technologies to take on the more mundane, repetitive portions of their jobs, and in turn elevate their decision-making roles within enterprises. Thats the word from Steve Shwartz,AI author, researcher and investor, who points out that the notion of AI taking jobs is a myth. However, AI will have a profound impact on employment.

Shwartz, author of the just-published book Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity, points out that many people are concerned that intelligent robots will be able to read manuals, take courses, and eliminate all our jobs. Fortunately, this is science fiction.

Todays AI systems are only capable of learning functions that relate a set of inputs to a set of outputs, he says. This simple paradigm has enabled fantastic technological accomplishments such as facial recognition, language translation, and cars that can see and avoid pedestrians. However, these learned functions have no more intelligence than a function that translates Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius temperatures.

It would take a huge breakthrough to create intelligent robots, and todays AI researchers have only vague ideas about how to create such a breakthrough, Shwartz says. Such a breakthrough is about as likely as time travel.

The bottom line is that any job that requires commonsense reasoning is safe; probably for our lifetimes. Maybe forever, he continues. People-oriented skills in finance, marketing, sales, and HR are probably safe. The types of jobs that will be impacted and not necessarily negative impacted are ones that involve repetitive decision-making that can be learned by AI systems.

Rather than replace jobs, AI is replacing tasks especially repetitive, data-oriented analyses are candidates for automation by AI systems. If it is possible to create a large training set of examples in which each example is labeled with the correct answer, that analysis can likely be learned by an AI system, says Shwartz.

Another task category that AI will enhance is repetitive customer service interactions, he continues. AI-based chatbots are assuming more customer-service work, and customer service jobs that involve a human following a script to interact with customers are at the most risk. Human interactions that require real, unscripted conversations are not at risk.

For non-technical careers, the greatest impact is the availability of massive amounts of data, Shwartz says. The field of marketing has already been transformed by data. Marketers analyze data from Google to determine which keywords to buy. They analyze huge amounts of customer data to determine which campaigns should be targeted to which customers. And they analyze massive databases of web traffic to determine what changes to make to their websites. Todays marketers need to be data analysts. Most companies are relying more and more on data to drive the business. Many formerly non-technical jobs now require extensive data analysis. Workers who do not adapt will be left behind.

While AI will be replacing many repetitive tasks and amplifying intelligence through data, the most exciting opportunities will be seen with the creation of new types of businesses. Shwartz was a founder of one of the first AI companies, Cognitive Systems, in 1986. As an angel investor, Shwartz now sees large numbers of startups whose business models are only possible because of AI technology: Computer-vision technology enables computers and robots to identify objects, faces, and activities. Startups are developing in-store products that identify customers and provide highly personalized offers direct to their smartphones. Companies are developing surveillance products for law enforcement and the military. Startups are creating AI-based medical applications to read MRIs and diagnose diseases. Other vendors are using other types of AI technology to detect fraud and stop cyber-attacks, analyze legal documents, predict the weather, improve search results, and even design golf clubs.

Along with achieving greater sophistication and better mimicking human reasoning, AI also brings additional challenges, Shwartz relates. Computer-vision systems have been shown to be biased against minorities. It is not only unethical for companies to roll out biased systems, but also bad for business. In Europe, due to GDPR regulations, it is illegal and similar regulations are almost certain to follow in the US. These biases are often created inadvertently using biased data. Ensuring systems are non-discriminatory can be harder than developing the technology in the first place.

Needed: People To Put The Intelligence In Artificial Intelligence - Forbes

Why Artificial Intelligence May Not Offer The Business Value You Think – CMSWire

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

PHOTO:Adobe

Last September, Gartner published its Hype Cycle for AI in which it identified two emerging trends (and five new AI solutions) that would have an impact on the workplace. One of those trends was what Gartner described as the democratization of AI. While there are many ways that this can be interpreted, in simple terms what it meansfor workersis the general distribution and use of AI across the digital workplace to achieve business goals.

In the enterprise, the target deployment of AI is now likely to include customers, business partners, business executives, salespeople, assembly line workers, application developers and IT operations professionals. As AI reaches a larger set of employees and partners, it requires new enterprise roles to deliver it to a wider audience.

While this was an emerging trend last summer, with COVID-19 and the adoption of many new technologies to enable remote working, the widespread use of AI, while still only anecdotal, now appears to be an established fact in the workplace.

Bill Galusha of senior director of marketing at Calsbad, Calif.-based digital intelligence company ABBYY points out, however, that this is not a new phenomena. In the past couple of years, weve seen AI enabling technology like OCR and machine learning become more accessible to non-technical employees and partners through no code/low code platforms, he said.

He points out that thetechnologies designed to help workers understand and extract insights from content have been in high demand as more digital workers increase the number of tasks a knowledge workers have to perform.

In practical terms these new AI platforms enable users to design cognitive skills that are can be easily trained to take unstructured data from type of document like invoices, utility bills, IDs, and contracts, or access trained cognitive skills available through online digital marketplaces. This new approach to making it easy to train machine learning content models and deliver them as skills in a marketplace are certainly going to fuel the online growth and reusability of AI as businesses look to automate all types of content-centric processes across the enterprise, he said.

Related Article:The Risks and Rewards of the Citizen Developer Approach

However, if AI is being used widely across the enterprise, it does not necessarily follow that it is providing business value to every organization, according to Chris Bergh, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based DataKitchen, a DataOps consultancy and platform provider.

AI is being deployed everywhere we look, but there is a problem that no one talks about. Machine learning tools are evolving to make it faster and less costly to develop AI systems. But deploying and maintaining these systems over time is getting exponentially more complex and expensive, he told us.

Data science teams are incurring enormous technical debt by deploying systems without the processes and tools to maintain, monitor and update them. Further, poor quality data sources create unplanned work and cause errors that invalidate results.

This is the heart of the problem and one that is likely to impact the bottom line of any business that uses AI. The AI code or model is a small fraction of what it takes to deploy and maintain a model successfully. This means that the delivery of a system that supports an AI model in an application context, is an order of magnitude more complex than the model itself. You can't manage the lifecycle complexity of AI systems with an army of programmers. The world changes too fast. Data constantly flows and models drift into ineffectiveness. The solution requires workflow automation, he said.

There is another problem for businesses too. Given the explosion in the amount of data that is available to them, at first glance you would think that developing AI was getting easier and, consequently, easier to deploy democratized across the enterprise. Not so, according to Chris Nicholson, CEO of San Francisco-based Pathmind, which develops a SaaS platform that enables businesses to apply reinforcement learning to real-world scenarios without data science expertise.

The real problem, he argues is that you cannot decouple algorithms from data, and the data is not being democratized, or made available, across the organization. In many cases, as with GDPR, the data is getting harder to access and because the data is not being democratized, most startups and companies will not be able to train AI models to perform well, because each team is limited to the data it can access.

In a few cases, a general-purpose machine-learning model, can be trained and made available behind an API. In this case, developers can build products on top of it, and that very particular type of AI is slowly percolating into products and impacting customers lives. But, in most cases, businesses have custom needs that can only be met by training on custom data, and custom data is expensive to collect, store, label and stream, he said. At best, AI is a feature. In the best companies, data scientists embed with developers to understand the ecosystem of the data and the code, and then they embed their algorithms in that flow.

Like the discussion around citizen data scientists (and democratizing data science), business leaders need to know what they want this new democratized AI to do. They will not be able to design and build AI models from scratch; that will always require an understanding of what the underlying methods and parameters do, which requires theoretical knowledge.

Given some gray box AI systems, one can envision such systems learning to solve well-defined classes of problems when they are trained or embedded by non-AI experts, Michael Berthold, Switzerland-based KNIME CEO and co-founder, said. Examples he cites are object recognition in images, speech recognition, or probably also quality control via noise and image tracking. Note that already here choosing the right data is critical so the resulting AI is not already biased by data selection.

I think this area will see growth, and if we consider this democratization of AI, then yes, it will grow, he added. But we will also see many instances where the semi-automated system fails to do what it is supposed to do because the task did not quite fit what it was designed to do, or the user fed it misleading information data.

It is possible to envision a shallower training enabling people to use and train such preconfigured AI systems without understanding all the algorithmic details. Kind of like following boarding instructions to fly on a plane vs. learning how to fly the plane itself.

If organizations take this path to develop AI, there are two ways enterprises can push AI to a broader audience. Simplify the tools and make them more intuitive, David Tareen, director of AI and analytics at Raleigh, N.C-based SAS told us.

Simplified Tools - A tool like conversational AI helps because it makes interacting with AI so much simpler. You do not have to build complex models but you can gain insights from your data by talking with your analytics.

Intuitive Tools - These tools should make AI easier to consume by everyone. This means taking your data and algorithms to the cloud to become cloud native. Becoming cloud native improves accessibility and reduces the cost of AI and analytics for all.

In organizations do this, they will see benefits everywhere. He cites the example of an insurance company that uses AI throughout the organization will reduce the cost of servicing claims, reduce the time to service claims, and improve customer satisfaction compared to the rest of the industry. He adds that some enterprise leaders are also surprised to learn that enabling AI across the enterprise itself involves more than the process itself. Often culture tweaks or an entire cultural change must accompany the process.

Leaders can practice transparency and good communication in their AI initiatives to address concerns, adjust the pace of change, and result in a successful completion of embedding AI and analytics for everyone, everywhere.

Original post:

Why Artificial Intelligence May Not Offer The Business Value You Think - CMSWire

Chess and Artificial Intelligence (1) – Chessbase News

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Frederic Friedel was a science journalist when he co-founded ChessBase in 1987 in Hamburg. It's still the headquarters of the German firm, which has become the world leader in chess software. His partner, the programmer Matthias Wllenweber, created the architecture of the first professional chess database in history: ChessBase 1.0. The iconic Fritz was born in 1991, developed under DOS by Frans Morsch and brought to light under Windows by Mathias Feist.

The "guru" of ChessBase is now 75 years old. He believes that Artificial Intelligence can be the key to the future, so that humans can live better on earth. He is as optimistic and enthusiastic as ever. He expresses his hopes, but also his fears and doubts. How will we coexist with computers of a new type when they have become as intelligent as we are, and even more so?

The following article was based on a telephone discussion conducted in December 2020 by Europe-checs editor Jean-Michel Pechine.

The article appeared in the February 2021 issue of Europe checs, which can be bought here.

Jean-Michel was advised and guided byHenri Assoignon, from the administrative desk of Europe Echecs.

This "general public" game program started modestly, but its computing power developed exponentially. In 2002, Deep Fritz drew a classic match against Kramnik (4-4), as did X3D Fritz against Kasparov in 2003 (2-2). In 2006, Kramnik lost 4-2 to Deep Fritz, and the taste for man-machine matches was over. The German firm continued to improve its flagship programme. Version 15 was developed by Vasik Rajlich, the creator of Rybka. Last November, it launched version 16 of ChessBase. That ushered in a new era by integrating specific revolutionary applications. Artificial Intelligence is in vogue. Frederic Friedel's new child prodigy, Fat Fritz, was launched a year earlier. It is a neural network program. Unlike its predecessors, it was not taught to play chess by human masters. It plays millions of games against itself and draws its own conclusions from them, becoming stronger and stronger. In one year, the prototype has gone from an absolute beginner's level to an Elo rating flirting with 3600 points!

This is the magic of technology and Fredric Friedel is delighted. He views his programs like his own children. How could he have imagined, 34 years ago, that his company would revolutionize the world of chess like no other player or theorist had done before? His meeting with Garry Kasparov in 1985 was decisive. The world champion became involved in the process of creating ChessBase. Kasparov's brute force helped to finish the job. It was the time of the computer pioneers, from Atari to Windows. Like Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Frederic Friedel's desire was to democratise access to high technology. This was also Kasparov's wish, he stresses in his interview. ChessBase offered everyone the opportunity to acquire state-of-the-art tools to prepare themselves, at an affordable cost. Chess became globalised.

With this program we carried out an experiment in Artificial Intelligence" explains Frederic Friedel. We used the same strategy as Google DeepMind with AlphaZero, which was developed by my old friend Demis Hassabis. We created our own program, which we called Fat Fritz. How did we do it? In December 2017, a DeepMind Artificial Intelligence project manager, Thore Grpel, came to see us in Hamburg. He revealed all his secrets to us, and we used the same basic techniques. After that, for a year, I had this very powerful computer right here under my desk. It was playing against itself, all the time, nearly 90,000 games a day in total tens of millions of games. A similar computer in Brazil was retrieving the games and learning from them. This project was led by my friend and colleague Albert Silver.

The only thing we did at the beginning was to teach it the basic rules. How the queen, a rook, a knight move, what is allowed or not allowed (like castling conditions), and the purpose of the game. After its first hundreds of games it played like an absolute idiot. After a few thousand, it started to play at the level of a beginner, and after a few million, Fat Fritz became really strong. It learned what it takes to win. It knew how to evaluate a position. It knew the value of the pieces, the value of a bishop, a knight. It understood that a queen is generally worth eight or nine pawns, depending on the situation. It knew which strategy to adopt. It went on to become the strongest entity that had ever played chess, stronger than Fritz or Komodo.

So Fat Fritz learned all on its own. Chess programmers are among the first human beings to directly experience the power of this new programming technique. The applications are infinite and will develop in all spheres of life. They will touch all fields, science, technology, writing and even the legal world. We can show billions of legal decisions to AI and, again, it learns from each of them. In the end, it may render more competent and fairer verdicts than human judges.

There has been nothing comparable to this revolution since the dawn of humanity. It is as if an alien lifeform had landed on our planet, coming from a distant galaxy. Suddenly we have a machine that may not think like a human being, but it acts in a similar. It may not be able to tell you how it arrives at its decisions. Take the example of chess: if you ask the AI program why one move is better than another, it will tell you: "Because statistically it is 1% better than the next best move." It cannot explain its "reasoning" in human terms. However, this mysterious way of thinking has already made it considerably stronger than the best player in the world.

Fat Fritz's current classification is around 3500 to 3600 Elo. Nobody can beat it, but chess players can use it to try ideas and see how it reacts. You test a novelty or a specific move in a known position and see how it responds. You think, "Oh, that's interesting, it takes the pawn or, on the contrary, why didn't it take it?" I'll explain it to you differently. Fat Fritz can leave a piece hanging. A GM who is analysing this position may say that the program is playing a really rotten move, and will try to demonstrate why. Five moves later, the GM will say: okay, maybe it wasn't a losing move, but whatever it was, it wasn't good. And five moves later, he'll see that it's a winner, that it was a brilliant move!

In the openings, Fat Fritz likes to play 1.e4 and 1.d4, which remain the best moves, according to it. The program will not play 1.h4, for example. Now, we have no idea about its strategy in the openings. It has played millions of games and prefers certain starting patterns. Then we started to show it the games of the best players in history, contained in MegaDatabase. With them, it learned the different styles of play of the humans: aggressive, tactical, positional, strategic, etc. It changed its style in a way that we find very interesting. But it continues playing against itself, to discover things that no human had discovered before. It learns to evaluate positions differently. It also has to discover elementary things, for example that three queens win against zero queens, a situation that never happens in games between humans.

Part two of the interview to follow soon...

The rest is here:

Chess and Artificial Intelligence (1) - Chessbase News

Artificial intelligence helps automation, but can’t tell you where to put your money, Indexa CEO says – Business Insider

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

This is an automated machine translation of an article published by Business Insider in a different language. Machine translations can generate errors or inaccuracies; we will continue the work to improve these translations. You can find the original version here.

The asset management industry is moving at the same pace as the planet as a whole.

Increased digitization and the use of digital tools is taking hold. Artificial intelligence is making its way into the financial industry and one of the debates is whether it can end up doing away with the figure of the manager and whether, in addition, it is the key factor on which indexed management - an investment strategy based on replicating indexes - is focused.

Business Insider Spain has exclusively interviewed Unai Ansejo, CEO of Indexa Capital, a fintech focused on indexed management and with a growing volume of clients, to discuss this series of questions about the future of the investment scheme, as well as delving into the expansion of its range of products with the launch of occupational pension plans.

Focusing on the advantages of artificial intelligence when it comes to managing the assets in which to invest Ansejo expounds that from his professional experience he realizes that long-term savings is not about using an algorithm that beats others, but rather about greatly reducing costs, diversifying and being invested in different areas.

"I'm incredulous of these things," he relates about nonparametrics. "I have analyzed many quantitative investment funds for more than 20 years and they always seemed very good, but then there came a time when something happened or there was any problem," he adds.

Therefore, as he explains, in the end, artificial intelligence is a very broad concept, but they would still be algorithms in which you create a series of entry points to then find an exit.

"What happens is that the process by which inputs become outputs is a black box: you don't know," he says.

At Indexa Capital, they don't use artificial intelligence to build investment models but instead focus on criteria they think are reasonable for how portfolios should be constructed over the long term: diversify a lot, reduce costs, incorporate the effect of direct taxes into portfolio construction. "In my view, AI as such is not the best way to obtain long-term performance," he notes.

Artificial intelligence with a Spanish stamp to revolutionize the financial sector: Ultramarine, the investment technology that stops trading if it detects uncertainty in the market.

Ansejo assures, however, that in the fintech they use technology a lot: "Our goal is that half of our team are technical profiles such as engineers, analysts or developers and we use technology for what needs to be done: automating processes where a person does not contribute any value".

For example, something that automates, as he relates, is that, once the client's portfolio is configured, based on their risk profile, they apply an algorithm that is public to guide how the allocation of their investors should be. "When you already have a model portfolio the daily management of your portfolio, or the request for a withdrawal to find the best fund in which there is a lower tax impact can be automated," he explains.

The Indexa Capital CEO asserts that you can't automate portfolio construction."You can't ask a computer or a machine what to invest in because there are many parameters to take into account," he says.

In this way, Ansejo reveals that to build their portfolios they carry out a quarterly review in which they try to see, among other things, if there is a new asset class in which they can invest cheaply and efficiently.

On the other hand, Indexa Capital has expanded its range of indexed products by incorporating occupational pension plans. "We do it with indexing because we think it's the best way to maximize your options to monetize a portfolio over the long term," he says. "What we have is 32,000 clients for whom this proposition works," he adds.

Along these lines, Ansejo says that they have had pension plans for 4 years and with a very clear vocation: that they should be indexed because they are cheaper. However, they saw that, apart from individual plans, in employment plans (where it is the company that creates a payment plan and contributes for the worker) the solutions available were once again very analogical. "Everything with a lot of paper and regulatory information," he describes.

On the other hand, they were usually active management, oriented towards SMEs and high costs. " So we decided to launch it to make it easier for an SME to have a plan quickly and online, and we did so by incorporating another feature, which is the life cycle," he says.

Ansejo confirms that they incorporated a large dose of innovation: that it could be done digitally, low costs and life cycle. "So, the response we are having is very good, although the amount we have is small, it is normal because in the end, when you create an employment plan you are contributing little by little to your employees," he says.

See the rest here:

Artificial intelligence helps automation, but can't tell you where to put your money, Indexa CEO says - Business Insider

Excerpt: ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power’ by Rajiv Malhotra – Times of India

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

With every passing year, humans become more dependent on technology. That has several advantages but also some dangers, which Rajiv Malhotra reveals in his book, 'Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power'.An internationally acclaimed author who has studied computer science and done extensive research on India's history, Rajiv Malhotra has interesting insights on what artificial intelligence is doing to our nation and how it will affect us in the future. He looks into how artificial intelligence will alter every aspect of our lives, from an international, to national to a personal level.Here is an excerpt of the book to give you an idea on it:Excerpts from 'Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power' by Rajiv MalhotraThe AI-based concentration of power has taken on a terrifying new aspect. When we think of global power, countries like the US, China, and Russia readily come to mind. But today, private companies are accumulating immense power based on their ability to leverage AI and big data as tools to influence, manipulate and even control the minds of people.Some of these private companies may soon become more powerful than many nation-states, but the shift will not be obvious. They will not fly a flag or manage a currency (although some are attempting to launch their own cryptocurrency), and they will not wield military power, at least not directly. However, their unprecedented knowledge of people and things around the world, coupled with their ability to disrupt and alter the physical world and manipulate peoples choices, will lead to a new nexus of power. Such companies will decide who will, and who will not, be given access to this new form of power, and on what terms.Not one Indian company is a player in this league. Most unfortunate is that a large number of talented Indians work for American and Chinese companies in an individual capacity, including in top executive positions, but not as owners. Indians who do own companies tend to sell their stake when the right offer comes along. Whenever innovative entrepreneurs anywhere in the world develop a promising breakthrough, digital giants or venture firms that serve as their proxies are waiting to buy them out. As a result, hundreds of instant millionaires are being created at the individual level, including many living in India.I view this trend as the return of Britains East India Company, which started out in 1600 as a modest private company for the purpose of making profit from lucrative trade with India. Over its 250-year history, the East India Company became the worlds largest private business, amassing more wealth, income and military power than even its own British government. Despite being a private company, it became a colonial powercollecting taxes, operating courts, and running the military and other functions of state across many kingdoms within India. At the time, the East India Company had more ships, soldiers, money and territory under its control than any European government, though now it is remembered as a rogue machine. Since then, the lines between government and private companies have often blurred.

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Excerpt: 'Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power' by Rajiv Malhotra - Times of India

BYU lab works to improve artificial intelligence communication – The Daily Universe – Universe.byu.edu

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

(Left to right) Berkeley Andrus, Nathaniel Robinson, Jay Cui, Ben Cullen, Nathaniel Carlson, Professor Nancy Fulda, Hazar Handal and Nathan Tibbetts are all members of the DRAGN Labs research team. The research team specializes in language communication within artificial intelligence. (Allison McArthur)

BYU research group DRAGN Labs is making big progress in its efforts to better artificial intelligence.

DRAGN is an acronym for Deep Representations and Architectures for Generative systems and Natural language understanding.The teams projects focus on artificial intelligence applications, research and language processing.

BYU professor Nancy Fulda started DRAGN Labs in August 2019 with only a handful of students. Since then the team has seen progress during its research of conversational artificial intelligence.

Computer science graduate student Berkeley Andrus and undergraduate applied and computational mathematics student Nate Robinson have worked under Fulda since the beginning of DRAGN Labs.

Were trying to make computers better at understanding what people say and write, then also be able to speak and write back to us, Andrus said.

DRAGN Lab students meet either in their teams or as an entire group once a week. Andrus said he sees many different backgrounds in the lab, with students majoring in math, computer science and even genetics, and values being able to know who has what specialty and collaborate with them.

A notable project during his time at DRAGN labs was working on natural language understanding. He focused on how video games figured out user speech (what people were saying as they played) and how the computer could respond.

The biggest project from Robinsons team has been creating a new algorithm to control biased language generated by artificial intelligence programs. These programs can generate huge amounts of text and have human-level fluency.

A lot of the time, these programs text is biased or just talks about whatever it wants to, so we created a new algorithm to control what it can or cannot say, he said.

Robinson is currently working on a machine translation project that explores different methods and combinations of un-studied languages.

Sometimes when you finish a project, the end product is really cool to sit back and look at. I think to myself, I made this and nobody understands it better than I do. Some projects take over a year, so its really satisfying to see the final reward, Robinson said.

Andrus said he wishes he could tell students who might be interested in the data or computer science field that BYU is a great environment for trying lots of things.

When starting his major, he said it was difficult to see how research success manifested differently than it might for other career fields. It takes a lot of time, but its really fulfilling.

Excerpt from:

BYU lab works to improve artificial intelligence communication - The Daily Universe - Universe.byu.edu

Artificial intelligence used to monitor patients with chronic diseases and COVID-19 – University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Numerous chronic conditions manifest with unpredictable symptoms, which can sometimes make it difficult for clinicians to take necessary action in a timely manner when tending to patients. Researchers at U.Va. Health working in the field of predictive analytics have created a software that uses artificial intelligence to estimate a patients relative risk by combining physiological data from thousands of previous patients, with a current patient's physiological state. The software is crucial in allowing clinicians to assess a patients risk for deterioration sooner than they normally would, allowing them to take often critical proactive actions towards maintaining the patients health.

Life-threatening conditions such as lung failure, sepsis or acute respiratory distress syndrome can all manifest in a patient without displaying warning signs to clinicians until the patient is in a critically debilitating condition. This can leave providers with limited time to make imperative decisions for patients and may thus threaten chances of survival.

Dr. Randall Moorman, cardiologist and innovator in the field of predictive analytics monitoring, realized this healthcare dilemma early on in his career.

Sometimes we can look back at the data that we had about those patients, and we can see that we should have seen it coming, Moorman said.

In attempts to better monitor patient stability through early detection, many hospitals around the world have resorted to using a standardized point system, which consists of recording certain physiological parameters and outputting a standardized score that can then be used to predict the patients stability. For instance, in England the National Early Warning Score measures pulse rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen levels, temperature and consciousness level in patients, allocating an individual score for each factor and totaling the scores. When the total reaches a threshold number designated by healthcare facilities, it alerts clinicians to take action.

However, Moorman found that such point systems were sometimes ineffective in monitoring the patient since they uniformly depended on the patient reaching a particular threshold score before clinicians were alerted. While threshold score monitoring may be helpful in some situations, these systems are not designed to indicate risk specific to each physiological factor, failing to utilize statistical tools like regression models, which use multiple variables to predict an outcome.

One of the benefits of many machine learning approaches [is] you get a continuous gradation of risk from all the possible numbers that might come in, no thresholds [are] allowed, Moorman said.

Additionally, tools like NEWS can be restraining since they do not focus on symptoms specific to a certain patient population, like cardiac patients, but instead rely on a one size fits all model.

Our own point of view has been that this is not a one-size-fits-all problem at all, that the predictors of deterioration in one part of the hospital are going to be very different from elsewhere in the hospital, Moorman said.

Generalizing symptoms can lead to clinicians who depend on a standardized score when trying to predict any patients disease progression, further leaving more room for ambiguity in executing care plans since the numbers are not always clearly indicative of a particular condition.

Approximately 20 years ago, Moorman decided to apply certain predictive concepts to proactively diagnose neonatal sepsis, which is a bacterial infection that occurs in the bloodstream of premature infants and can be deadly if not diagnosed early on. Sepsis has been particularly difficult for healthcare providers to diagnose since premature infants are unable to aptly communicate discomfort and are too fragile to have many diagnostic tests conducted on them.

Moorman analyzed data from several infants infected with sepsis and recognized distinct patterns in the heartbeat of infants that occurred before sepsis began. He then quantified the heart rate data for the heartbeat abnormality and created a software which would detect this abnormality and alert clinicians. The HeRO software, coupled with observations and skillset of clinicians, allowed for them to proactively integrate the softwares findings into their care, culminating in a 20 percent decline in premature infant mortality as shown by a randomized trial.

Consequently, Moorman expanded his work to create predictive models for adults, attempting to address a multitude of diseases using evidence from data coming from approximately 200,000 patients who have been admitted to U.Va. Health previously.

We present to the clinicians, not just the risk of sepsis, but we have developed predictive tools for early detection of other kinds of clinical deterioration like lung failure or bleeding or the need to be transferred to an ICU, Moorman said.

One of his primary goals is to use the benefits of Big Data analysis in predicting outcomes for future patients.

[We are working] toward the idea of taking all of the data that comes out from a patient and analyzing it in such a way that we can tell the clinicians that someone's risk for something bad is going up, Moorman said.

Contrary to standardizing softwares like NEWS, the Continuous Monitoring of Event Trajectories software relies on constant monitoring of the patient and previous data, working to apply algorithms which output the patients status and risk of experiencing a serious event in the next 12 hours, updating every 15 minutes. CoMET updates models by calculating the cumulative contribution of physiological information from patients including data from their electronic medical records, EKG signals, vital signs and laboratory results.

The added machine learning approach allows for patients to be assessed relative to the outcomes from thousands of other patients and is more specific to the individual patient by displaying models specific to the patients unit.

At this point we have generated truly, hundreds of predictive models, depending on where you are in the hospital, what kind of things might go wrong and what information is available, Moorman said.

The Prediction Assistant screen uses regression to display patient risk by showing comets for each patient being monitored in the unit, with more stable patients represented as small and close to the bottom of the graph, while patients at higher risk are represented by larger and brighter comets. Each of the comets are graphed as a measure of a combination of factors most relevant to the hospital unit.

University cardiologist Jamieson Bourque, in collaboration with Jessica Keim-Malpass, associate professor of nursing and pediatrics, have recently begun a two-year randomized controlled study of the CoMET software in patients in the medical-surgical floor for cardiology and cardiovascular surgery patients at the U.Va. Hospital. They intend to analyze the long term outcomes of patients and prove the softwares utility to help patients through providing clinicians with valuable predictive models from physiological data.

What CoMET does is allows you to see the small incremental changes in heart rate, respiratory rate, vital signs [and] labs that can sort of fly under the radar, but when all those values are added together, that may signify a more significant change, Bourque said.

The team is also in the process of developing a predictive model specifically for COVID-19. However, it is waiting to gain more data to better understand the unpredictable nature of the disease so is currently using pre-existing models for the respiratory distress that accompanies COVID-19. The researchers feel that a predictive model could potentially be largely beneficial to dealing with COVID-19 patients since it could help anticipate some of the unpredictable symptoms which have shown to cause mortality.

At unexpected times, a fair number of patients do deteriorate drastically, and then there are very big decisions to be made in this time of constrained resources or this time of full hospitals, Moorman said.

Main challenges researchers face with integrating CoMET involve educating clinicians on reading the patterns as well as helping them integrate the softwares usage into their daily workflow. With CoMET, clinicians are suggested to utilize the proactive warning signs and learn to construct a care plan sooner than they normally would.

Keim-Malpass, who is also trained as a nurse, is able to incorporate her first-hand perspective to CoMETs design by attempting to ensure that nurses and other clinicians in the hospital can adapt their responsibilities to the proactive nature of the software. She spoke of a time when nurses recognized a spike in the patients CoMET score trajectory that allowed them to prevent sepsis when the patient was still stable.

They went ahead and preemptively took blood cultures, and a few hours later they came back positive that they had blood infection, that they were heading towards sepsis, so that patient got antibiotics sooner [than] they would have, Keim-Malpass said.

In the future, the team plans to use more data to enhance the COVID-19 model and to implement CoMET to other hospitals around the nation.

Conflict of interest disclosure: Randall Moorman is Chief Medical Officer and owns equity in AMP3D, which licenses technology from UVALVG and markets the CoMET monitor.

Original post:

Artificial intelligence used to monitor patients with chronic diseases and COVID-19 - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

Elon Musk Talks Auto Safety and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence with Joe Rogan – Corporate Crime Reporter

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

On the Joe Rogan podcast this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musks inner Ralph Nader was on full display, with Musk promoting federal regulation of artificial intelligence, criticizing the auto industrys campaign against seat belts and safety regulation, and praising modern airbags as crazy good.

In the middle of a three and a half hour conversation, Rogan triggered the discussion on regulation when he said he was worried about artificial intelligence.

We should have oversight of some kind, Musk said. A regulatory agency like the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). We need an acronym to oversee this stuff.

Rogan expressed doubts about a government agency getting the job done.

The probability of industry capture is higher if its an industry body than if it is the government, Musk said. Its not zero if it is the government. There are plenty of instances of regulatory capture of a government agency. But the probability is lower than if it is an industry group. At the end of the day somebody has to go and tell Facebook, or Google or Tesla, this is okay or it is not okay. Or at least report back to the public this is what we found. Otherwise the inmates are running the asylum. And these are not necessarily friendly inmates.

Im not a fan of lets have the government do lots of things, Musk said. You want to have the government do the least amount of stuff. The right role of government is for it to be the referee on the field. When the government starts being a player on the field, thats problematic. Or when you start having more referees than players, which is the case in California, then thats not good. You cant have no referees. Everyone agrees that a referee might be annoying at times, but it is better to have a referee than not.

Rogan said Im just worried that its going to be too late, by the time these things become sentient, by the time they develop the ability to analyze what the threat of human beings are and whether or not human beings are essential

Im not saying that having regulatory agencies is some panacea or reduces the risk to zero, Musk said. There is still some significant risk even with a regulatory agency. Nonetheless, the good outweighs the bad and we should have one.

It took a while before there was an FAA, Musk said. There were a lot of plane companies cutting corners. It took a while before there was an FDA. What tends to happen is some company gets desperate, they are on the verge of bankruptcy and they are like we will just cut this corner, it will be fine. And then, somebody dies.

Look at seat belts. Now we take seat belts for granted. But the car companies fought seat belts like there was no tomorrow.

Really, they fought them? Rogan asked.

For decades, Musk said. The data was absolutely clear that you needed seat belts. The difference in fatalities with seat belts versus not seat belts is gigantic and obvious. Its not subtle. But still, the car companies fought seat belts for ten to twenty years. A lot of people died.

Now, these days with advanced airbags, I think we might have come full circle and no longer need seat belts if you have advanced airbags.

What if the car flips? Rogan asked.

You are just covered its airbags everywhere, Musk said. Modern airbags are so good it will blow your mind how good they are. At Tesla, we even update the software to improve how the airbags deploy. We will calculate are you an adult, how much do you weigh, are you sitting in this part of the seat or that part of the seat? You may be a baby. Are you a toddler?

Based on the weight? Rogan asked.

Not just the weight, but the pressure distribution on the seat. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? Are you a fifth percent female or 95 percent male? The airbag firing will be different depending on where you are sitting on the seat, what size you are, and what your orientation is. And well update it over the years. It gets better over time.

A child could be sitting in the front seat? Rogan asked.

Unbelted child sitting in a bad position probably still fine, Musk said. The seat belt is like if you wear the seat belt thats nice. The airbag is doing the work. Airbag technology is crazy good. You want the airbag to inflate and then deflate, otherwise you are going to be asphyxiated.

We go way beyond the regulatory requirements. We got the lowest probability of injury of any cars they ever tested.

We get five stars in every category and subcategories. And if there was a sixth star, we would get a sixth star.

But then Musk admitted the star safety rating is kind of bullshit.

If a smart car hits a freight train, it doesnt matter how good your safety system is, you are screwed. If you are in a little car and it gets hit by a big car, the big car will win. A low star rating in a big car hitting a high star rating in a small car the small car is screwed. Small cars are not safe.

What about your small car? Rogan asked.

Our Model 3 is not small, Musk said.

What about the Roadster? Rogan asked.

The Roadster is not super safe, Musk said. The original Roadster is not super safe. Its safe for a car like that, but safety maximization is not the goal in a sports car.

Elon Musk Talks Auto Safety and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence with Joe Rogan - Corporate Crime Reporter

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Market is expected to rise at a remarkable CAGR during the Forecast Period 2020-2026 KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper…

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

A new Market Research Report by Facts and Factors Market Research (fnfresearch.com), on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Market Overview By Trends, Industry Top Manufactures, Size, Industry Growth Analysis & Forecast Till 2026 added to the flourishing data archive is in place to provide readers with innate detailing on market developments, comprising a detailed market overview, vendor landscape, market dimensions, vendor landscape as well as in-depth SWOT and PESTEL assessment, besides other internationally approved market assessment guidelines that play crucial roles in growth dissemination.

The report Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Market 2020-2026 focuses on outlining and narrating the key influencing elements for the growth of the market. It also proposes a thorough study of the market stature (revenue), market share, key market segments, distinct geographic regions, dominant market players, and prime industry trends. The aim of this report is to portray the forthcoming market trends and revenue prognosis for the global Artificial Intelligence in Medicine market for the next five years.

According to the research report, Global artificial intelligence in medicine market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 49% and is anticipated to reach around USD 15,000.00 Million by 2026. Artificial intelligence in medicine has the probable to expressively convert the character of the doctor and revolutionize the preparation of medicine.

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Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Market by Top Manufacturers (2020-2026)

Bay Labs Inc

Welltok

CloudMedx Inc.

Siemens Healthcare GmbH

Nvidia Corporation

Enclitic

Next IT Corp.

General Electric

General Vision

Google Inc

IBM Corporation

iCarbonX

Koninklijke Philips

maxQ

Microsoft

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The COVID-19 outbreak has affected economies and industries in various countries due to lockdowns, travel bans, and business shutdowns. The decrease in the overall market growth due to COVID-19 is also affecting the Post growth of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine market owing to the shutting down of factories, obstacles in the supply chain, and a downturn in the world economy.

This report presents a comprehensive overview, market shares, and growth opportunities of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine market by product type, application, key manufacturers, and key regions and countries. In addition, this report discusses the key drivers influencing market growth, opportunities, the challenges, and the risks faced by key manufacturers and the market as a whole. It also analyzes key emerging trends and their impact on present and future development.

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The complete profile of the companies is mentioned. And the capacity, production, price, revenue, cost, gross, gross margin, sales volume, sales revenue, consumption, growth rate, import, export, supply, future strategies, and the technological developments that they are making are also included within the report. This report analyzed 12 years of data history and forecast.

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Table of Contents

Research Coverage:

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Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Market is expected to rise at a remarkable CAGR during the Forecast Period 2020-2026 KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper...

World Travel Holdings Offering Up to $1 Million in Commercial Loans to its Network of Travel Agency Franchise Owners as Part of a Financial Assistance…

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

"We're There To Help" Stimulus Plan provides resources and funding for franchise owners with Dream Vacations/CruiseOne

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, home-based travel agency franchise Dream Vacations/CruiseOne has been an industry leader with its support of its franchise owners. With the financial backing of its parent company World Travel Holdings, the nation's largest cruise agency and award-winning leisure travel company, the franchisor has raised the bar even higher by offering up to $1 Million in commercial loans to its franchise owners as part of its "We're There to Help" Stimulus Plan.

"For our franchise owners, travel is more than a passion, it is their livelihood and the pandemic has had serious implications on their businesses," said Drew Daly, senior vice president and general manager of Dream Vacations/CruiseOne. "As a franchisor, we take pride in providing our franchise owners the resources they need to succeed. However, in times like these, it is crucial to go beyond providing a 'business-in-a-box.' The success of our franchisees is our only business and this Stimulus Plan supports the foundation of our business model to support small business owners."

The "We're There to Help" Stimulus Plan, which represents World Travel Holdings' initials, has a three-pronged approach to providing franchisees with additional resources and financial assistance to navigate through 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

World Travel Holdings-Funded Commercial Loan World Travel Holdings will make up to $1 Million available in commercial loans to qualified Dream Vacations/CruiseOne franchisees. Applicants will have to explain how they plan to use their funds and submit a business plan to be considered.

PPP Assistance with Bank Through a partnership with World Travel Holdings' banking institution, they negotiated an agreement where Dream Vacations/CruiseOne franchisees can receive assistance from the bank in securing a PPP loan.

Cares Page Dream Vacations/CruiseOne created a special section on its Business Center intranet that consolidates financial assistance information from World Travel Holdings, government, franchising, trade and business organizations in one easy-to-find location.

"We are seeing the biggest pent-up demand for travel in history and extremely strong bookings for the end of 2021 and into 2022, and after more than a year of minimal travel and sales, we want to help ensure our franchisees can sustain their business for when this travel boom arrives," said Brad Tolkin, co-CEO/chairman of World Travel Holdings. "In spite of World Travel Holdings not qualifying for PPP funds due to our size, it was very important to us to find a way to provide additional assistance for the small business owners within our franchise system. We know the future of leisure travel is bright and we want to do our part and assist our travel agency franchise owners to be ready to meet this demand."

Story continues

The "We're There to Help" Stimulus Plan is just one of many initiatives that Dream Vacations/CruiseOne has implemented to provide assistance to its franchisees during COVID-19. They have provided enhanced support to its existing franchisees by offering the option to defer monthly fees for up to six months; hosting Town Halls and webinars with industry executives; presenting robust virtual training and conferences; creating increased and unique engagement opportunities such as a Walking Club and more. Dream Vacations/CruiseOne has steadily been recruiting the entire year and new travel agency franchises are opening each month. The franchisor has adapted its onboarding process for new franchisees to better meet the unique challenges they are facing while opening during a pandemic. The saying "We Care More" has always been a mantra for Dream Vacations/CruiseOne, and it has never been as meaningful as it has these last 14 months.

To learn more about joining the travel agency franchise that cares more about its franchise owners, please visit http://www.dreamvacationsfranchise.com or call 888-249-8235.

About World Travel Holdings World Travel Holdings is the nation's largest cruise agency and award-winning leisure travel company with a portfolio of more than 40 diverse brands. In addition to owning some of the largest brands distributing cruises, villas, resort vacations, car rentals, resort day passes and luxury travel services, World Travel Holdings has a vast portfolio of private-label partnerships comprised of top leisure travel providers, including almost every U.S. airline, leading hotel brands and prominent corporations. The company also operates a top-rated travel agency franchise and the country's original host agency, and is consistently recognized as an industry leader in work-at-home employment. Its global presence includes operating multiple cruise brands in the United Kingdom. World Travel Holdings has offices in Wilmington, Mass.; Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; New York, NY; and Chorley, England. For more information, visit WorldTravelHoldings.com.

About CruiseOne / Dream Vacations A member of the International Franchise Association, the top-ranked home-based travel agency franchise CruiseOne has been in operation since 1992, and its sister brand Dream Vacations launched in April 2016, giving franchisees a choice in how they want to brand their travel business. CruiseOne / Dream Vacations franchisees have the resources to plan and create seamless vacation experiences for their customers while offering the best value. CruiseOne / Dream Vacations is part of World Travel Holdings and has received franchise partner of the year, a top-ranking status, by all the major cruise lines as well as national recognition for its support of military veterans. For more information, visit http://www.DreamVacationsFranchise.com. Like CruiseOne / Dream Vacations on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/DreamVacationsFranchise, follow on Twitter at @Dream_Franchise and watch its videos at http://www.youtube.com/DreamVacationsBusiness.

Media Contact

Rachel Shapiro, Dream Vacations/CruiseOne, 954-958-3664, rshapiro@wth.com

SOURCE Dream Vacations/CruiseOne

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World Travel Holdings Offering Up to $1 Million in Commercial Loans to its Network of Travel Agency Franchise Owners as Part of a Financial Assistance...

Steamboat cross-country skiers travel to closed-down Finland for World Junior Championships – Steamboat Pilot and Today

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS Waverly Gebhardt didnt know she had the chance to go to Finland for the World Junior Championships until a week and a half before. She knew she was an alternate on the womens team and when a team member backed out, Gebhardt was asked if she wanted to make the trip. She and fellow Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club skier Wally Magill made the journey to Europe to compete in the FIS cross-country junior world championships and came home with some solid results.

Mentally preparing to race was tricky, and mentally making the decision to travel right now, that was a hard decision to make, Gebhardt said. The U.S. team and the crew there we were traveling with and the organization in Finland, they had all taken the right steps. They wouldnt have put the event on if it wasnt COVID safe. I felt good about that. Ultimately skiing is what we do. I couldnt pass up the opportunity.

At 19, Gebhardt is in her last year of eligibility for the junior championships. That was a factor in her decision to attend the event in Vuokatti, Finland. She said international travel felt a lot safer than domestic travel, since everyone traveling has to have a negative test. She also enjoyed that the international terminals and flights were far less crowded than domestic terminals.

Once in Finland, Gebhardt made the most of the long flight. In her first race, the sprint qualifiers, Gebhardt took 28th. That put her in the finals, which were sent out in heats, a format that she hadnt seen since last winter, before the pandemic. Gebhardt thrived, speeding to a 25th-place finish.

I was really happy with my sprint day, she said. That was sort of the race I was going there really fired up for.

A few days later, Gebhardt and Magill competed in the 5K and 10K freestyle race. Magill took 68th, just over three minutes behind the winner. Gebhardt finished the 5K in 51st. Although there were 50 skiers between her and the victor, she was less than two minutes behind the winner.

Magill was on track to finish in the 30s, but he crashed, and his binding disconnected from his ski entirely, leaving him scrambling to reattach it while the field passed him and his momentum halted.

In the 15K classic race two days later, Gebhardt earned 53rd. Magill finished the 30K classic race in 59th.

That last race, he basically said it was the worst race of his life, said Josh Smullin, SSWSC U20 head cross-country coach. Something went wrong in his body. It just wasnt working right.

At 18, Magill was among the youngest field of competitors and will have two more years to improve upon his results, should he make the team again.

The World Junior Championships are the most competitive races between athletes younger than 20 from across the world.

They got a big experience, Smullin said. I think Waverly came away with one solid result, and Wally came away hungry for more.

All the while, Gebhardt was taking classes virtually at the University of Vermont, where shes studying neuroscience. In a normal year, Gebhardt would have flat out missed a weeks worth of in-person classes, but the online classes allowed her to keep up.

Shell continue taking classes on the computer for the next week while she self-isolates. When she returns to training with her team, shes focusing her sights on the NCAA championships in mid-March.

To reach Shelby Reardon, call 970-871-4253, email sreardon@SteamboatPilot.com or follow her on Twitter @ByShelbyReardon.

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Steamboat cross-country skiers travel to closed-down Finland for World Junior Championships - Steamboat Pilot and Today

Anthony Bourdains Posthumous Travel Guide Will Be Available This Spring – Delish

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Frederick M. BrownGetty Images

When Anthony Bourdain passed away in 2018, the entire culinary world felt the loss. Three years following his death, a posthumous travel guide about his life and travels is set to hit shelves, which was started by the chef and author prior to his passing and was finished with the help of his assistant and those closest to him.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide was originally due to be published in October 2020 but was left unfinished after Anthony's death in 2018. The travel guide is a 480-page book co-authored by his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever. After his death Woolever and Anthony's closest friends, family, and colleagues worked together to finish the piece. After his death Woolever and Anthony's closest friends, family, and colleagues worked together to finish the piece.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

Anthony was always adamant about the important of travel and immersing oneself in the culture of a place to get to know the food and people. This book, set to be released in April 2021, will follow those same themes. According to the book's description on Amazon, it will dive into the fascinating stories of Anthony's global adventures.

"Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone, " the description reads. "His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzanias utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Omans Empty Quarterand many places beyond."

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide is currently available for preorder on Amazon for about $35. It will be available in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook versions.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, Anthony Bourdains last, posthumous book, to be released on April 20 – Yahoo Lifestyle

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

anthony bourdain

Anthony Bourdain passed away in 2018, and it was a heartbreaking loss not only for food media, but also for people who loved living vicariously through his CNN travel show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Ive caught myself wondering a few times what hed think about our current situation, from the shitshow of the presidency to the pandemic, because Im guessing hed have a lot of deeply cutting things to say. But well never know.

His book World Travel: An Irreverent Guide will be released on April 20, and serves as a practical and fun travel guide from the perspective of someone who had been from Buenos Aires to a tribal longhouse in Borneo and practically everywhere in between. He covers some of his favorite places, and his words will guide you through how to get there, where to stay, what to eat, andjust as valuablewhat to avoid.

This book has been put together by co-author Laurie Woolever, who functioned as Bourdains long time lieutenant. Shes also a food writer whos been published in New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, and Saveur, and she also co-hosts a food podcast called Carbface for Radio with Chris Thornton (full disclosure: I make a guest appearance in one episode).

Other essays are peppered in Bourdains stories, some by friends and family, like his brother Chris and music producer Steve Albini, who will contribute a guide to Chicagos cheap food. The book is illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook. You can read an excerpt here at Entertainment Weekly, but mark your calendars for what surely will be a collection of lively essays from our favorite traveler.

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World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, Anthony Bourdains last, posthumous book, to be released on April 20 - Yahoo Lifestyle

Travel The World With Wine, No Passport Necessary: New Zealand Edition – Forbes

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Landscapes of New Zealand stun, from one end of the island chain, to the other.

Last Friday wrapped up the much needed New Zealand wine week, a bright spot in a dark winter thats dragging for much of America. Tasting through a dozen wines sparked memories of my last visit to this extraordinary placeand a bit of envy that New Zealand is not only in the throes of summer exuberance but largely back to normal as far as domestic life. Its for these memories of places and people pastand hopes for future experiencesthat I open wine. Ive temporarily lost interest in analyzing it, taking notes or keeping score; reducing wine to its molecules. Who cares in this moment, really. Rather, Im looking for joy, deliciousness, and honest intentions. I want to feel the wine, be transported by it, have my eyes pop open and utter dammit, this is why wine exists. New Zealand sets a high bar when it comes to this criteria.

As I wrote in my first No Passport Necessary column, wine represents so much more than just the liquid in the bottle. Its a snapshot in time, a lesson in impermanence, the embodiment of the truth that change is the only constant. Wine tells the story of the vintage, the ethos of the winemaker; it hints at the soil, climate, and labor to make it. Wine speaks to the history, culture, and traditions of a place, if you are open to listening to the tales in your glass. If you just want to drink and relax, thats okay, too. Wine is both teacher and tonic. Today, I mostly want a tonic.

During this year-long withdrawal into a cabin in New Yorks Catskills, I frequently recite the phrase this too, shall pass as comfort in meltdown moments. Then I select a bottle, with purpose, to transport me to faraway places.

Visit New Zealand with these five wines, no passport necessary.

Lakes and mountains define the landscape around Queenstown

Central Otago

Once an adventure sports capital, Queenstown developed into a bucket list destination for oenophiles. Outstanding restaurants, boutique hotels, and area wineries making life-changing Pinot Noir lured folks down there in the Before Covid or BC Timesback when people crossed borders in planes to travel. My maiden voyage to Queenstown was for the Central Otago Pinot Festival. On that first afternoon, still recovering from jet lag, I ran into an old friend. Shed left New York to become a winemaker, settling in permanently with vines, dogs, and a man in Otago. With a bottle of her wine, we headed out into the summer sun to sip and catch up on a decade of life. I remember the glacial blue water of the river, the purity of the air, the clarity of the Pinot, and the strangeness of seeing an old face in a new place. I now realize another ten years may pass before we do that again.

Valli, Bannockburn Vineyard Pinot Noir, 2016, $50 If youre the winemaker, this Bannockburn tastes like home. To the rest of us, it tastes like strawberries, spiced cocktail cherries and fantasies of a place to which wed flee if we couldlike Jen Parr did, the American winemaker (my friend) who joined Grant Taylor at Valli in 2015. This wine has power, concentration, and ethereal beautyand is meant for the long haul.

Quartz Reef, Bendigo Estate Single Vineyard Pinot Noir, 2017, $29 Fragrant and seductive, balancing elegance with confidence and focus. It smacks of churned dirt and raspberries; a languorous summer afternoon on a blanket by the river. It evokes carefree weekends and barbecues with friends, when we could commune over a meal in BC times.

Hawkes Bay

Hawke's Bay Vineyards

One of New Zealands warmer growing areas, the region produces outstanding Bordeaux blends, as well as varietal Merlot, Cabernet, and Syrah. The area is also home to great bike trails, fantastic beaches, and lots of independent restaurants. Well-preserved Art Deco buildings in the quaint town of Napier could serve as backdrop for a film set in the 1930s. Though I spent most of my time in wineries and comparative tastings, I made copious notes on places Id visit on a future trip. For now, a glass of wine will suffice.

Trinity Hill, "Gimblett Gravels" Syrah, 2017, $30 One might say New Zealand Syrah is woefully underrated because few Americans drink it; the truth is that its hard to find. For those writers, sommeliers, and consumers who do get their hands on a bottle, they often become lifelong converts. Trinity Hill makes outstanding Syrah, some quite expensivewhich makes this stylish $30 bottle brimming with herbs, fresh red berries, and smoked meats, a steal.

Craggy Range Winery, Te Kahu Gimblett Gravels, Bordeaux Blend, 2018, $24 Gorgeous aromatics escape the glass from this Bordeaux look-alike. Notes of fresh plums, cassis, olive, and a whiff of tobacco perfume this finely structured wine. Can either drink now or be rewarded with a year or two of patience.

Room with a view from an inn on Waiheke Island.

Waiheke Island

The Hamptons of Auckland, but waaaaaay more chill: thats how I remember Waiheke from my first trip six years ago. From the capital citys dock on the North Island, I tracked down the fast ferry. We sailed away, leaving Aucklands gleaming towers behind, the boats bow trained on the low-slung rock of beige beaches ahead. Id rented a tiny car for my 3-day trip on wine island. The agent gave me a few tips on left-lane driving, wishing me luck on the sleepy streets. Though roads get visitors most places, the best way to visit Man OWar, if youre lucky, rich, or connected, is by boat. Hidden away on a protected cove, the winerys cellar door feels like an escape from the world.

Man O' War, Dreadnought Syrah, 2017 Smoky, savory, and juicy, oak gives shape to dark, fleshy fruits. Yet, Waiheke wines arent made for analysis and tasting notes but for bottling a way of life. And life on Waiheke is idylliclet this Syrah encourage your daydreams.

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Travel The World With Wine, No Passport Necessary: New Zealand Edition - Forbes

Showing Girls the World With Travel, Service & Media – WMUK

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Sonya Bernard-Hollins once produced a coloring book about prominent Black graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools, among them former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. Now shes at it againthis time shes created a coloring book of firsts of Kalamazoo African-American women and a similar coloring book of firsts about local African-American men. And shes involved her all-girls Merze Tate Explorers travel and community-service group in the project.

WMUK's Earlene McMichael talks with Sonya Bernard-Hollins (aired 2/16/21) Scroll down for a longer version

We use our organization to not only teach girls about history but to allow them to teach their next generation as well, Bernard-Hollins says in an interview that aired today on WMUK 102.1 FM, as a part of a monthlong series featuring local citizens making a difference. The girls have made mini-documentaries about the women in her new "Your Turn!" coloring book series.

Bernard-Hollins, a Kalamazoo native, and her graphic-designer husband, Sean, own Season Press Publishing. They both earned Community Arts Awards from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo in 2020. Sean won the Business Arts Award; Sonya won the Gayle Hoogstraten Arts Leadership Award for Arts Education.

Sonya Bernard-Hollins graduated in 1993 from Western Michigan University with a degree in English and journalism. She named her Merze Tate Explorers travel club after a fellow alumna, Merze Tate, who, in 1927, became the first African-American to earn a bachelors degree from WMU. The group's members, who are in fourth through 12th grades, are exposed to careers and the world through traveling, meeting trailblazing women and doing multi-media projects.

Tate spoke five languages. She was a world traveler and high-school and college educator in history. Tate would expand her students world view by taking them on trips. Bernard-Hollins has authored a children's book about this accomplished woman. She also developed a traveling exhibit about Tate. It debuted at the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2011.

Bernard-Hollins founded the Merze Tate Explorers in 2008. Her girls have visited France, Japan, Canada, Italy, Hawaii and many other places. Every year, they publish a magazine detailing their journeys and interviews with high-profile career women. They also chronicle their projects on their YouTube channel.

For more about Merze Tate, check out this just released WMU News Service article. For more about Sonya Bernard-Hollins, watch an interview with her at 7 pm Friday, Feb. 26 on the city of Portage's website.

Showing Girls the World With Travel, Service & Media - WMUK

Apples official World Travel Adapter Kit returns to Amazon low of $25 – 9to5Toys

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Amazon is offering the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit for $24.99 Prime shipped. If you are not a Prime member, orders that exceed $25 will qualify for free shipping. Thats $4 off the typical rate there and is a match for the lowest price we have tracked. Plan for future adventures with Apples official World Travel Adapter Kit. This offering is comprised of seven AC plugs that are specifically made with Apple products in mind. Included adapters support outlets in North America, Japan, China, UK, Continental Europe, Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong.

If bypassing Apple branding wont be a bother, Prime members should consider Castries All-In-One Worldwide Travel Charger at $16. This unit is able to handle voltages ranging from 100-250V, ensuring it can be used across over 200 countries. Four USB-A ports are built in and its rated 4.7/5 stars by more than 1,500 Amazon shoppers.

Speaking of Apple discounts, right now you can score a $100 Apple gift card with a $10 Target credit for as low as $95. This is a great way to lock in lower pricing on Apple subscriptions, apps, and more. And swing by our Apple guide to see if any other deals stand out to you.

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Apples official World Travel Adapter Kit returns to Amazon low of $25 - 9to5Toys

Colombia was accepted into the World Travel and Tourism Council – Travel Daily News International

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

The country will have direct access to the 200 companies that represent 30% of what the tourism industry generates worldwide, will be able to get involved in the development of joint projects, share best practices, and receive information and data made by the international organization, among other benefits.

ProColombia will work hand in hand with the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) now as a member of this organization, one of the most important at the level in international in travel and tourism and focus efforts on removing travel barriers, restoring the confidence of tourists, and providing safe travel.

Having been accepted as a Destination Partner is very important news that further drives our management as an entity that promotes tourism internationally. We are grateful that the WTTC has placed its trust in our work and we are ready to contribute to the projects and initiatives that this important organization will undertake in 2021 focusing on the recovery of tourism, explained Flavia Santoro, president of ProColombia.

This membership will facilitate contact with companies worldwide since WTTC represents more than 200 companies that represent 30% of the income that the industry generates in the world: We will have access to the main private sector network in the world, which will allow us to leverage commercial opportunities both to attract international tourists and foreign investment projects in tourism, added Santoro.

Among other benefits of the new membership, is being part of the network made up of countries around the world that helps promote and boost the industry. In this measure, ProColombia will have the opportunity to be part of the summits and events organized by the WTTC or to be part of its executive committee. In addition, theyll have the opportunity to get involved in the development of joint projects, share best practices and receive information and data made by the organization.

Since 2020, the WTTC has been a great ally for the country in the objective of supporting the tourism industry. According to Santoro, In addition to the World Tourism Organization, the WTTC endorsed the 'Check in certified, COVID-19 bioseguro' seal from the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, which has undoubtedly given 300 Colombian companies the prestige of both organizations by complying with all the safe parameters for travelers . WTTC also included Colombia in its list of safe travel destinations and granted it the Safe Travels seal, making it one of the seven countries to have such a recognition in South America along with Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Brazil.

Colombia was accepted into the World Travel and Tourism Council - Travel Daily News International

Uzakrota Global Travel Awards has announced the global winners for the Travel and Tourism industry – 2020 – Travel Daily News International

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

MALAGA, SPAIN - Uzakrota Travel Awards the global initiative to recognize and reward excellence in travel and tourism unveiled the 2020 winners of its World Leading categories yesterday. It has been announced that Skal International has won the World's Leading Tourism Association Category among eight other associations that were nominated for this category.

After registration between 18th and 24th January 2021, the voting began on January 25, lasted until midnight on February 5, 2021. As a result of the competition, 182,475 votes were registered globally awards were distributed in 45 categories. The awards will be presented to the winners at Uzakrota Global Summit in Istanbul at a gala event on December 2, 2021.

"I am humbled and honored by the news that Skal International was voted the World's Leading Tourism Association by industry partners of the Travel Summit. I was privileged to participate as a panelist on 'New Content of Tourism; Urban Adventures and Events' during the 2020 Uzakrota Online Travel Summit in December. I want to thank Skal International Izmir as well as Kaan Yalcin, General Coordinator of Uzakrota, for a very successful and well-organized event," said Skal International World President Bill Rheaume.

Uzakrota has been listed as one of the 'World's Top 2018 Most Influential Tourism Events' by Netherlands-based Bidroom in the top 10, selected as one of the 'World's Top 2019 Events' by Japan-based HIS Travel in the top 5. This year, it was named 'World's Top 10 Tourism Events' by South African Hepstar.

"In these challenging times, Skal International has been committed to supporting the entire Tourism sector, with a special focus on our thousands of members, Tourism professionals in almost 100 countries around the world. In one of the biggest crises of all times, it is necessary to intensify efforts, appeal to collective understanding, and an awareness that we are stronger by working together. Therefore, our recognition in this award goes to all those who make this possible, our Skal International members," said Daniela Otero, CEO, Skal International.

Uzakrota Travel Summit is one of the biggest conference and foyer area for online travel agencies, airline companies, hotels, travel agencies, travel tech startups, hospitality investors, venture capitalists, tech companies, and distribution tech companies. Uzakrota Travel Summit is connecting the most prominent companies with the brightest minds and professionals of the travel industry around the World.

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Uzakrota Global Travel Awards has announced the global winners for the Travel and Tourism industry - 2020 - Travel Daily News International

Animal Crossing Players Are Using Gulliver Items in SUPER Creative Builds – CBR – Comic Book Resources

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players have made some incredibly creative things using the real-world monuments that they've received from Gulliver.

TheAnimal Crossing: New Horizonscommunity has found tons of creative ways to take their islands' designs to the next level, mastering the game's customization mechanics. They've already found uses forvarious hacked items, such as the fence found on Harv's Island. Players have evenfound a whole host of unique ways to incorporateunique collectible items like thoseoffered by Gulliverinto island designs.

Gulliver's furniture items are all themed arounddifferent locations around the world, such as the Pyramids of Giza, which makes them somewhat difficult to use. Most players willsimply use these items as outdoor decoration, like putting the Statue of Liberty near the docks to welcome new players. However, some creative players have found some fascinating ways to use these items.

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These items can be acquired by helping the special NPC Gulliver locate the pieces of his communicator whenever he washes up on a player's island. It should be noted that there are two NPCs who can wash up on beaches that look strikingly similar, these being Gulliver and his pirate equivalent, Captain Gullivarrr. Gulliver, the non-pirate one, is the NPC that gives players furniture items themed around traveling the world.

These island designers have uploaded tons of online tutorials and speed builds to walk players through using some of these more obtuse items. The most popular world travel items seem to be the pyramids and thePagoda.Even if players don't want to use Gulliver's unique item set, some of the techniques players use with their world travel builds can help take a player's island to the next level.

One way that these furniture items are used is through forced-perspective set-pieces, which are perfect for giving islands more of a scenic view. The basic principle behind this design is that, when players look at a series of furniture in a specific way, it can look like a far-away setting. The Pagodas are used frequently with this design style since, from a distance, they can often look like feudal Japan towers.

RELATED:Link's Most Talkative Appearance Is in... Animal Crossing?

To do a forced-perspective set-piece, players will need to utilize the terrain editing tools to set up a viewing location for the set-piece. From there, the trick is to design the area to look as though it's much further away than it really is, using smaller furniture items andcustom patterns to complete the illusion. Setting up the forced-perspective set-piece as low as possible will also help sell the visual sinceNew Horizonshas a neat fog effect when viewing lower terrain.

Another more straightforward way that players have been using Gulliver's furniture set is to theme areas for certain villagers. A popular one is giving the popular Egyptian-themed cat villager Ankh a desert-like environment, complete with pyramids. With terrain painting tools and a few palm trees, players can help the pyramids feel right at home in a special themed region of an island.

There are also some smaller buildings the monument-themed items have been used for. Pyramids have been used as roofs for miniature houses made of panels, and the Statue of Liberty's torch has been utilizedas a stylized torch for various outdoor setups. These two methods can sometimes involve small amounts of building glitches and exploits, but they can also provide a unique look to a player's island.

KEEP READING:Animal Crossing: 5 Quality of Life Improvements That Would Transform New Horizons

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A writer for CBR since September 2020, Jacob Creswell is a life long writer and gamer. Has written for both local and global publications. Lover of Animal Crossing, Undertale, Team Fortress 2, and a little professional wrestling on the side. Often can be found doing way more research than needed for his video game theories. Can also be found on his Twitter, @Creeology98

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Animal Crossing Players Are Using Gulliver Items in SUPER Creative Builds - CBR - Comic Book Resources

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