Monthly Archives: February 2017

Last Fall when Salesforce introduced Einstein, its artificial intelligence initiative, it debuted with some intelligence built into the core CRM tool, but with a promise that it would expand into other products over time. Today it announced it was adding Einstein AI to its ServiceCloud customer service platform.

The goal is to make life easier for customer service reps and their managers. For the reps, it gives information that is supposed to help them better understand the needs of the customer theyre dealing with. For the managers, its been designed to help give deeperinsight into their customer service center operation. The ultimate goal is improving the key customer satisfaction metric known as CSAT.

For the customer service rep, it starts with how the call gets routed to them. It uses underlying intelligence to route the call to the best available rep based on known information, and it provides the rep with some background before they even interact with the customer.

All that should help the CSR do their jobs better and be more efficient with the customer. They also get fed somedata on the right side of the customer service window, which the system thinks will help improve the CSAT score.

Einstein case management window. Photo: Salesforce

This could be a case of too much information when youre dealing with a customerbecause it forces you to look atthe classification that Einstein believes is the correct one for this interaction. You also have to absorb several data points, which Einstein has determined could be havingan impact on the projected score. Thats all well and good, butviewing this data requires taking your attention away from the customer.

Regardless, thatindividual CSAT data gets compiled into a view for the customer service manager, who can see how the customer service team isdoing in terms of agent availability, the size of queues and wait times at any given moment. All of this is useful in compiling and improving that all important CSAT score.

Salesforce has been developing its artificial intelligence technology for some time. As I wrote at the time of the announcement in September:

The company pulled together 175 data scientists to help create Salesforce Einstein, while leveraging acquisitions such as MetaMind, PredictionIO and RelateIQ. In fact, MetaMind founder Richard Socher, holds the title of Chief Data Scientist at Salesforce now. Salesforce Einstein will touch every one of its products in some way eventually.

Indeed todays announcement is a continuation of that original vision, and we can expect that over the coming months and years, additional Salesforce products will get the Einstein treatment.

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Salesforce adds some artificial intelligence to customer service products - TechCrunch

Ford is investing $1-billion into a new artificial intelligence company.

The investment will go towards developing a virtual driver system for Fords upcoming self-driving cars, with the potential to license the technology to other companies. The $1-billion investment is in Argo AI, founded by former Google and Uber leaders and features a team of experts in robotics and artificial intelligence led bycompany founders Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander.Salesky serves as CEO of Argo AIand was previously a leader on the self-driving car team of Google, while Rander is company COO and formerly had a similar role as Salesky at Uber.

The current team working on Fords virtual driver system will be combined with the roboticstalent and expertise of Argo AI. The virtual driver system is a machine-learning software that acts as the brain of autonomous vehicles. Both companies hope to bring SAE level 4 self-driving vehicles to Fords lineup.

SEE ALSO:Ford Turns its Attention Back to US Manufacturing, Dumps Plans for Mexico Plant

The automaker hopes to have fully autonomous vehiclesto marketin 2021 and by becoming majority stakeholder in Argo AI, it moves one step closer to that goal. The investment will bemade over five years.

The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Fords moving assembly line did 100 years ago, said Ford President and CEO Mark Fields. As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Fords leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.

Discuss this story on our Ford Forum

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Ford Invests $1-Billion in Artificial Intelligence - AutoGuide.com

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Ford has announced that it will invest $1 billion in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence startup, to help develop the automakers autonomous vehicles, which are scheduled to arrive in 2021. Argo AIs main responsibility will be the development of a virtual driver system for Fords self-driving cars.

The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Fords moving assembly line did 100 years ago, said Mark Fields, Fords president and CEO. As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Fords leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.

As part of Fords continued development of autonomous vehicles, the automakers team responsible for developing a virtual driver system will be combined with Argo AI. The combined development team will then be charged of creating SAE level 4 self-driving cars. Ford, however, will continue to be in charge of developing vehicle platforms, systems integration, exterior and interior designs, manufacturing, and managing regulatory policies related to autonomous cars.

The investment also includes Ford becoming a majority stakeholder in the Argo AI but will remain independent from the automaker. Fords autonomous vehicle project will be the Argo AIs key initial focus but in the future, the automaker says that the startup could also license its self-driving technologies to other companies.

Source: Ford

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Ford Announces Investment in Artificial Intelligence Company Argo AI - Motor Trend

More and more, health technologies originally viewed as futuristic have become reality. Photograph: Carmen Murillo/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Last year, it was reported that supercomputer IBM Watson diagnosed a rare form of leukaemia in a patient at a University of Tokyo-affiliated hospital whose case had baffled her medical team.

The cloud-based, artificial intelligence-powered supercomputer is capable of cross-referencing and analysing data from tens of millions of oncology papers from research institutes all over the world. From vast volumes of data, it can instantly pull out the information it needs, much faster than humans can.

The University of Tokyo reported that the 60-year-old Japanese woman was correctly diagnosed in just 10 minutes by Watson, after her genetic data was cross-referenced with the computers own database.

More and more, health technologies originally viewed as futuristic like virtual avatars and chatbots have become reality. These technologies use artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic conversation with people, interact on the internet and perform other tasks that would normally require human intelligence.

One example of this is Sensely, a mobile triage smartphone app currently being trialled by the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom.

Olivia, Senselys artificially intelligent virtual nurse, guides patients naturally through their personal healthcare needs on demand 24/7, 365 days a year. The blue-eyed, dewy skinned young woman in blue NHS scrubs, gathers information by listening to the patient and asking questions, similar to a person-to-person interaction with a clinician.

Sensely was developed by a Californian start-up, but as Richard Corbridge, chief executive of eHealth Ireland points out, theres no need to go to California to see examples of how AI is revolutionising healthcare. Five out of the top 10 start-ups in Dublin last year were in the digital health arena, he says.

Corbridge will be speaking at this weeks Dublin Technology Summit 2017 (February 15th to 16th) on the topic of Health Reality, Not Science Fi.

Things are moving so fast that technologies we would have regarded as sci-fi last year, will become a reality this year. Over the last couple of years, Ireland has made some really big strides in digital healthcare, he says.

We are still the last first world country not to have a national electronic health record (EHR) in place, yet we are way ahead in other areas, like DNA genome sequencing.

The eHealth Epilepsy Lighthouse Project has developed the infrastructure to sequence the genome (figure out the order of DNA nucleotides in a complete set of genes) in patients and to record this information for clinicians to use in the delivery of care. The significance of sequencing the genome is that it can be used by healthcare systems across the world to predict what will happen to an individual patients health.

Corbridge remarks: Take a patient with epilepsy who has had an epileptic seizure every day for 20 years at least. By taking a sample of that patients DNA, we can sequence the genome and enter the information into his/her EHR.

The multidisciplinary team can then use this data to change or adapt the patients care plan. Within a week of one patient on the project changing his diet, he went a full day without having a fit for the first time in 20 years.

Over the past few weeks, every maternity hospital in Ireland has been visited by teams from eHealth Ireland to identify where the gaps are in their digital health capabilities and to close them.

Going forward, every newborn baby in hospital will have three devices in their cot, monitoring respiration, temperature and heart rate. All of this information is automatically transferred to the babys EHR.

Instead of constantly checking these levels in individual patients, each nurse has a tablet PC where they can see the vital information on all the babies in their care at their fingertips, including requests for tests and scans and results. Within the next two years, every hospital in Ireland will have this technology. Its an amazing leap for Ireland in a short space of time, says Corbridge.

With an increased emphasis on getting patients to self-manage their health where possible, rapid advances are being made in smartphone and wearable devices. Another eHealth project is an app for patients with bipolar disorder which uses a chatbot to engage with the user, monitor their mood and try to keep them on the right track. With the patients consent, the app can contact their carer or GP if it feels they need support.

Dublin-based start-up TickerFit enables health professionals to prescribe, educate and monitor a heart patients recovery from a distance through a wearable device. Founder Avril Coleman is another of the speakers at this weeks summit which brings global leaders in innovation, technology and business together to shape the future of global trends and technologies. The two-day summit will host 10,000 members of the tech community at the Convention Centre Dublin this Thursday and Friday.

Fabian Bolin, cofounder of War on Cancer, will be talking about waroncancer.com, an online storytelling community to help people deal with the mental challenges that come with a cancer diagnosis.

Musics new role in healthcare and the evolving world of HealthTunes will be explored in a session entitled When Medicine Rocks, with the panel discussing the possibility of a time when music, given its undeniable influence on our emotions, could be prescribed along with conventional medicines.

To learn more visit dublintechsummit.com.

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The artificial intelligence revolutionising healthcare - Irish Times

A much discussed area in technology these days is artificial intelligence, a type of machine learning. Artificial intelligence is a workload that requires an immense amount of processing power, which is why companies like microprocessor giant Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) -- a company that brings in tens of billions of dollars from sales of processors -- see this market as an interesting long-term growth opportunity.

Interestingly, although Intel is a major supplier of processors for artificial intelligence workloads, the company doesn't get nearly as much attention for its efforts in this market as does graphics specialist NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) -- a company that has seen significant revenue and profit growth from artificial intelligence applications as its long-term investments in this space are paying off.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at the company's AI day back in November 2016. Image source: Intel.

Intel went over its artificial intelligence strategy at its Feb. 9 investor meeting. Let's look at what the company had to say about the market and how it plans to win in it.

According to Intel, only 7% of server sales in 2016 were used for artificial intelligence workloads, but it is the "fastest-growing data center workload."

Within that 7%, the company says that 60% of those servers were used for "classical machine learning" while the remaining 40% were used for "deep learning."

The company then went on to show that of the servers used for classical machine learning, 97% used Intel Xeon processors to handle the computations, 2% used alternative architectures, and 1% used Intel processors paired with graphics processing units (likely from NVIDIA).

Among servers used for deep learning applications, the chipmaker says that 91% use just Intel Xeon processors to handle the computations, 7% use Xeon processors paired with graphics processing units, while 2% use alternative architectures altogether.

The point that Intel is trying to make is that its chips overwhelmingly dominate the market for servers that run artificial intelligence workloads today.

Intel clearly views graphics processors from the likes of NVIDIA as a threat to its position in the artificial intelligence market -- a reasonable viewpoint considering that NVIDIA's data center graphics processor business continues to grow at a phenomenal rate (revenue was up 145% in the company's fiscal year 2017).

The risk is that that those graphics processors, though usually paired with Intel Xeon processors, will reduce the demand for said Xeon processor (i.e., if some number of Xeon processors can be replaced by one Xeon processor and some smaller number of graphics processors, then Intel loses).

Intel's strategy, then, appears to be to cast a very wide net with a wide range of different architectures and hope that it can offer better solutions for specific types of artificial intelligence workloads than the graphics chipmakers like NVIDIA can.

Intel's broad AI product portfolio. Image source: Intel.

Look at the slide above and you'll notice Intel has different solutions for different types of workloads. It's promoting its next-generation Xeon processor (known as Skylake-EP) as the standard, general-purpose artificial intelligence processor.

From there, the offerings get more targeted. For some workloads, it will offer a specialized version of its Xeon Phi processor called Knights Mill. For others, it's going to offer combined Xeon processor with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips. And, for still others, the company plans to offer a chip that combines a Xeon processor with a specialized deep learning chip called Lake Crest (based on technology that Intel acquired when it picked up start-up Nervana Systems).

Intel's strategy looks as solid as it can possibly be as it seems to be throwing its entire technical arsenal at the problem -- I'd say the company is well positioned to profit from the continued proliferation of artificial intelligence workloads.

What will only become evidence in time, though, will be how much market share Intel will ultimately be able to capture in this market. The underlying market growth should mean that Intel's revenue and profits here will grow, but obviously, the magnitude of that growth will depend on its ability to defend its market share while at the same time defending its average selling prices.

Ashraf Eassa owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Inside Intel Corporation's Artificial Intelligence Strategy - Motley Fool