Daily Archives: March 9, 2017

A New COIN

JP Morgan Chase & Co. is the biggest bank in the United States. It is one of the largest employers in the American banking sector, with more than 240,000 employeesserving millions of customers. Some of those employees are lawyers and loan officers who spend a total of 360,000 hours each year tackling a slew of rather mundane tasks, such as interpreting commercial-loan agreements. Now, the company has managed to cut the time spent on this work down to a matter ofsecondsusing machine learning.

In June, JP Morgan started implementing a program called COIN, which is short for Contract Intelligence. COIN runs on a machine learning system thats powered by a new private cloud network that the bank uses. Apart from shortening the time it takes to review documents, COIN has also managed to help JP Morgan decrease its number of loan-servicing mistakes. According to the programs designers, these mistakes stemmed from human error in interpreting 12,000 new wholesale contracts every year.

COIN is part of the banks push to automate filing tasks and create new tools for both its bankers and clients. Automation is now a growing part of JP Morgans $9.6 billion technology budget. In fact, over the past two years, technology spending in JP Morgans consumer banking sector has totaled about $1 billion. We have invested heavily in technology and marketing and we are seeing strong returns, the bank said in a presentation prior to its annual investor day.

Over the coming years and decades, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to usher in a new era of automation. Accordingly, the increase in automated systems will bring with it job displacement in a number of industries, including finance, transportation, manufacturing, information technology, and even law. In total,one study projected that 57 percent of the worlds jobs are at risk of being replaced by automated systems.

This is due, in part, to growing access to technology and cheaper computing systems. Automation can increaseefficiency and limit or altogether eliminate human error, as JP Morgans COIN program has demonstrated. Were starting to see the real fruits of our labor, said Matt Zames, the banks CTO. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff.

The bank, however, doesnt see their move toward better automated systems as a cause of unemployment. People always talk about this stuff as displacement. I talk about it as freeing people to work on higher-value things, which is why its such a terrific opportunity for the firm, said Dana Deasy, Chief Information Officer at JP Morgan.

Whatever the case may be, automation will cause a job disruption in the years to come. In some places, like JP Morgan, its already begun. Institutions, both private and public, have to be ready to adjust to the economic future automation will bring with it.

Read this article:
An AI Completed 360,000 Hours of Finance Work in Just Seconds - Futurism

Why We Age

In the absence of an actual fountain of youth, people have turned to drugs, creams, and even blood to prevent aging. But it turns out one of the best ways to combat the inevitable was right under our noses all alongexercise.

As we get older our cells lose their ability to generate energy effectively, which leads to the physical changeswe associate with aging.Researchled by Sreekumaran Nair at the Mayo Clinic reveals that high intensity interval training (HIIT) can help reverse those effects.

The study includedvolunteers from two age groups, one between 18 and 30, and the otherbetween 65 to 80. These groups were then divided into three: one received HIIT, another received weight training, and the third group was given a combination of both. All volunteers had to engage in the regimen for three months, and muscle biopsies were taken before and after for comparison.

Aging actually happens at a cellular level. As the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) declines with age, it leads to many age-related conditions everything from worsening eyesight to cancer. HIIT training which involves short bursts of intense physical activity, mixed with periods of lower-intensity exercise can apparently boost the mitochondrias ability to generate energy by 69 percent among older subjects, and 49 percent in a younger group.

Perhaps the most telling sign of cellular aging is when the body begins to have difficultywith specific functions, such as the muscles ability to burn excess blood sugar which could lead to diabetes. HIIT training lead to not just a halt in thedecline, but evenreversed it. After three months of interval training, everything converged towards what we saw in young people, says Nair.

In addition to positive impacton a cellular level, the training also provideda major improvement in lung, heart, and circulation health. The amount of oxygen the younger groupcould inhale rose by 28 percent, androse by 17 percent among the older volunteers.

Among the group that was given weight training instead of HIIT, no mitochondrial or respiratory improvements were observed. Under this exercise regimen, the best benefit received was gaining muscle mass. In the group that received a combination of both, oxygen consumption rose by 21 percent among older volunteers, and showed intermediate results.In a statement announcing their research, Dr. Nair said:

Other research centered around anti-aging efforts are also making significant strides: a drug called metformin, which has long been used to treat diabetes, has just been approved for clinical trials involving its potentialage-related applications. A separate study claims to have formulated a drug that can help slow down the aging process. Having a deeper understanding of genetics has also helped scientists gainnew insights into how we can effectively slow physical aging and the onset of age-related diseases.

Given these findings, combined with numerous breakthroughs in the field, we may be closer to the fountain of youth than we think.

Original post:
Scientists Have Found a Way to Reverse the Signs of Aging - Futurism

Mind Control

One reasonhumans fear robots and autonomous technologies in general is the potential for them to spiral out of our control (perhaps taking over the world while theyre at it). Since wedont yet know exactly how technological singularity would play out, for now, robots taking over the world remains just science fiction.

To that end, heres something that might appease those who worry a lot about machines taking over the world. Technology currently in development at Massachusetts Institute of Technologys (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), together with researchers from Boston University, is working on a way to give robots command using brain signals.Essentially, this letspeople control robots using onlytheir minds.

Researcherscreated a feedback system that allows robots to correct their mistakes easily. This system uses brain activity data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor, scanning for brain signals called error-related potentials (ErrPs). ErrPs are generated whenever the brain notices a mistake.

This feedback mechanism works in real time, thanks to the teams machine-learning algorithms that makes the system capable of classifying brain waves in just 10 to 20 milliseconds. As you watch the robot, all you have to do is mentally agree or disagree with what it is doing, explained CSAIL director Daniela Rus, senior author of the teams research paper which was accepted for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) which will take place in May. You dont have to train yourself to think in a certain way the machine adapts to you, and not the other way around.

Of course, monitoring ErrPs is just one piece of the puzzle.To be able to control a robot fully using the human brain, it would take more than than just reading a couple of brain signals. But this research on more intuitive human-robot interaction opens up possibilities for application in real-world setups that require a person to control robots. For example, managing robot assembly lines in factories or autonomous driving systems.

Imagine being able to instantaneously tell a robot to do a certain action, without needing to type a command, push a button or even say a word, Rus said. A streamlined approach like that would improve our abilities to supervise factory robots, driverless cars, and other technologies we havent even invented yet.

University of Freiburg computer science professor Wolfram Burgard commented onthis technologys potentialfor developing effective tools for brain-controlled robots and prostheses. Burgard, who wasnt part of the study, also added, Given how difficult it can be to translate human language into a meaningful signal for robots, work in this area could have a truly profound impact on the future of human-robot collaboration.

Original post:
MIT Tech Lets You Control Robots With Your Thoughts - Futurism