Monthly Archives: March 2017

From helping you take care of email to creating personalized online shopping experiences, AI promises to transform the way we live and work.

But with all the hype out there, how do we know which benefits well actually see? In order to learn more, I asked a few members of YECthe following question:

Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us.

What is the top benefit you predict emerging from AI, and do you think the overall benefits will live up to the hype?

The greatest benefit of AI which is already emerging is the elimination of repetitive tasks. From chat bots that can free up human staffers times to work on more complex issues, to scheduling AIs like x.ai that eliminate the need to schedule meetings, AI will ultimately help humans spend more time focusing on creative and high-mental-effort activities. Brittany Hodak,ZinePak

I think the benefits of deeper personalization in terms of the ability to understand what each customer really wants and is interested in can be achieved through AI over time. It will live up to the hype because its already being used in some degree to illustrate how personalization is possible and how AI saves considerable time in getting to a deeper level of understanding of each customer. Angela Ruth, Due

AI will save companies considerable time by doing tasks and collecting data as well as providing decisions based on that data much faster than human beings can do. It seems quite possible that AI has the capability of doing so much more than we can on many levels. Its an exciting time to watch the changes that AI brings. Murray Newlands,Sighted

AI will enable us to interact with information as if were interacting with a knowledgeable individual. We wont have to look at a screen to learn about anything, we can simply converse with AI. SIRI is already a reliable personal assistant when it comes to setting reminders, alarm clocks, sending texts, etc. AI will make it possible for us to do virtually anything with voice command. Andrew Namminga,Andesign

The biggest change thats coming is the move from humans using software as a tool, to humans working with software as team members. Software will monitor things, alert humans, and execute basic tasks without human intervention. This will free human time for the really creative or interesting tasks and greatly improve business. A.I. is going to have a much larger impact than the hype. Brennan White,Cortex

I think the greatest advantage of AI is the automation of tasks that will free up employees to focus on strategic initiatives. On the other hand, I dont think it will be as big as predicted. There are still too many tasks that need a human touch to make them successful. Well see great benefit from AI in the more mundane areas, but youll always need the human brain for some tasks. Nicole Munoz,Start Ranking Now

One of the top benefits will be the emergence of personalized medicine. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, doctors will be able to tailor treatment on an individual basis and prescribe the right treatments and procedures based on your medical history. As far as living up to hype, yes definitely. Though as with many new technologies its more of a question of whenratherthan if. Kevin Yamazaki,Sidebench

No, tomorrows AI wont live up to the hype. Freeing ordinary folks from repetitive tasks and giving them personal assistants only allows people to busy themselves with other, more complex tasks. The resulting productivity will mark incremental gains for business owners, but nothing on par with the digital revolution and the industrial one before it. For that, well have to wait for the robots. Manpreet Singh,TalkLocal

With each wave of technology advancement, the quality of life for the world overall has increased. With AI, we will have better personalized healthcare, more efficient energy use, enhanced food production capabilities, improved jobs with less mundane work, and more. People will lead longer and more high quality lives. Adelyn Zhou,TOPBOTS

I believe it will be more like the science fiction movies, where we will maintain and work with the machines that do the work. However, these jobs will come with a level of prestige, as most people will probably live off a government sponsored socialism system. With AI and automation replacing so many jobs in the next 20 years, we will have to change social systems in order to adapt. Andy Karuza,FenSens

While AI is critical for self-driving cars, the military, commerce, AI-driven SEO and gaming, its poised to make the most human impact in medicine and human behavior. Imagine the UN leveraging neural networks and deep learning to discover what helps some communities thrive and others fall behind. Those lessons can then be leveraged into community builders, city planners, grants and projects. Gideon Kimbrell,InList Inc

Artificial intelligence based home automation is the future. If everyone in the United States installed Nest or a similar smart thermostat, they would collectively save hundreds of millions of dollars annually in wasted energy since Nest is able to learn when people are orare not home. Nest and others automatically adjust temperature saving on energy use and costs. Kristopher Jones,LSEO.com

Artificial Intelligence will do wonders to help automate processes that, today, take time and manual labor but dont contribute much to the bottom line or moving forward as a company. Automation will allow additional time and resources to be dedicated to what companies need to focus their energy on: customer experience. Andrew Kucheriavy,Intechnic

Read next: Heres everything you need to know about the state of autonomous cars

Read the original post:

13 ways AI will change your life - TNW

Artificial Intelligence is having a drastic impact on the way companies interact with their customers.

Most people are familiar with artificial intelligence because of movies like iRobot or Star Wars. Over the years, technology proved that artificial intelligence wont always be a science fiction myth. In the year 2014 alone, a total of $300 million was invested in AI startup companies, as reported by Bloomberg. AI has been making things much simplerfor a lot of businesses which inevitably makes customers happy.

In fact, AI is becoming so big that according to Gartner, 85% of total customer interactions will not be managed by humans as of the year 2020. Forrester is even predicting that AI will take over a total of 16% of American jobs at the end of the decade.

Because of the development in technology, it is actually possible to communicate with computers the same way that we also communicate with people. The great thing about AI is that it is able to store tons of information in their memory banks and to pull them out any time. This type of function is extremely helpful for many companies in improving customer experience as it gives the customers what they exactly wanted. This adds to the overall customer satisfaction of the public. Remember that customer service is an integral ingredient of customer satisfaction; so the whole fact that AI can strengthen it will immediately ensure a higher customer satisfaction rate.

Over time, many technology companies have been delving into AI and have come up with a lot of interesting results. Siri happens to be one of the most famous apps of them all that aids in the iPhones customer satisfaction. For example, if you ask her to search something in Google for you, she will respond and bring you to the Google page with the search results presented.

Another one would be Watson, which is an even smarter AI app. Watson is known to be able to understand and respond to customers through cognition and not just memory banks from a database. In a nutshell, created by IBM, Watson is a problem solving robot thats been around since 2004.

Of course, Ive already mentioned how Apple made use of Siri to further help iPhone users get the most out of their phones. Just like Siri, Cortana is also an artificial intelligence assistant that also helps phone users, only Cortana can be found in Windows devices instead of Apple.

Weve also got Cogito which happens to be a very intelligent customer support robot that improves customer service of customer service representatives.

The travel industry also vastly benefits from AI apps. Take Baarb for example, a platform that uses AI technology to intelligently find the best travel spots for customers. All recommendations made by the platform are personalized and suited for each customers wants. These are only some of the companies that make use of AI for customer experience.

One of the most wonderful things about AI is how AI can actually make customer experience more personalized through the collection of data and also execution of humanlike traits. AIs work by first collecting data of their customers and storing them into their memory banks. They then use the information to interact with the customers. The more data that they store, the more intelligently they can interact. In a way, they are almost humanlike. They learn, they remember, then they apply.

By taking a look at some of the examples given above, we can see how the AIs use customer data to enhance experience. Siri, for example, stores information that will allow her to suggest tasks to be carried out for your needs. Baarb also does the same thing, but focuses on your travel preferences to come up with the best trips for your next vacation.

What makes AIs amazing are their ability to use data stored in their memory and use it to aid customers -- just like a customer service representative would.

AI is slowly becoming an integral part of our lives. With the use of this type of technology, creating good customer experiences for your consumers will be so much easier. With their sharp efficiency and human like traits, AI will definitely take over many tasks that were once done by humans. We just have to be ready for it.

Nathan Resnick

Excerpt from:

How Artificial Intelligence is Improving Customer Experience - Business.com

Relax. Artificial intelligence is making our lives easier, but won't be a threat to human existence, according to panel of practitioners in the space.

"One of the biggest misconceptions today about autonomous robots is how capable they are," said Brenna Argall, faculty research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, during a Chicago Innovation Awards eventWednesday.

"We see a lot of videos online showing robots doing amazing things. What isn't shown is the hours of footage where they did the wrong thing," she said. "The reality is that robots spend most of their time not doing what they're supposed to be doing."

The event at Studio Xfinity drew about 200 people, who mingled among tech exhibits before contemplating killer robot overlords.

Stephen Pratt, a former IBM employee who was then responsible for the global implementation of Watson, also was quick to swat down the notion that machines are poised to run the world.

The tech insteadgives better ways to improve services, products and business, hesaid besting humans in applications dealing with demand predictions, pricing, inventory, retail promotion, logistics and preventive maintenance.

"Amplifying human intelligence, and overcoming human cognitive biases I think that's where it fits," said Pratt, founder and CEO of business consultancy Noodle.ai. "Humans are really bad probabilistic thinkers and statisticians. That's where cognitive bias creeps in and, therefore, inefficiencies and lost profit."

But machineswon't replace humans when it comes to big-picture decisions, he said.

"Those algorithms are not going to set the strategy for the company. It'll help you make the decision once I come up with the idea," Pratt said. "But any executive that doesn't have a supercomputer in the mix now on their side and they're stuck in the spreadsheet era your jobs are going to be in jeopardy in a few years."

It'll be up to machines to decipher those spreadsheets anyway, as so much data is being collected it would be overwhelming for humans to understand, said Kris Hammond, co-founder of Chicago AI company Narrative Science.

"We're no longer looking at a world with a spreadsheet with 20 columns and 50 rows. We're now looking at spreadsheets of thousands of columns and millions of rows," said Hammond, founder of the University of Chicago's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "The only way we can actually understand what's going on in the world is to have systems that look at that data, understand what they mean and then turn it into something we can understand."

Mike Shelton, technical director for Microsoft's Azure Data Services, said it's also a time saver.

"What I see every day is it's giving time back," he said. "Through an AI interface, I can ask a question in speech or text and get a response through that without having to go search for a web page or hunt for information."

Julie Friedman Steele , CEO of the World Future Society, said her organization is focusing on the advances that could be made using AI in education, where teachers in crowded classrooms can't give much attention to students individually.

"As a human, can you actually learn all the knowledge that you might have a student interested in learning?" said Steele, who's also CEO and founder of The 3D Printer Experience. "I'm not talking about there not being a human in the room and it's all robots. I'm just saying that there's an opportunity in education with artificial intelligence so that if a teacher doesn't know something, it's OK."

Cheryl V. Jackson is a freelance writer. Twitter@cherylvjackson

The rest is here:

AI won't kill you, but ignoring it might kill your business, experts say ... - Chicago Tribune

First there was "open washing," the marketing strategy for dressing up proprietary software as open source. Next came "cloud washing," whereby datacenter-bound software products masqueraded as cloud offerings. The same happened to big data, with petabyte-deprived enterprises pretending to be awash in data science.

Now we're into AI-washing -- an attempt to make dumb products sound smart.

Judging by the number of companies talking up their amazing AI projects, the entire Fortune 500 went from bozo status to the Mensa society. Not to rain on this parade, but it's worth remembering that virtually all so-called AI offerings today should be defined as "artificially inflated" rather than "artificially intelligent."

As tweeted by Michael McDonough, global director of economic research and chief economist, Bloomberg Intelligence, the number of mentions of artificial intelligence on earnings calls has exploded since mid-2014:

It's possible that in the last three years, the state of AI has accelerated incredibly fast so that nearly every enterprise now has something worthwhile to say on the subject. More likely, everyone wants on the AI bandwagon, and in the absence of mastery, they're marketing.

AI is, after all, incredibly difficult. Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook, said at a recent O'Reilly conference that "machines need to understand how the world works, learn a large amount of background knowledge, perceive the state of the world at any given moment, and be able to reason and plan."

Most companies have neither the expertise on staff nor the scale to pull this off. Or, at least, not to an extent worthy of talking about AI initiatives on earnings calls.

Developers recognize this even if their earnings-touting executives don't. For example, as an extensive, roughly 8,500-strong developer survey from VisionMobile uncovers, less than one quarter of developers think AI-driven chatbots are currently worthwhile. While chatbots aren't the only expression of AI, they're one of the most visible examples of hype getting out in front of reality.

I witnessed the sound and fury of AI hype firsthand at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where I participated in a panel ("The Future of Messaging: Engagement, eCommerce and Bots") that explored the current and future state of AI as applied to messaging and chatbots. Executives from Google, PayPal, and Sprint joined me, and it quickly became clear that the promise of AI has yet to be realized and won't be for some time. Instead of overpromising a near-term AI future, the session seemed to conclude, it would be best for enterprises to focus on small-scale AI projects that deliver simple but effective consumer value.

For example, machine learning/AI can be used to interpret patterns in X-rays, as Dr. Ziad Obermeyer of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital and Ezekiel Emanuel, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, posit in a New England Journal of Medicine article. Deep, mind-blowing AI? Nope. Effective (and likely to render a big chunk of the radiologist population under-employed)? Likely.

The trick to making AI work well is data: lots and lots of data. Most companies simply aren't in a position to gather, create, or harness that data. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, by contrast, can and do, and yet anyone who has used Amazon's Echo or Apple's Siri knows that the output of their mountains of data is still relatively basic. Each of these companies sees the potential, however, and is ramping up efforts to collect and annotate data. Amazon, for example, has 15,000 to 20,000 low-paid people working behind the scenes on labeling snippets of data. Those people are building toward an AI-driven future, but it's still the future.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves. Everyone may be talking about AI, but it's mostly artificial with precious little intelligence. That's OK, so long as we recognize it as such and build simple services that deliver on their promise.

In sum, we don't need an AI revolution. Evolution will do nicely.

Go here to read the rest:

Artificially inflated: It's time to call BS on AI - InfoWorld

Computer researchers are betting they can take on the house after designing a new artificial intelligence program that has beat professional poker players.

Researchers from University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague developed the "DeepStack" program as a way to build artificial intelligence capable of playing a complex kind of poker. Creating an AI program that can win against a human player in a no-limit poker game has long been a goal of researchers due to the complexity of the game.

Michael Bowling, a professor in the Department of Computing Science in the University of Alberta, explained that computers have been able to win at "perfect" games such as chess or Go, in which all the information is available to both players, but that "imperfect" games like poker have been much harder to program for.

"This game [poker] embodies situations where you find yourself not having all the information you need to make a decision," said Bowling. "In real-life situations, it's a rare moment that we have all the information."

There have been other poker-playing AI programs, but they were playing a poker game that included a pot limit, meaning there were limitations on the amount of money could be bet during different stages. As a result, there was less information and risk analysis for the program to compute. In those programs, Bowling explained, the program could look at all potential paths and probabilities for playing different hands prior to playing the game and then simply plug in the information from each hand to win the game.

In this new version of a two-person Texas hold'em poker, there were no limits on betting vastly expanding the amount of information that would need to be processed. Bowling explained without that limitation there were more potential outcomes "than there are atoms in the universe."

"DeepStack gets around that by not pre-computing everything in advance, it will process information at each time," said Bowling.

The programmers were able to create an "intuition" program system for the AI that would focus on looking at each hand in real time and then compute the probability of winning the next few hands, rather than the entire game.

"It only looks a few answers ahead," Bowling explained.

In order for the program to be able to respond in real time, Bowling and his co-researchers were able to create special machinery designed to "learn" complex information. Called a deep neural network, the technology allows the AI to "learn" by looking at past poker games and their outcomes. By simulating poker games over and over, the AI is able to better estimate how to play a hand and figure out a hand's "value."

Bowling explained the program could see via the simulations "how much money would I expect to win if I found myself in this situation."

"If it's positive, it's good for me; if it's negative, it's bad," Bowling said.

The "intuition" could then determine if a hand was more valuable by looking at past simulation results and then be able to better predict a winning move.

To test if their AI could win, the researchers worked with the International Federation of Poker to recruit players willing to play against DeepStack. In four weeks, they had 11 professional poker players each play 3,000 games against DeepStack. They found DeepStack won most of the time against all the players.

"We were ahead by quite a large margin," Bowling said. When they went back to look and see if the program might have just been lucky, they found the program was likely ahead due to skill not luck when pitted against 10 of the 11 participants.

The researchers hope the program will be able to be used for other complicated situations such as "defending strategic resources" or making difficult decisions in medical treatment recommendations.

"With many real-world problems involving information asymmetry, DeepStack also has implications for seeing powerful AI applied more in settings that do not fit the perfect information assumption," the authors said.

Read more:

Poker-playing AI beats pros using 'intuition,' study finds - ABC News