Daily Archives: June 5, 2017

From Amazon Echos AI assistant, Alexa, to Sephoras Kik chatbot, businesses are utilizing AI to enhance the user experience in a growing number of ways.

In the past year, chatbots have surged in popularity, helping retailers better connect with their customers. Beyond chatbots, AI has shown immense potential for improving and streamlining the customer experience.

Retailers can use the power of AI and predictive analytics to anticipate shoppers needs. For example, by looking at a shoppers order history and frequency to determine repeat ordering patterns.

These tools help retailers estimate when a customer might place a new order, so they can send either a reminder email with a personalized promotion or potentially help the shopper set up an automated ordering option. This enables retailers to build loyalty with customers through AI, because it saves shoppers time and is tailored to address their needs.

In the future, AI is expected to play an integral role in enabling merchants to build trust with their customers through their payment processors by supporting reliable fraud prevention, accurate behavioral prediction and increased checkout speed. While the technologies surrounding AI and machine learning might not be accessible to all retailers today, the increased shift toward using these capabilities to address their needs is opening the door to partnerships and collaboration to leverage AI across the industry.

According to FuturePays recent report, The Big Ticket: Whats Stopping Shoppers?, security is still a concern for customers shopping online. From storing payment information to entering contact details, 13% of shoppers admitted to abandoning a cart because of security concerns. AI has the potential to ease some of these worries. With a trusted partnership in place, retailers can leverage AI to identify fraud and stop it in its tracks. By using payment processors that rely on intuitive, human-like reasoning when evaluating transactions, business owners can help spot inconsistencies in their customers purchasing behavior and mitigate fraudulent transactions before its too late.

In addition to using past customer behavior to prevent fraud, AI chatbots are redefining the customer services experience offered by retailers. The increased popularity of mobile messaging and the demand for instant gratification has led to an opportunity for brands to utilize chatbots as a more convenient, automated way to improve the customer experience.

A recent survey from IBM revealed that more than 65% of millennials in North America prefer interacting with bots rather than communication with live customer service agents. Chatbots not only provide a channel where brands can better engage and acquire customers, but the technology also introduces a unique way for retailers to deliver a personalized experience that may keep customers coming back for more.

While its still a little early to say how AI will ultimately impact retailers, chatbots and AI are changing how consumers are connecting to retailers, especially when it comes to the customer experience. However, to keep up with shoppers desire for security, convenience and speed, all aspects of the customer experience must be adapted, including payments, and AI has the potential to help streamline that process.

Denise Purtzer is vice president of business development for FuturePay.

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Retailers must see artificial intelligence as more than bots - PaymentsSource

Sunday June 04, 2017 more stories from this episode

"The year 2017 has arrived and we humans are still in charge. Whew!"

That reassuring proclamation came from a New Year's editorial in the Chicago Tribune.

If you haven't been paying attention to the news about artificial intelligence, and particularly its newest iteration called deep learning, then it's probably time you started. This technology is poised to completely revolutionize just about everything in our lives.

If it hasn't already.

Experts say Canadian workers could be in for some major upheaval over the next decade as increasingly intelligent software, robotics and artificial intelligence perform more sophisticated tasks in the economy. (CBC News)

Today, machines are able to "think" more like humans than most of us, even the scientists who study it, ever imagined.

They are moving into our workplaces, homes, cars, hospitals and schools, and they are making decisions for us. Big ones.

Artificial intelligence has enormous potential for good.But its galloping development has also given rise to fears of massive economic dislocation, even fears that these sentient computers might one day get so smart, we will no longer be able to control them.

To use an old fashioned card playing analogy, this is not a shuffle. It's a whole new deck and with a mind of its own.

Sunday Edition contributor Ira Basen has been exploring the frontiers of this remarkable new technology. His documentary is called"Into the Deep: The Promise and Perils of Artificial Intelligence."

Ira Basen June 2, 2017

Remember HAL?

The HAL 9000 computer was the super smart machine in charge of the Discovery One space station in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. For millions of moviegoers, it was their first look at a computer that could think and respond like a human, and it did not go well.

In one of the film's pivotal scenes, the two astronauts living in the space station try to return from a mission outside the spacecraft, only to discover that HAL won't allow them back in.

"Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL," Dave, one of astronauts, demands several times.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," HAL finally replies. "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something that I can't allow to happen."

The astronauts were finally able to re-enter the spacecraft and disable HAL, but the image of a sentient computer going rogue and trying to destroy its creators has haunted many people's perceptions of artificial intelligence ever since.

For most of the past fifty years, those negative images haven't really mattered very much. Machines with the cognitive powers of HAL lay in the realm of science fiction. But not anymore. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is the hottest thing going in the field of computer science.

Governments and industry are pouring billions of dollars into AI research. The most recent example isthe Vector Institute, a new Toronto-based AI research lab announced with much fanfare in March and backed by about $170 million in funding from the Ontario and federal governments, and gig tech companies like Google and Uber.

The Vector Institute will focus on a particular subset of AI called "deep learning."It was pioneered by U of T professor Geoffrey Hinton, who is now the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Institute. Hinton and other deep learning researchers have been able to essentially mimic the architecture of the human brain inside a computer. They created artificial neural networks that work in much the same way as the vast networks of neurons in our brain, that when triggered, allow us to think.

"Once your computer is pretending to be a neural net," Hinton explained in a recent interview in the Toronto office of Google Canada, where he is currently an Engineering Fellow, "you get it to be able to do a particular task by just showing it a whole lot of examples."

So if you want your computer to be able to identify a picture of a cat, you show it lots of pictures of cats. But it doesn't need to see every picture of a cat to be able to figure out what a cat looks like. This is not programming the way computers have been traditionally been programmed. "What we can do," Hinton says, "is show it a lot of examples and have it just kind of get it. And that's a new way of getting computers to do things."

For people haunted by memories of HAL, or Skynet in the Terminator movies another AI computer turned killing machinethe idea of computers being able to think for themselves, to "just kind of get it", in ways that even people like Geoffrey Hinton can't really explain, is far from re-assuring.

They worry about "superintelligence"the point at which computers become more intelligent than humans, and we lose control of our creations. It's this fear that has people like Elon Musk, the man behind the Tesla electric car, declaring that the "biggest existential threat" to the planet today is artificial intelligence. "With artificial intelligence," he asserts, "we are summoning the demon".

SHODAN, the malevolent artificial intelligence from System Shock 2. (Irrational Games/Electronic Arts)

People who work in AI believe these fears of superintelligence are vastly overblown. They argue we are decades away from superintelligence, and we may, in fact, never get there. And even if we do, there's no reason to think that our machines will turn against us.

Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, one of the world's leading deep learning researchers, believes we should avoid projecting our own psychology onto the machines we are building.

"Our psychology is really a defensive one," he argued in a recent interview. "We are afraid of the rest of the world, so we try to defend from potential attacks." But we don't have to build that same defensive psychology into our computers. HAL was a programming error, not an inevitable consequence of artificial intelligence.

"It's not like by default an intelligent machine also has a will to survive against anything else,"Bengio concludes. "This is something that would have to be put in. So long as we don't put that in, they will be as egoless as a toaster, even though it could be much, much smarter than us.

So if we decide to build machines that have an ego and would kill rather than be killed then, well, we'll suffer from our own stupidity. But we don't have to do that."

Humans suffering from our own stupidity? When has that ever happened?

Feeling better?

Click 'listen' above to hear Ira Basen'sdocumentary on artificial intelligence.

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Artificial intelligence - wonderful and terrifying - will change life as we know it - CBC.ca

In the United States, job demographic data from censuses since the 1900s reveal a startling fact. Despite the two post-Industrial revolutions of electricity and computers, the occupations with the largest employment numbers are still jobs for drivers, retail, cashiers, secretaries, janitors etc, i.e. old professions needing simple skills and mostly repetitive work. This lack of transition to newer jobs is a global phenomenon, especially in the global south. India, for example, has half of the working population doing agriculture.

One must grasp the significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in this context. Unlike technological upheavals of the past, AI is unique in that it can rather cheaply replace a vast spectrum of mental, creative, and intuitive human labour. With AI presiding over the mass extinction of repetitive jobs, precisely the sort employing the most workers, no precedent exists of newer jobs replacing them in large enough numbers.

There is no dearth of alarmist narratives around AI. But the danger of AI isnt that it will become hostile, or follow its instructions with such a literal interpretation and on such a scale that human existence itself be jeopardised. Science-fiction scenarios of rampant AI are interesting thought-experiments but already-existing AI is here, and requires well-crafted policy.

Take driverless cars. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics lists six million professional drivers in US as of 2016 and their jobs are in peril. Trains are easier to automate, and metros like Rome, London, and Paris to name a few are already transitioning. An MIT Tech Review 2016 article describes factories, warehouses, and farms developed in China needing minimal humans to operate. A US firm, WinterGreen Research Inc, projects that agricultural robots can become a $16 billion industry.

In India, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd already has one robot for every four workers at its Manesar and Gurgaon factories. McKinsey reports in 2017 that half of the Indian Information Technology workforce will become irrelevant in four years. Some industry watchers advocate retraining in social skills, under the prevalent but incorrect notion that machines cannot replicate human empathy and genius. AI, however, can perform creative or empathic types of labour. Caregiver robots will eventually enter nursing. The arts (including music) are subjects of AI research with Artificial Creativity as a subfield. Even areas like journalism, teaching, and entertainment are not entirely immune. Sophisticated processes like answering free-form questions in natural language is being actively researched, and will dramatically change the service sector.

In medicine, auxiliary work is easy to automate but the real challenge arrives when AI starts making better diagnoses than humans, which was demonstrated for cardiovascular diseases in an April 2017 paper. In the field of law, interns and junior lawyers, the backbone of legal firms, doing tasks like discovery, can be replaced. Finally, US banking giants like BNY Mellon, BBVA, and American Express, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on AI research, and low-end banking jobs might get axed.

A 2016 study by Deloitte states that 35% of jobs in Britain are at high risk in the next two decades. A 2016 McKinsey report pegs the potential for automation in US at 75% for food services, 40% in services, 35% in education, and 30% in administration. And unlike the first world India lacks the robust welfare state to support our underpaid contractual labour when automation hits our shores.

Given that Artificial Intelligence is revolutionary, and imminent, what is to be done?

The worst policy is to do nothing. A broken labour market alongside the euphemistically named sharing economy wherein monopolies own vast assets managed by AI and people only rent (think Uber like services not just for cars but for everything, operated via AI), presents a real danger of a regression to a system where only capital is needed and most of labour isnt. Futurists call this neo-feudalism. In an extreme case, much of the working population might become irrelevant to the economy, reduced to penury, and locked out of civilised sustenance.

A panacea which technocratic thought leaders are advocating is Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea behind UBI is that we accept unemployability of most humans and to preserve a minimum living standard and consumption needed for the economy, all welfare measures be streamlined, and a regular quantum of money paid to everyone. This money could be, as Bill Gates suggested, obtained via the heavy taxation of automation, or might come from public wealth, like land or oil.

The problem is, in a trivial form, UBI does nothing to address the root cause the control of vast productive forces by an ever-decreasing few. It gives up on most of the population, relegating them to an infantile, consumerist role, to be only fed and entertained, with no chance at social mobility. It does noting to correct the pseudo-scarcity the market creates in an otherwise era of AI-led hyperproduction. This is a waste of the potential of both humanity and AI.

There is another way, however, which doesnt treat AI as a technological artefact separate from socio-political forces, but as a component of public policy. AI could be a public good, and not merely an awe-inspiring private resource that companies can dazzle us with. Theres a need to challenge free-market fundamentalism and initiate international cooperation on AI policy, and start large, public funded, and distributed AI research, AI public-works, and AI-centric education.

In the light of this who controls the AI? becomes a vital question. A serious conversation is needed, especially in the third world, on how the AI led production of the future be managed: Will it be democratically controlled, or driven by corporate shareholders? AI can conceivably and radically improve both distribution and productivity, augmenting individual and public affluence. In other words, AI need not be market driven; there is a case for conceptualising it as a public good that is used to realise a better redistribution and a critical tool for shaping and strengthening democratic institutions.

AI can upend the metaphorical gameboard and liberate labour. It is a historical opportunity.

Anupam Guha is with the University of Maryland

The views expressed are personal

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Labour and Artificial Intelligence: Visions of despair, hope, and liberation - Hindustan Times

When Chinese Go master Ke Jie was comprehensively defeated by Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo on May 27 in the ancient canal town of Wuzhen, technology watchers around the world had to redraw the timeline in which AI rules the world.

The artificial mind had swept all three matches against the world's top player, a feat once thought impossible, given Go's deep complexity compared with previous AI wins, such as in chess or checkers.

The event also underscored continued Western dominance in the field of AI. AlphaGo was developed by the American search juggernaut's Deepmind unit, a British firm it acquired in 2014.

But China is today nipping at the heels of the United States, long the undisputed leader in AI technology, and may soon be poised to edge ahead as it brings products to market at a quicker pace.

One firm is using AI to analyse and approve loans more quickly and with a far lower default rate, while another that uses AI to enhance photos already has a user base of 1.3 billion, venture capitalist and former Microsoft and Google executive Lee Kai-Fu said at a commencement speech at Columbia University last month.

The quantity of papers published by Chinese researchers on branches of AI research such as deep learning - where a machine modelled after the human brain can learn by itself over time - already exceeds those by American scientists.

Chinese studies have also been cited more often than American ones, said a White House report last October that sought to draw attention to China's soaring capabilities in the field and the US' own eroding lead.

AI firms in China are also drawing unprecedented amounts of funding. While the US$2.6 billion (S$3.6 billion) they attracted last year is still a fraction of the US$17.9 billion that went to American AI firms, Shenzhen research firm ASKCI estimated that this is a 12-fold increase compared with three years ago.

Experts said three key ingredients make China's rise to the top in AI capability inevitable.

Its population of 1.3 billion provides a broad domestic market to test out new applications for AI, and to also supply the vast amounts of data that AI systems - like search engines before them - need to become more accurate, said Professor Zhang Wenqiang, director of the Robot Intelligence Lab of Fudan University.

"Firms such as Huawei and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) are also taking AI into uncharted territory in China, exploring possibilities in areas such as mobile payments," he told The Straits Times.

Having lost the PC and mobile Internet eras to the West, Beijing sees AI as a field it must dominate, and a key piece of the "Internet-plus" strategy that the government introduced in 2015 to use online technology to modernise its economy.

Besides putting in place fiscal policies last year to grow the sector, such as financial incentives to encourage greater use of industrial robots, Premier Li Keqiang drove home the point in March when he used the term "artificial intelligence" for the first time in his Government Work Report.

But amid the exuberance and high expectations, experts say China's AI sector may already be frothing.

The tussle with Silicon Valley for AI talent has seen salaries soar, while start-ups without any revenue are seeing valuations of as much as US$1 billion.

"As AI remains largely a technology tool and not a full-fledged product or platform, some companies are clearly overvalued," an analyst at Fortune Venture Capital told the China Money Network.

And even as it has made large strides in AI, China remains better at imitating and improving rather than truly inventive, ground-breaking work, said Prof Zhang.

"The US remains superior in this area and in attracting AI talent from all over," he added. "China has to innovate on its education and immigration policies if it is to get to the next level."

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China gets smarter on artificial intelligence, Asia News & Top Stories ... - The Straits Times

Noah Weiss, head of search, learning and intelligence at Slack, says the company is in a great position to take on the likes of Microsoft.

When former Google and Foursquare product specialist Noah Weiss joined workplace communication specialist Slack at the start of 2016, it was already vaunted as the world's hottest start-up, and enjoyed the kind of cool set aside for only the hottest of hot new things.

Described in some quarters as an email killer, the collaboration tool had evolved beyond being a co-worker chat tool to one that was attempting to redefine the way whole organisations and teams worked, shared information and applied their knowledge.

But the man who had helped Google define its "knowledge graph" of individuals' searches, was brought in to ensure it stayed at the forefront in an era where artificial intelligence has slipped off the pages of science fiction and into the marketing brochures of almost every tech company on the planet.

Making his first visit to Australia over a year later, Weiss, Slack's head of search, learning and intelligence tells The Australian Financial Review that the company has applied analytics and intelligence in such a way that it believes it can keep an edge over an eye-wateringly competitive field.

"A lot of people just love using Slack, because it felt like the tools that they used when they weren't at work, and we have now taken that further to the intelligent services, so that work systems feel as smart, convenient and proactive as the things you get to use on your phone away from the office," he says.

"It's kind of ironic that people are now able to do leisure more effectively than they can do work because their phone predicts what you want to do because it has all the data on you ... we have turned the unprecedented level of engagement that our users have to learn about what they do and who they do it with, so we can do interesting things to recycle it back to them and make them more effective at their jobs."

When he speaks of unprecedented levels of engagement he refers to stats that show more than 5million daily active usersusing Slack for more than two hours a day, andsending more than 70 messages per person per day.

In the same way that Google uses extensive user data to rank search results, Slack is now applying AI-like smarts when users look for information within it. Effectively Slack is watching its users, learning how they do their job and knows what users want to know before they even think to ask.

This will feasibly progress to theautomation ofsome of the purely process driven tasks, or suggestions about how workersshould be doing things better.

Weiss says there needs to be a balance between AI-driven communication and human interaction joking about a recent conversation in Gmail with a friend, where both came to realise that the other was using pre-predicted suggested answers but says once companies such as Slack perfect it, productivity should go through the roof.

"A lot of research into AI is is being published really openly both from the academic labs and and industry players, which is great for companies like us, which can use the public infrastructure to build these types of services as prices are dropping tremendously," he says.

"In a sense it has created a golden era for companies to create smart systems ... [which] means less people working on things that feel menial and rote, and hopefully more people getting to work on things that feel meaningful and creative and new."

Despite still being spoken of as a start-up, Slack is no small-time play. It has already raised just shy of $US540 million ($726 million) in external funding and is facing down some of the biggest companies in the world. While it is known in Australia as a competitor to Atlassian's HipChat product, it is also up against the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Weiss says that Slack tends to view Atlassian more as a partner, through the integration of Atlassian's Jira software with Slack, and rarely comes across HipChat in a competitive conversation outside of Australia. He says Slack's main game is a head-to-head against US giant Microsoft for the future of corporate teamwork.

Late last year Microsoft seemingly went straight after Slack with the launch of Microsoft Teams, but Weiss says he is confident it is a fight Slack will win.

"Frankly I think Microsoft is by far the most credible competitor, in part because we present the biggest existential risk to Microsoft more so than even Google ... but the juxtaposition between us and Microsoft couldn't be bigger," he says.

"We are building an open platform and ecosystem, where we want everybody else to be able to build great experiences into Slack, whereas Microsoft is trying to sell a bundle of its products and keep competitors out ... We are happy to be on this side of technology where we're trying to help you have this connective tissue that pulls all of the best services together."

A practical example he uses to highlight this is a partnership with US software firm Salesforce, which enables sales executives to work withthe specialist software from inside of Slack. He says Microsoft's wish to force customers to use its own Salesforce competitor Dynamics, means it will never allow integration with one of the most popularly used systems in the world.

In the near term,Weiss says Slack will continue its growth in the Asia Pacific region, which accounts for 15 per cent of its global usage, with plans to open an office in Japan this year.

While the product has not yet evolved to operate in Japanese, he said the country is one of the fastest adopters of Slack globally.

"Most of the history about technology companies in Japan is being befuddled by them wondering how to get these very wealthy intelligent folks to use their services," Weiss says.

"Our experience has been the opposite as we never even tried to build it for them and they seem to love using it. So we intend to see how great it can be if we actually tryto help them use it better."

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Slack eyes artificial intelligence as it takes on Microsoft and Asian expansion - The Australian Financial Review