Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Is Artificial Intelligence taking over our lives?

By Rohitha Elsa Philip.       August 3, 2018 

From driverless cars and smart robots to drones and computer chess champions, technology is making our lives more interesting, convenient, and safer.

Is artificial Intelligence improving or taking over our lives? Is the technology evolving faster than we can understand?

Either way, the impact of AI is on all of us.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is something more into expert systems and symbolic systems intended to produce general, human-like intelligence in a machine.

AI technology allows rapidly to build models for geology, financial, and other industries to do predictions or to generate new insights. For instance, IBM took the strategy of Watson, which was basically a QA strategy. On the other hand, with the data possessed, Google and Amazon focussed on big learning strategies.

When it is about health care, real estate, or any sort of industry like that, there are a lot of unstructured data in a messy way, as it lacks standards to follow. Because of this, data streamlining is critical in making sense of data.

So How Does AI Really Help?

First, AI gives software the ability to interpret the meaning of data; interpret images, video, or voice in order to make all of the data understandable in deep ways.

Second, it allows you to learn from vast amounts of data and find conclusions and understand what might happen in the future so you can act.

Third, it allows you to interact with software in very natural ways; it allows machines to talk to you; it allows machines to take commands from you and do things for you.

AI Is Empowering the Next Billion

AI is here to stay and what we are seeing is just the beginning.

Whether we realize it or not, it has reached its tipping point and has made its way into our daily lives. AI has the potential to displace a whole economy of truck drivers, delivery services, and taxis with a self-driving car. And Uber has already deployed self-driving cars in Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

At Google I/0 2018, Sundhar Pichai showcases the real power of Artificial Intelligence. Google Assistant can actually ring up a salon or a restaurant to make a reservation for you by speaking to a human on the other end.

Data alone means nothing. Making use of AI along with the data will drive more insights about what customers want. In short, AI is the science of extracting information from what we are engaging in. If a person is engaged with Music and is traveling to Los Angeles, AI will automatically find a Musical event in that city. There is no loyalty left. In this way, AI adds more value to the user experience.

Moreover, nowadays everyone wants to get things personalized and personalization will drive industries.

AI is not about rewriting the software of your business model. AI is all about rewriting the entire business model. In the future, all software applications will be built with AI and will be on the cloud, all combining data and AI, and working with your smart devices it will impact your life in tangible ways.

How Does AI help?

Seeing AI is an AI implemented talking camera app for those with a visual impairment that empowers the blind to sense the world and hear the world. It can recognize people. It can help you understand the environment. It can understand the products. Amazingly, there are even people who watch TV using the Seeing AI app. This is one small example of how artificial intelligence can enhance the human ability and compensate for challenges we may have.

AI With Tech Giants

Within the tech giants, there is a huge ongoing fight to win on the race with AI.

Microsoft has been working on developing their Brainwave chips which dramatically accelerate their machine learning capabilities and their own search engine — Bing, functioning better than a factor of 10. And their hybrid cloud network in Azure, which is raking in the market share. With their latest acquisition of Github, their focus on being a cloud-first company is coming across very clearly.

Google is rushing in with their own Google Cloud with the best technical offering. But still, they have some ground to cover before posing a serious threat to the market leaders. As an early adopter, Amazon has a surreal advantage of about 7 years and that is pretty clear in their market shares. AWS powers about 40% of the internet, just because of their hold on AI. Not just because of the quality but because of the attitude with which Amazon does business. Whenever they see a threat from any of their customers they can just slash prices by a huge margin with their AI monopoly.

AI Everywhere

As the rapid evolution of technology has influenced our quality of life the impact of AI continues to grow. For instance, AI is at the heart of Apple’s iPhone X. The iPhone X has a neural engine built into the processor which accelerates specific types of AI software that were built to process pictures and speech.

Siri

Apple’s friendly voice-activated personal assistant that often interact with us.

Google Assistant

Google’s virtual assistant provides contextual information and performs actions on behalf of us.

Alexa

Amazon’s tech gadget listens to us and can decipher speech coming from anywhere in a room.

Tesla

Elon Musk’s self-driving car has been in tough spots but makes mistake, now this car is getting smarter.

Netflix

Depending on what you watch, Netflix makes accurate predictions. What comes after House MD?!

Video Games

The non-player characters in Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor have memories of past interactions and variable objectives.

Wrap Up

Without any doubt, AI will free up time by taking up some of our cognitive load. So, no wonder business leaders in industries like retail, healthcare, professional services, and finance are behind AI. For most, AI is their top priority because the AI impacts are clear and are revealed by the dominance of Amazon in retail, and Google and Facebook in advertising.

Undoubtedly, with data, AI is going to hack all the market dominance, and I think this will happen in the fairly short term.

DoD stands up its artificial intelligence hub

WASHINGTON – The Defense Department has formally ordered the creation of a new hub for artificial intelligence research with Dana Deasy, the Pentagon’s new chief information officer, taking the lead.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan ordered the move in a June 27 memo. The Pentagon’s goal is to launch a series of AI projects known as National Mission Initiatives within 90 days – as well as taking over the controversial Project Maven.

The office will be known as the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), with the goal of enabling “teams across DoD to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and effectively experiment with new operating concepts in support of DoD’s military missions and business functions,” according to DoD spokeswoman Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza.

Put another way, the group will have the “overarching goal of accelerating the delivery of AI-enabled capabilities, scaling the Department-wide impact of AI, and synchronizing DoD AI activities to expand Joint Force advantages,” according to a copy of the memo posted by Breaking Defense.

“This effort is a Department priority. Speed and security are of the essence,” Shanahan wrote. “I expect all offices and personnel to provide all reasonable support necessary to make rapid enterprise-wide AI adoption a reality.”

The JAIC marks the second major initiative Pentagon leaders handed over to Deasy, a former CIO with JPMorgan Chase who has only been at the Pentagon for a few weeks. Deasy also is in charge of managing the department’s JEDI cloud computing contract.

The idea of standing up an AI center was first confirmed by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on April 12, but it has been championed by the Defense Innovation Board, a group of outside experts ho advice the secretary on potential updates to how the Pentagon handles evolving technologies.

According to Michael Griffin, the head of Pentagon research and engineering, the department counts 592 projects as having some form of AI in them. However, Griffin said in April 18 testimony that he did not believe every one of those projects makes sense to roll into some sort of AI hub.

That concern appears to be reflected in Shanahan’s memo, which orders that any AI project with a budget of $15 million or more should be coordinated with the services in order to ensure “DoD is creating Department-wide advantages.”

In terms of budget, Shanahan ordered the Pentagon’s comptroller to find options for funding during the current fiscal year, but the major focus is on driving resources for fiscal year 2019 and beyond. Given the support for artificial intelligence research on the Hill, it is likely the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY19 will include some funding for the new office.

The movement of Project Maven to the JAIC is notable. A DoD initiative to accelerate the integration of big data and machine learning, largely drawing on video feeds from unmanned systems, Maven in the last month has become a poster child for the clash of cultures between the defense department and Silicon Valley.

Google was working hand-in-hand with the Pentagon on the project, until a backlash from the company’s employees, who argued in an open letter signed by more than 3,000 workers that it did not want to “build warfare technology.” Moving the program to the JAIC may be an attempt to keep the project underway without Google’s participation.