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HealthTech startups and the future of healthcare

#artificialintelligence

HeathTech no doubt is the future of what the world will expect to experience in the healthcare service provision space. Due to the tech leverage and artificial intelligence (AI), HealthTech can offer realtime service to tens of millions of people on an almost instantaneous automated process, while spotting demand trends and future possibilities. Also, very obvious in solving the space-time challenge, Internet Technologies and AI is totally redefining startups and how we share and use information. The covid-19 pandemic came in to redefine how the entire globe is perceiving the human interactions as most organizations find how to deliver in the midst of the big change. Some healthcare providers offering leading insights in that category have been discussed in this article to further make available information on how globally-positioned organizations are engaging with people needs and requirements within and outside their domain of operation through tech best practices.


Disney adds beloved characters as text-to-speech voices in TikTok – and bans them from saying 'lesbian' or 'gay'

The Independent - Tech

A text-to-speech TikTok voice made by Disney that made users sound like Rocket Raccoon does not allow users to'say' words like "gay", "lesbian", or "queer". Numerous posts by users showed the feature failing to say the LGBTQ terms before it was quietly changed to allow the words. Words like "bisexual" and "transgender", were allowed by the feature. Originally, Rocket's voice would skip over the words when written normally but would be pronounced phonetically if a user wrote "qweer", for example. Attempts to make it read text that contained only the seemingly-prohibited words resulted in an error message saying that text-to-speech was not supported by the language chosen.


Cardinal Health to Test Drone Delivery to Pharmacies

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

The program is Cardinal Health's first foray into drone deliveries, which the Dublin, Ohio-based distributor sees as a way around delays in restocking inventory and volatile last-minute shipping prices. It follows other efforts by companies including United Parcel Service Inc., Merck & Co. and Walmart Inc. testing the use of drones for the domestic shipment of medical products and supplies. Josh Dolan, Cardinal Health's senior vice president of pharmaceutical operations, said drone delivery would allow the company to bypass road obstacles such as natural disasters and help replenish high-turnover items. Eventually, he said, it will be useful for emergency situations in remote areas or when time is crucial, such as delivering antivenom for snake bites. While speed and reliability are the main reasons Cardinal Health is pursuing drone delivery, the flights would also allow the company to avoid fluctuations in prices for last-minute courier or helicopter deliveries, Mr. Dolan said.


Top HealthTech Companies in Europe

#artificialintelligence

Oxford Nanopore (@nanopore): is a sequencing company (spun out of the University of Oxford) valued at around $4,6 billion in London IPO. Oxford Nanopore is offering a technology to analyse any length of native DNA or RNA, and it's the only sequencing tech company to enable real-time analysis, in fully scalable formats--from pocket to population scale. But Nanopore goes beyond sequencing, since ML learning algorithms can be used to extract unknown biology information hidden in the Nanopore sequencing data. On the report of a Financial Times article, the pandemic put Nanopore on the map since its patented technology (MinION the world's first portable pocket-sized sequencing device) was used in identifying and tracking the spread of Covid variants in 85 countries, by sequencing about 18% of all coronavirus genomes globally. In fact, Oxford Nanopore made a gross profit of £26.9m in the first half of 2021 and is now competing with Illumina in a $7 billion market for DNA sequencing, dominated so far by Illumina.


AI can make breast cancer screening more affordable. Here's how

#artificialintelligence

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer globally, and is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Indian women. Of the 685,000 women who die around the world every year because of breast cancer, over 90,000 are in India, where cancer of the breast is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in India. One of the major reasons for the high mortality rate in India is that most Indian patients present in the later stages of the disease. Population-scale screening with early detection methods, and efforts to increase awareness of breast cancer, could help tackle the disease, improve survival rates and reduce treatment costs. Screening mammography is a widely used method, but its usage in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is limited due to equipment cost and the expert skill required for interpretation of mammograms.


Language bias in Visual Question Answering: A Survey and Taxonomy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task, which has attracted more and more attention in the field of computer vision and natural language processing. However, the current visual question answering has the problem of language bias, which reduces the robustness of the model and has an adverse impact on the practical application of visual question answering. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review and analysis of this field for the first time, and classify the existing methods according to three categories, including enhancing visual information, weakening language priors, data enhancement and training strategies. At the same time, the relevant representative methods are introduced, summarized and analyzed in turn. The causes of language bias are revealed and classified. Secondly, this paper introduces the datasets mainly used for testing, and reports the experimental results of various existing methods. Finally, we discuss the possible future research directions in this field.


Covariate Shift in High-Dimensional Random Feature Regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is covariate shift, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label distributions remain the same. Despite the prevalence of covariate shift in real-world applications, a theoretical understanding in the context of modern machine learning has remained lacking. In this work, we examine the exact high-dimensional asymptotics of random feature regression under covariate shift and present a precise characterization of the limiting test error, bias, and variance in this setting. Our results motivate a natural partial order over covariate shifts that provides a sufficient condition for determining when the shift will harm (or even help) test performance. We find that overparameterized models exhibit enhanced robustness to covariate shift, providing one of the first theoretical explanations for this intriguing phenomenon. Additionally, our analysis reveals an exact linear relationship between in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization performance, offering an explanation for this surprising recent empirical observation.


Machine Learning and Ensemble Approach Onto Predicting Heart Disease

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The four essential chambers of one's heart that lie in the thoracic cavity are crucial for one's survival, yet ironically prove to be the most vulnerable. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) also commonly referred to as heart disease has steadily grown to the leading cause of death amongst humans over the past few decades. Taking this concerning statistic into consideration, it is evident that patients suffering from CVDs need a quick and correct diagnosis in order to facilitate early treatment to lessen the chances of fatality. This paper attempts to utilize the data provided to train classification models such as Logistic Regression, K Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Gaussian Naive Bayes, Random Forest, and Multi-Layer Perceptron (Artificial Neural Network) and eventually using a soft voting ensemble technique in order to attain as many correct diagnoses as possible.


Trust in biometrics sought with AI Act, government programs and ethical facial recognition

#artificialintelligence

Biometrics adoption is being encouraged in the public sector for digital ID and online government applications, as it continues to rise in the private sector from smartphones, where Fingerprint Cards has announced new wins to airport processes, where NEC technology is being deployed and Vision-Box is positioning for more growth. National digital ID programs are under the microscope, while Thales has signed a major deal in Vietnam, and a debate has broken out on facial recognition ethics between Oosto and Clearview AI. The potential for digital identity to boost national economies is examined by the World Economic Forum in a new white paper. The WEF sees digital ID as benefitting people by easing access to a range of services, helping small and medium-sized businesses with easier access to financing, and help establish robust growth in digital service industries, with China's digital wealth-management market offered as an example. Research ICT Africa has released a series of extensive reports delving into the digital identity systems in 10 African countries.


The Metaverse Has Already Arrived. Here's What That Actually Means

TIME - Tech

When Cathy Hackl's son wanted to throw a party for his 9th birthday, he didn't ask for favors for his friends or themed decorations. Instead, he asked if they could hold the celebration on Roblox. On the digital platform, which allows users to play and create a multitude of games, Hackl's son and his friends would attend the party as their virtual avatars. "They hung out and played and they went to other different games together," she says. "Just because it happens in a virtual space doesn't make it less real. The futility of throwing an outdoor pandemic-friendly event in January wasn't the only reason Hackl's son lobbied for a digital event. Roblox might be unknown to many over the age of, say, 25, but the 13-year-old platform is booming. Available on most desktop and mobile platforms, it is simultaneously a venue for free games, a creation engine that allows users to generate new activities of their own, and a marketplace to sell those experiences, as well as side products like ...