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How artificial intelligence will impact accounting

#artificialintelligence

So many works of film and fiction are hooked on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it might mean for humanity. They are often apocalyptic tales – Blade Runner, Alien, Terminator – where mankind comes off badly. But now that AI is being spearheaded by internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems – chat bots, purchase prediction, news generation – what will really happen? In 2015 the UK media widely picked up on American media organisation NPR's calculator that could predict which jobs are susceptible to computerisation. The calculator, using research by the University of Oxford, said accountants have a 95% chance of losing their jobs as machines take over the number crunching and data analysis.


Predicting The Status of Waterpoints

@machinelearnbot

He took NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program between Sept 23 to Dec 18, 2015. The post was based on his fourth class project(due at 8th week of the program). Kaggle is the most famous organization dedicated to Data Science competitions, but there are others. One of these is Driven Data. Beyond the difference in visibility, a point of divergence between Kaggle and Driven Data is that the latter's competitions often have a social focus as opposed to the former's usual business leanings.


My #4IR Journey And How I Discovered IBM

#artificialintelligence

I had a background in financial sales and portfolio strategy, but Fintech was on the rise, the RoboAdvisor was gaining momentum, and Bogleheads were taking over. They were consolidating to the point of monopoly and had determined that fee income and cross-sell ratio were more important than service and fiduciary responsibility to client wealth. "Too big to fail" became the justification for mass abuse in the financial system. We only have to look to Wells Fargo's recent crisis to see the results. The problem is systemic, encouraged, and will get worse before it gets better.


Endangered Animals Are Being Poisoned In Zimbabwe. Drones Are Flying To The Rescue.

Huffington Post - Tech news and opinion

Instead of using guns to kill elephants and rhinoceroses, some poachers in Zimbabwe have begun poisoning the animals' water with cyanide? a practice some activists believe could be curbed by flying drones over parks in the African country. Although drone usage hasn't been proven to stop the killing of elephants, anti-poaching program Air Shepherd is prepared to use monitoring to help stop people from poisoning animals. The organization already flies drones over parks in three southern Africa countries at night to patrol for gun-toting poachers. The suspected cause of death, according to news reports, is cyanide, which has been used to kill hundreds of elephants in recent years. "The biggest problem that we have is that ivory is a business," said Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the CEO of UAV and Drone Solutions, a business partnering with the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation to run the Air Shepherd program. "The poaching of the animals is the last thing that people want to solve.


Wild monkeys make sharp stone tools, but they might not realize it, scientists say

Los Angeles Times

It does not pay to underestimate a monkey with a rock. Scientists studying the stone-smashing habits of bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil have found that the primates inadvertently produce stone flakes that look very similar to the flakes used as cutting tools by early humans. The findings, published in the journal Nature, could snarl the links that paleoanthropologists make between early Stone Age artifacts and the emergence of primitive human technology. "It does raise interesting questions about the level of cognitive complexity -- how intelligent a hominin has to be in order to produce what we thought was a sophisticated technology," said lead author Tomos Proffitt, a paleoanthropologist at Oxford University. When anthropologists explore early human settlements, they typically search for signs of tool use, whether by looking at the cuts on butchered animal bones or finding the tools themselves.


The Cure for Cancer Is Data--Mountains of Data

WIRED

A few years ago Eric Schadt met a woman who had cancer. It was an aggressive form of colon cancer that had come on quickly and metastasized to her liver. She was a young war widow from Mississippi, the mother of two girls she was raising alone, and she had only the health care that her husband's death benefits afforded her--an overburdened oncologist at a military hospital, the lowest rung on the health care ladder. To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when "colon cancer" was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu. A time without big data, machine learning, or hope.


Artificial intelligence and rural African power

#artificialintelligence

In the West, we rely on the grid, which provides most people with ample power. In off-grid communities such as those in large parts of rural Africa, energy is a highly valued resource and consumers are much more aware of energy efficiency. The limited energy that is available is disproportionately expensive and innovative solutions, such as small-scale renewable power, that cannot yet compete in the West, are gaining ground where, compared to the cost of the fossil fuels they replace, they are seen as a bargain. Developments such as small solar home systems are bringing power for the first time to millions of off-grid consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to technological advances in LED lights, batteries and mobile payment, creating what many are referring to as the "clean energy revolution" in rural electrification. While LED lighting and phone charging were the first volume application in this rapidly evolving market, consumers of the clean energy revolution in Africa want, and increasingly demand, more. Customers now expect to be able to access the latest technology, media and communications through the growth of the largely familiar pay-as-you-go technology, even in areas where there is no little or no grid access.


Hey Silicon Valley: President Obama Has a To-Do List for You

WIRED

Ask not what the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. He presented WIRED with six challenges he feels the tech industry needs to address--just a few earthshaking problems the country could use some help with, that's all. We reached out to six of the biggest names in the WIRED world, and we gave each of them a challenge from the president's list. Then we asked: To get this done, what's the industry's best play? Silicon Valley runs on stories. So does the economy in general. We create what we believe in. If we believe we can use technology to identify and solve big problems, then that's what we'll do.


Six Very Clear Signs That Your Job Is Due To Be Automated

#artificialintelligence

Anesthesiologists' jobs look safer than radiologists' jobs. In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should?


This Groundbreaking Algorithm Can Spot Sepsis Before Doctors

Huffington Post - Tech news and opinion

Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at Thursday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.