Artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare providers is currently at the peak of inflated expectations, according to Gartner's recently published "Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers, 2019." This is not a surprising conclusion, given the industry's ongoing claims about disruptive AI-based solutions that will transform healthcare. When you start reading about how "ambient AI" is going to see and hear everything that is going on in an exam room and somehow magically convert that to usable data for analytics and machine learning, you should be very skeptical. This misplaced dream of an all-knowing, all-seeing machine is holding developers back from addressing the real problem: giving clinicians tools they can use at the point of care today. Before we defer to Dr. Alexa for all our healthcare needs, let's first consider what type of AI innovations have the potential to improve healthcare efficiencies -- and which functions don't address what's really broken in healthcare.

An aviation industry startup accelerator program has selected an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)-based platform called Whispr to help improve the speed, accuracy and safety of aircraft inspections and turnarounds. As part of International Airline Group's (IAG) Hangar 51 accelerator program, Whispr is partnering with Spanish carrier Iberia to implement its hands-free voice guidance platform on two projects. The first project is being conducted with Iberia Maintenance at Madrid-Barajas Airport (MAD) to digitize the aircraft inspection documentation process on the airline's new fleet of Airbus A350s, which up until now has been entirely paper-based. According to Hugh O'Flanagan, Whispr's co-founder and CEO, the existing inspection process entails engineers walking around the aircraft and checking tens of items in each different section as they manually complete a paper-based report, which then has to be manually input into a system.

Unison Inc., the leading provider of software and insight to government agencies, program offices, and contractors, today introduced the Data Validation Engine to support the modernization of the federal acquisition lifecycle. This transformative app utilizes machine learning, an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to automate configurable rules for improved data quality and accuracy. "We launched the Data Validation Engine with acquisition modernization as a top priority to put the power in the hands of federal agencies to drive compliance with their policies and procedures," said Reid Jackson, Unison President and CEO. "At Unison, we bring real-world applications of leading-edge technical innovations to the federal acquisition and contractor workforces. This app is just the latest of several new product releases built on our Insight Platform using the latest AI and RPA technologies."

Pittsburgh International Airport and Manchester-Boston Regional Airport are amongst the first airports that are relying on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce the stress of the holiday rush. Developed by Zensors, a Carnegie Mellon University startup, airports can provide travelers with real-time wait estimates at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints to give passengers an idea of how much time they can expect to wait in the security queue. Passengers can access security wait times on airport websites before they leave home and allowing them to manage their time and diffuse "will I miss my flight" worries. "We know that the airport security screening process is very stressful for passengers and a significant operational challenge for airports and air carriers," said Anuraag Jain, founder of Zensors. "By using Artificial Intelligence to provide real-time data, airports can improve the passenger experience and optimize operations. Having enough time for a beer or coffee once airside is a huge relief for weary holiday passengers."

The most well-known stories are about Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) taking over our decisions, rendering us humans obsolete, or eradicating us all together. We have HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the terminators as good examples. But the most horrifying story I ever read was the one about the Paperclip maximizer. I will share it here with you and, just in the interests of Halloween, I've added a little bit of flavor. Now imagine it is a cold and dark night.

Montreal has become something of a magnet for AI. Ian Goodfellow, the research scientist who pioneered generative adversarial networks (GANs) got his PhD in machine learning at the Université de Montréal, rising AI star Hugo Larochelle now leads Google Brain in Montreal, and last year the city hosted NeurIPS. At the center of the Montreal AI scene is Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a Université de Montréal Professor and Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). Bengio was honored as a 2018 ACM Turing Award Laureate, sharing the "Nobel Prize of Computing" with two other essential AI figures -- Dr. Geoffrey Hinton from Google and Dr. Yann LeCun from Facebook. Last week hundreds of academics and industry professionals filled a downtown Montreal hotel for the RE·WORK Deep Learning Summit, where Bengio gave a talk on Deep Learning and Cognition.

In 2018 smart speaker ownership has doubled in the UK. The most popular voice assistant is Amazon Alexa which is part of the Alexa Echo device, followed by Google Assistant which powers Google Home and Google Home Mini, Apple's Home Pod and Sonos One. At the moment people mainly use voice assistants to play music, answer questions, set alarm and reminders. Is there an opportunity there for marketers? Alexa provides a set of built-in capabilities, called skills.

This week I'm in conversation with Henrietta Palmer, a strategic L and D professional and learning solutions manager at toury, a leading and innovative travel brand in the UK and an industry defined by the digital age and which companies have adapted to it. Henrietta is also passionate about the constraints corporate learning and development specialists is exist within. Sophie Bailey: 18:13 Unlike the wild budget utopia our state system education folk might think of when we think about learning and the corporate world. She also talks about going beyond Google searches and getting into the world of learning at work. Sophie Bailey: 18:57 Yeah, absolutely delighted to have Henrietta Palmer, a strategic L and D professional and learning solutions manager on the line, so welcome Henrietta. Hello, so for those who don't know Tui, formerly Thompson, is the UK is leading travel brand with 6 million holiday makers in the UK alone and with many more internationally and in the UK too. He has around 12 and a half thousand employees ranging from travel agents to cabin crew engineers and back office staff. Henrietta is responsible for ensuring Tui has the innovative development opportunities to drive the success of the Tui business. She has won numerous awards on behalf of her team, including the bronze awards in both learning technologies, team of the year and best learning technologies projects and in Henrietta's his own words. I'm a creative problem solver with 20 years experience in the field of digital learning. No year is the same.

An American giant may have figured out a way to simplify the tedious procedure of issuing driver's licenses. And an early sneak peek of this solution is now live in parts of India. Hundreds of people who have taken the driver's license test in Dehradun, the capital of Indian state Uttarakhand near the Himalayan foothills, in recent weeks haven't had to sit next to an instructor. Instead, their cars were affixed with a smartphone that was running HAMS, an AI project developed by Microsoft Research team. HAMS uses a smartphone's front and rear cameras and other sensors to monitor the driver (their gaze), and the road ahead of them.

OPINION -- Artificial intelligence is everywhere. If you shop online or occasionally speak to a voice assistant in the morning, you are already embracing the changes this technology has created. Many people are familiar with the advances of autonomous vehicles or facial recognition technology, and some may be curious, or even anxious, about how they will affect safety or privacy. Make no mistake, AI is a transformative technology that is influencing our daily lives and will touch every sector of the global economy. Whether society and government enable or inhibit the AI race, and the extent to which they do so, will be a critical question of the next decade.