According to Philips' Annual Future Health Index (FHI) 2019 report, Singapore's healthcare professionals are not yet leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to its full potential for treatment and diagnosis. In the report, it is revealed that healthcare professionals in Singapore are using AI technology more for improving the accuracy and efficiency of administrative tasks such as staffing and patient scheduling (37%) than for diagnosis (28%), flagging patient anomalies (26%) and facilitating remote patient monitoring (25%). The report states that emerging countries that are leading the way for AI use in diagnosis globally with nearly half (45%) of China's healthcare professionals, and more than a third in Saudi Arabia (34%), using AI technology to improve the accuracy of their diagnoses. Additionally, the report also hints that apprehension amongst Singapore's healthcare professionals may be one of the barriers to wider adoption, with one in five (20%) admitting that they fear their long-term job security is threatened by new advancements in healthcare technology, such as AI and telehealth. AI aside, the report highlights that Singapore consistently outperforms its Asia Pacific neighbour Australia and holds its own amongst additional Asian countries that were part of the study in terms of digital technology usage, with 89% of Singapore's healthcare professionals using digital health records in their hospital/practice, compared to 81% in Australia and China, and 76% in India.

As you open the pantry door, you discover that some of the food you purchased yesterday has already gone off or perished – despite the expiry date being weeks away. Feelings of guilt and anger start to wash over you, and rightly so. Food wastage not only affects you economically, but has a widespread ethical and environmental impact. Notwithstanding your own personal loss, there's around 88 million tonnes of food waste in Europe each year, which has associated costs estimated at €143 billion. Put simply by Bernhard Url, executive director of the European Food Safety Authority: "Europe wastes 30% of food, it is an ethical scandal."

This summer, I sat down with Christoph Koch to talk about the brave new world of consumer-facing artificial intelligence, some of the core anxieties that consumers experience, and how companies can address them. The resulting interview appeared in the October issue of the German business magazine Brand Eins. The very rough translation from German to English below was powered - oh irony - by the AI-enabled machine translator https://www.deepl.com. I am deeply grateful to Brand Eins and Christoph Koch for their interest in research on this important subject. More blog stories on designing AI experiences can be found here. Brand Eins: Professor Giesler, a video was recently circulated online, in which two people throw a box at each other and a robot in the middle unsuccessfully tries to intercept it.

Stop us if you've heard this one before. Four-hundred years ago next fall, a ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England, to the New World. It carried 102 passengers, made up of English Puritans, known today as the Pilgrims. Once they arrived at their destination, they established Plymouth Colony and signed the document that became a rudimentary first draft of modern democracy in America. Next year, to mark the fourth centenary of the Mayflower voyage, another ship will follow in its wake, traveling from Plymouth in the United Kingdom across the Atlantic.

Earlier this week, I attended the 3rd Tallinn Digital Summit - a gathering of leaders from policy, academia and business to look at the challenges and opportunities technology like AI offers for digital governance. Estonia is a great example of a country where leaders work to ensure technology benefits businesses and citizens by being proactive, but not overbearing. The Estonian Prime Minister Jüri Ratas touched on the importance of this balance in his keynote. While not every nation is as progressive as Estonia, one thing became very clear: Artificial intelligence is not a future concept, it is here already, fundamentally reshaping the products and processes of organizations and businesses. This was a key theme of the talk I gave too, emphasizing that AI is here and we need to make choices in accordance to the societies we want to live in.

For government to earn the trust of the American people, it needs to do a better job of meeting their needs. As such, it is essential that agencies empower the civil servants responsible for improving program performance. However, a new Bipartisan Policy Center report finds that the individuals charged with that task are also the same people responsible for overseeing compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. This "double duty" limits the time staff have for work essential to improving mission performance. To address this, the BPC task force report, "Oversight Matters: Balancing Mission, Risk, and Compliance," recommends devoting more resources to better target oversight efforts by employing a risk-based framework aimed at improving performance.

The recent rapid development of pretrained language models has produced significant performance improvements on downstream NLP tasks. These pretrained language models compile and store relational knowledge they encounter in training data, which prompted Facebook AI Research and University College London to introduce their LAMA (LAnguage Model Analysis) probe to explore the feasibility of using language models as knowledge bases. The term "knowledge base" was introduced in the 1970s. Unlike databases which store figures, tables, and other straightforward data in computer memory, a knowledge base is able to store more complex structured and unstructured information. A knowledge base system can be likened to a library that stores facts in a specific field.

If you've ever seen a self-driving car in the wild, you might wonder about that spinning cylinder on top of it. It's a "lidar sensor," and it's what allows the car to navigate the world. By sending out pulses of infrared light and measuring the time it takes for them to bounce off objects, the sensor creates a "point cloud" that builds a 3D snapshot of the car's surroundings. Making sense of raw point-cloud data is difficult, and before the age of machine learning it traditionally required highly trained engineers to tediously specify which qualities they wanted to capture by hand. But in a new series of papers out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), researchers show that they can use deep learning to automatically process point clouds for a wide range of 3D-imaging applications.

The HR function is changing with technology. There is no doubt that technology has changed the roles and responsibilities of essentially all employees within nearly every industry over the last few decades, but none more than those in the IT department, and most directly those leading the IT department. With the role of CIO often encompassing both IT and HR processes, it is clear that the two departments are growing increasingly dependent on one another to function efficiently. According to a recent report by Sage, 82 percent of HR leaders anticipate that their role will be unrecognizable in 10 years' time, thanks in large part to the transformation from HR to a "People" function and the adoption of technology. This "People" function will incorporate "Operations", which accounts for productivity, employee loyalty, change management and even tech adoption. As tech becomes more embedded in our way of work-- within even the most resistant of industries-- typical HR duties will have an increasingly strong thread of tech running through them, including the use of AI and automation.

He and his team have played a key part in weaving ML into the very fabric of Workday's underlying platform, which is critical to delivering compelling experiences and outcomes without customers even needing to realize it is there. Earlier in his career, while at a number of Silicon Valley companies, he played a part in making the technology we rely on everyday--GPS, and wifi, for example--so ubiquitous that most of us take these revolutionary technologies for granted. Chakraborty also co-founded and served as chief operating officer at GridCraft, a company that developed simple-to-use data analytics tools that Workday acquired in 2015. Now, as senior vice president of tools and technology at Workday, Chakraborty is responsible for the infrastructure on which our applications are built. In particular, he's leading the charge to make sure that machine learning helps customers make faster, better decisions using all of Workday's products.