To launch a successful virtual agent project for your organization's customer service capability, the company must overcome four hurdles. This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. Are you ready to turn your company's customer service over to AI-powered virtual agents? Whether your goals include creating a fully digital business, improving customer experience, or cutting costs, virtual agents and automation offer many benefits. Consider the experience of Mark Baylis, vice president of customer service and digital customer engagement at Optus, Australia's second-largest telecom operator.

AI and machine learning can be complicated for a layperson to fully grasp, yet surveys show this hasn't deterred enterprises from adopting the technology in droves. Business use of AI grew a whopping 270% over the past four years, according to Gartner, while Deloitte says 62% of respondents to its corporate October 2018 report deployed some form of AI, up from 53% a year ago. But adoption doesn't always meet with success, as the roughly 25% of companies who've seen half of their AI projects fail will tell you. That's why managed machine learning solutions firms like H2O.ai are growing at a healthy clip. In perhaps another sign of the industry's upward momentum, H2O today announced that it has raised $72.5 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager fund, with continued investments from Wells Fargo and Nexus Venture Partners.

While there is still much to overcome to achieve AI-dependent healthcare, Artificial Intelligence (AI) could prove to be a self-running growth engine for the health sector in the not-so-distant future. A recent report from Accenture focusing on the potential of 10 AI applications determined the "near-term value" of AI in healthcare and how the impact of rapid technology stacks up against the upfront costs of implementation. Results from the report show that an estimated $150 billion could be saved through the application of AI in the U.S. healthcare economy by 2026. Below are the top three AI applications with the most significant value potential in healthcare, according to the report's findings. To learn more about AI revolutionizing in the healthcare industry, check out the original article from Venture Beat.

AUSTIN, Texas – Computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have taught an artificial intelligence agent how to do something that usually only humans can do--take a few quick glimpses around and infer its whole environment, a skill necessary for the development of effective search-and-rescue robots that one day can improve the effectiveness of dangerous missions. The team, led by professor Kristen Grauman, Ph.D. candidate Santhosh Ramakrishnan and former Ph.D. candidate Dinesh Jayaraman (now at the University of California, Berkeley) published their results today in the journal Science Robotics. Most AI agents--computer systems that could endow robots or other machines with intelligence--are trained for very specific tasks--such as to recognize an object or estimate its volume--in an environment they have experienced before, like a factory. But the agent developed by Grauman and Ramakrishnan is general purpose, gathering visual information that can then be used for a wide range of tasks. "We want an agent that's generally equipped to enter environments and be ready for new perception tasks as they arise," Grauman said.

Maybe we can get through the climate crisis without a global catastrophe, although that door is closing fast. And maybe we can cope with the huge loss of jobs caused by the revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) without a social and political calamity. But can we do both at the same time? We should know how to deal with the AI revolution because we have been down this road before. It's a bit different this time, of course, in the sense that the original industrial revolution in 1780-1850 created as many new jobs (in manufacturing) as it destroyed (in cottage industries and skilled trades).

A few years ago, we witnessed the heralding of the imminent rise of artificial intelligence (AI) to support medical information services provided through industry-based contact centers. And, in some cases, the message Lonnie Corant Jaman Shuka Rashid Lynn (better known as Common) shares in recent Microsoft commercials is our reality: we do have more power at our fingertips than generations before us. But witnessing the rise of AI and actually experiencing it are two different realities. In retrospect, for medical information services these emerging technologies were overhyped when first introduced to the market in terms of how feasibly they could be applied in practical applications capable of creating a positive return on investment. Many larger companies invested in machine learning'pilot' programs that appeared to produce less than positive outcomes, and the term "over innovating" entered the corporate lexicon.

Former Israeli Air Force pilot Tal Keinan says Israeli policy is to interrupt the ambition of any regional power that wants to eradicate Israel. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday he supports "Israel's right to defend itself from threats posed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps," after the Israeli military carried out an attack on targets inside Syria on Saturday in what it described as a successful effort to thwart a "very imminent" Iranian drone strike. Pompeo tweeted that he spoke with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday regarding the airstrikes in Syria. He wrote, "I expressed my support for Israel's right to defend itself from threats posed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps & to take action to prevent imminent attacks against Israeli assets." Pompeo also tweeted, "We discussed how Iran is leveraging its foothold in Syria to threaten Israel and its neighbors. The Prime Minister Netanyahu noted that Israel would strike IRGC (The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) targets threatening Israel, wherever they are located."

This morning I found myself summarizing my favorite bits from a talk that I enjoyed at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, What's New with TensorFlow? Then I thought about it for a moment and couldn't see a reason not to share my super-short summary with you (except maybe that you might not watch the video -- you totally should check it out, the speaker is awesome) so here goes… TensorFlow is a machine learning framework that might be your new best friend if you have a lot of data and/or you're after the state-of-the-art in AI: deep learning. It's not a data science Swiss Army Knife, it's the industrial lathe… which means you can probably stop reading if all you want to do is put a regression line through 20-by-2 spreadsheet. But if big is what you're after, get excited. TensorFlow has been used to go hunting for new planets, prevent blindness by helping doctors screen for diabetic retinopathy, and help save forests by alerting authorities to signs of illegal deforestation activity.

Statistics is a branch of mathematics that deals with the interpretation of data. Statisticians work in a wide variety of fields in both the private and the public sectors and can be found anywhere - Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, Louisiana. They are teachers, consultants, watchdogs, journalists, designers, programmers, and by in large, ordinary people like you and me. In searching for the top statistics blogs on the web we only considered recently active blogs. In deciding which ones to include in our (admittedly unscientific) list of the 50 best statistics blogs we considered a range of factors, including visual appeal/aesthetics, frequency of posts, and accessibility to non-specialists.

A Russian humanoid robot was making its way on Thursday to the International Space Station after blasting off on a two-week mission to support the crew and test his skills. Known as FEDOR, which stands for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research, the Skybot F-850 is the first humanoid robot to be sent to space by Russia. NASA sent humanoid robot Robonaut 2 to space in 2011 to work in hazardous environments. "The robot's main purpose it to be used in operations that are especially dangerous for humans onboard spacecraft and in outer space," Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Thursday after the launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The ISS is a joint project of the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.