Personal
Can AI Predict Humanity's Future Events?
Can artificial intelligence (AI) predict future events? Successful serial entrepreneur, award-winning inventor, scientist, and technology innovator Kira Radinsky, Ph.D., has an expert's point of view and first-hand experience to answer that question. She is a member of the United Nations Secretary-General's high-level panel on digital cooperation that is chaired by Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jack Ma, the Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group. Radinsky is the Co-Founder, Chairwoman, and Chief Technology Officer of Diagnostic Robotics, a health care artificial intelligence (AI) system with predictive analytics, with locations in Tel-Aviv and New York City. In early November 2019, she successfully raised $24 million in Series A venture capital financing led by Accelmed Ventures with other investors for the two-year-old technology startup.
Keras inventor Chollet charts a new direction for AI: a Q&A ZDNet
"A lot of well-funded, large-scale gradient-descent projects get carried out as a way to generate bombastic press articles that misleadingly suggest that human-level AI is perhaps a few years away," says Google scientist Franรงois Chollet. "Many people have staked a lot on this illusion. Franรงois Chollet, a scientist in Google's artificial intelligence unit, is a member of a new generation of pioneers in machine learning. In 2015, he introduced the world to an application programming interface that has become wildly popular for implementing deep learning networks, called Keras. It is most commonly used as an interface to Google's TensorFlow framework. In that way, Chollet has helped in very concrete fashion to advance the development and testing of deep learning. It may seem surprising, then, that one of Chollet's foci at the moment is the very big picture of how to advance artificial intelligence beyond merely getting better on benchmarks. Chollet is not entirely satisfied with where AI is at the moment. "A lot of well-funded, large-scale gradient-descent projects get carried out as a way to generate bombastic press articles that misleadingly suggest that human-level AI is perhaps a few years away," wrote Chollet in a communication with ZDNet in email. "Many people have staked a lot on this illusion.
Will the future of work be ethical? Future leader perspectives โ TechCrunch
In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT's famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work. Greg's essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls "a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well." In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy. Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.
Will the future of work be ethical? Perspectives from MIT Technology Review โ TechCrunch
In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT's famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work. Greg's essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls "a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well." In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy. Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees. Below he speaks to two key organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.
How TechStyle Uses Machine Learning for Personalization: Q&A With Danielle Boeglin
"TechStyle brands utilize machine learning to cluster similar products based on different attributes, such as color, fabric, heel height, review information, etc., which then match customer clusters with product clusters to show users the most relevant information." This Los-Angeles based, avant-garde fashion group, which includes brands like, ShoeDazzle, Fabletics and JustFab, seamlessly ties personalization and vertical integration to create a winning combination of brick-and-mortar stores with online retail. We spoke to Danielle Boeglin, vice president of data analytics at TechStyle Fashion Group, to understand how the company marries data and fashion so successfully. From her approach toward customer experience to the role of AI and ML in personalization, Boeglin shares the most useful lessons for marketers in the digital retail space. In this exclusive with Martech Advisor, she throws light on TechStyle's experience with integrating the various components of their martech stack, and more.
Will the future of work be ethical? โ TechCrunch
Meili Gupta is about to ask another question. A poised and eloquent rising senior at elite boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy, Gupta, 17, is anything but the introverted, soft-spoken techie stereotype. She does, however, know as much about computer science as any high school student you'd ever meet. She even grew up faithfully reading the MIT Technology Review, the university's flagship publication, which shows, because Meili is the most ubiquitous student attendee at EmTech Next, a conference the publication held on campus this past summer on AI, Machine Learning, and "the future of work." Ostensibly, the conference is an opportunity for executives and tech professionals to rub elbows while determining how next-generation technologies will shape our jobs and economy in the coming decades. For me, the gathering feels more like an opportunity to have an existential crisis; I could even say a religious crisis, though I'm not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.
Sam George: The State of IoT, Cloud, Edge, and AI - Connected World
Peggy Smedley: For you, what are the most interesting trends that you see? You and I have talked in the past about the IoT (Internet of Things) and I know that you have a lot of vision, a lot of examples that you look at when you think about cloud and edge and we talk about manufacturing and all these things in vertical markets, but for listeners right now, based on investments you guys [Microsoft] are making, what do you see are the most interesting trends? Sam George: Well, I think if you zoom the telescope way back out and look at the very big picture, what we're seeing across all of these vertical markets, whether it's manufacturing or agriculture, smart cites, smart energy. If you take a look at what's happening with all of these, there's a set of disruptive technologies that are fundamentally transforming how those industries function. Cloud was a big catalyst for that and I'd say, very well established at this point. And then IoT, a couple of years ago, really started hitting the scene, building on top of cloud and giving these businesses unprecedented visibility if they were able to take advantage of it back in the early days. Virtually all aspects of their business are able to sense things in the physical world, in realtime, that they weren't able to before. And then while the IoT was happening, edge computing started happening too, which was a normal and natural optimization, where as I connect and start collecting data from these billions of devices that are sensing across all of these different industries that are sensing things that are happening, it's natural to start taking some of the computing that you were doing in the cloud and some of the services that you were taking advantage of and pushing those right out and distributing those right out to the devices themselves for a variety of reasons, whether that's latency concerns or security concerns or anything else. We see this wonderful trend of AI that is powering really new breakthrough capabilities across all of these industries. AI is a great example, where as it takes advantage of those proceeding waves, edge computing and the IoT and cloud. AI can now run in a distributed fashion as well.
How artificial intelligence could transform GI patient care: Dr. William Karnes of Docbot weighs in
William Karnes, MD, is director of the high-risk program and colonoscopy quality at the UCI Health H.H. Chao Comprehensive Digestive Disease Center in Orange, Calif., and chief medical officer of Docbot, a technology that uses artificial intelligence to detect abnormalities from colonoscopy capsule video. Here, Dr. Karnes shares his thoughts with Becker's ASC Review on the future of AI in the gastroenterology specialty, and how the technology could help patients and physicians. Question: Can you tell me a little more about the Docbot technology and how you got involved? Dr. William Karnes: The story goes back to 2012 when I came to UCI and Dr. Chan brought me on to wipe out colon cancer in Orange County. It was a three-pronged approach but one of the most important ones.