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Will Chatbots Revolutionize Customer Experience?
In this interview, we chat with Wizeline's head of growth, Matt Pasienski. As a PhD-educated data scientist and chatbot enthusiast, Matt has lots of interesting opinions on the emerging role of artificial intelligence in the worlds of business and social media. So if you're curious about any of these topics, don't be afraid to hit him up on Twitter. To learn more about Matt and our team's work on chatbots, visit Wizeline's solutions page. Adam: Everyone, welcome to the program, I'm Adam, and today we're being joined by Matt Pasienski who runs the services team at Wizeline.
Tech billionaire Mike Lynch: 'You're seeing the beginning of a new age'
This Wednesday, the tech billionaire investor announced an investment in Luminance, a newly launched startup that uses artificial technology to read contracts in order help law firms with the arduous process of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It's not a "sexy" piece of technology, Lynch argues -- but one that has huge implications for the way we live our lives, and is indicative of a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence. What this is is probably an example of what's going to be changing a lot of things. If you can get machine technology to be reading contracts, it's going to be changing a lot of the world around us ... you're seeing the beginning of a new age." He has since founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital -- the vehicle through which the investment in Luminance was made. This week, Business Insider sat down with the investor to discuss Luminance, Brexit, his augmented reality plans, and why he likes having an "unfair advantage." Mike Lynch is an investor in Luminance -- but was also instrumental in helping create it. "The bit that makes it possible is the machine learning, and that was being done by some research people at Cambridge, and I actually have a connection because my PhD a long, long time ago was in machine learning," Lynch said. "I was introduced to them, and what they were doing looked great, but I said to them'look, you gotta go and meet some real world people.' "So they started getting real data and they met up with [law firm] Slaughter and May, and basically the machine learnt from Slaughter and May how to do these thing and at that point they made a little company. They got a CEO who is a lady who'd actually been involved in a lot of M&A deals over their career and we funded it, and it's been developing the product, and today it comes out into the bright lights of day."
BIG-i Social Home Robot Has a Big Eye, Launches on Kickstarter
In case you haven't yet managed to find the perfect social robot for your home, this is BIG-i. BIG-i is going to stare at you without blinking until you decide that you want it. Seriously though, BIG-i should get your attention if for no other reason than it's a design that's completely different (and significantly softer) than anything we've seen before. It's also mobile, with what looks to be a simple and useful if-this-then-that-style verbal programming. The Kickstarter just Kickstarted off and has already just about reached its goal, but if giant eyeballs are your thing (and let's be honest, everyone has a thing for giant eyeballs), this robot is probably worth a look.
Today: Who Has That 'Presidential Look'? A Bank Scandal Does the Impossible.
Here are some story lines I don't want you to miss today. Donald Trump's defenders say he is an equal-opportunity offender, as likely to go after "low-energy" Jeb Bush or "little" Marco Rubio as "crooked" Hillary Clinton. His critics say, as he might put it, there's something going on with repeatedly criticizing Clinton for not looking presidential and calling into question her strength and stamina. And there was his primary season comment about playing "the woman's card." So what is going on with gender in the campaign?
three-challenges-for-artificial-intelligence-in-medicine-dfb9993ae750#.5v4hyzqbl
There are three central challenges that have plagued past efforts to use artificial intelligence in medicine: the label problem, the deployment problem, and fear around regulation. With tools like Apple's ResearchKit and Google Fit, we can collect health data at scale; with deep learning, we can translate large volumes of raw data into insights that help both clinicians and patients take real actions. These annotations, called labels, are essential to make techniques like deep learning work. These two things enable outside-in approaches to healthcare: build up a user base outside the core of the healthcare system (e.g., outside the EMR), but take on risk for core problems within the healthcare system, such as re-hospitalizations.
The Award for Awards Show That Actually Got It Right Goes toโฆthe Emmys
Rami Malek said it better than anyone: "Please tell me you're seeing this, too." It was a reference to his Mr. Robot character Elliot's tenuous grip on reality, but as he stood there accepting his Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, it was also the phrase so many viewers had to be whispering to themselves for hours. Throughout last night's telecast, underdogs like Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany actually won, TV's growing diversity was celebrated (take that, Oscars), and streaming services proved their method of shaking up the TV model was working by scoring scads of trophies. It felt like a dream. Sure, Jimmy Kimmel wasn't the best host, and there was a sense of immobility at the top, as HBO's Veep and Game of Thrones took home Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series, respectively, for the second year in a row.
Jane Jacobs's Street Smarts
I got to talk to Jane Jacobs once, toward the end of her life, an interview that is mentioned, in its properly Lilliputian proportion, in Robert Kanigel's new biography, "Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs" (Knopf). She was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them, the others being Iona Opie, the British folklorist who collected children's rhymes, and I. F. Stone, the independent American journalist. What they had in common was a sort of radiant self-reliance. They could say an obvious thing--that children are citizens of another country, that all governments lie--with the conviction that comes from having really found it out. They spoke for many, because they thought for themselves. Iona Opie made hanging around schoolyards to find small variants in jumping-rope rhymes seem essential to understanding humanity, and Izzy Stone made you feel unpatriotic for not printing your own biweekly page of political commentary. The ability to radiate certainty without condescension, to be both very sure and very simple, is a potent one, and witnessing it in life explains a lot in history that might otherwise be inexplicable--for instance, how a sixteen-year-old girl could lead the French Army to victory. Jane Jacobs's aura was so powerful that it made her, precisely, the St. Joan of the small scale. Her name still summons an entire city vision--the much watched corner, the mixed-use neighborhood--and her holy tale is all the stronger for including a nemesis of equal stature: Robert Moses, the Sauron of the street corner. The New York planning dictator wanted to drive an expressway through lower Manhattan, and was defeated, the legend runs, by this ordinary mom.
Elon Musk tells us about his predictions for the future of AI
Let's be honest, stupid humans are too smart sometimes for their own good and Skynet is going to happen, at least that's what Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think, but what do they know? In 2014, Stephen Hawking wrote: "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history, โ Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets." In a separate interview in the same year, he warned: "humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded by A.I." In a Reddit Q&A Session in January 2015 Gates said: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."
Exclusive: Lyft Cofounder Lays Out His Vision of the Driverless Future
Lyft, the nation's second-largest ride-hailing service, expects autonomous vehicles to account for a majority of its rides within five years, cofounder and president John Zimmer told TIME in an exclusive interview. Days after its chief rival Uber's self-driving cars began ferrying passengers in Pittsburgh, Zimmer also said he expects car ownership will "all but end" in major U.S. cities in less than 10 years. "There are already specific trips--whether it's just on this street or just at this time in this perfect weather condition--that an autonomous vehicle could do today," Zimmer tells TIME. And he believes that this is how the self-driving revolution will come to the masses: not by consumers swapping out their old cars for fully autonomous personal vehicles but by consumers paying for rides in self-driving cars they don't own, with the type of trip restricted heavily at first and then growing more complicated as technology and regulations advance. That is also the logic on which his five-year prediction is built.