Most companies that say they're using artificial intelligence have yet to gain any value from their A.I. investments. A survey from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group released Tuesday found that companies that view A.I. as merely a "technology thing," akin to a product rather than a business overhaul, fail to gain financial results. The survey's authors defined the "value" of an A.I. project as lifting sales, reducing costs, or creating a new product. The survey, based on responses from nearly 2,500 executives, found that seven out of ten companies report little to no impact from their A.I. projects so far. Overall, 40% of the surveyed companies that have made "significant investments" in A.I. have yet to report any business gains.

While many news stories focus on the pitfalls of technology, Wired did something a little different and put together a cover story of 25 people and groups who the magazine says are "racing to save us." From climate change to the growing power of big tech behemoths, the world is facing any number of challenges, in some cases existential ones. The innovations that facilitate our lives are frequently double edged swords. The power plants that quench our thirst for electricity are spewing planet warming emissions into the atmosphere. The facial recognition algorithms that can help organize smartphone photo collections also have inherent biases against women and minorities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a major part of all our lives and societies. From popular voice command applications like Siri and Alexa; to business spam filters; and connected cars like Tesla; AI is all around us. Increasingly, AI is being introduced within the public service sector with a view to improving efficiency, reducing costs, saving time and enhancing quality. Yet with ethical and privacy concerns being the opposite side of the coin, last month the UK government released draft guidelines for AI procurement within the public sector. According to document the new AI procurement guidelines "will help inform and empower buyers in the public sector, helping them to evaluate suppliers, then confidently and responsibly procure technologies for the benefit of citizens."

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently launched a recruitment effort to hire its first-ever senior-level artificial intelligence expert to advance the agency's applications of the emerging technology and provide technical expertise to keep employees on the leading edge. In a conversation with Nextgov, USPTO's chief information officer provided a look inside the search to fill the new role and explained how it all fits into the agency's broader vision around modernization. "We need to figure out how we can use those algorithms to the best of our abilities," CIO Henry "Jamie" Holcombe said Friday. "We've seen an explosion in AI submissions and so AI is now maturing to a point to where it actually can be used--we don't want it to be a buzzword." USPTO's mission is to award patents to inventors and businesses and register trademarks for products and intellectual property. When Holcombe took on the agency's top information technology management role earlier this year, the office already had many AI-related efforts underway.

Nations around the world are "stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia" in which artificial intelligence and other technologies are used to target, surveil and punish the poorest people, the United Nation's monitor on poverty has warned. Philip Alston, UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, has produced a devastating account of how new digital technologies are revolutionizing the interaction between governments and the most vulnerable in society. In what he calls the rise of the "digital welfare state", billions of dollars of public money is now being invested in automated systems that are radically changing the nature of social protection. Alston's report on the human rights implications of the shift will be presented to the UN general assembly on Friday. It says that AI has the potential to improve dramatically the lives of disadvantaged communities, but warns that such hope is being lost amid the constant drive for cost cutting and "efficiency".

As in many other industries, the public sector is dipping its toe into the world of AI with chatbots. According to a new survey, nearly a quarter of US states are already deploying chatbots or digital assistants for a range of use cases. These robotic process automation (RPA) tools are helping with everything from enrolling infants in health programs to tutoring new drivers. What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence At the same time, these simple tools are providing state technology leaders with an easy introduction to intelligent automation, laying the groundwork for more ambitious AI deployments. Nearly nine out of 10 states are using or have some planned use for AI, according to the survey published Tuesday by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) and the Center for Digital Government, with support from IBM. Conducted in August, the survey is based on responses from CIOs and other technology leaders in 45 US states.

The more medications a patient takes, the greater the likelihood that interactions between those drugs could trigger negative side effects, including long-term organ damage and even death. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed a machine learning system that may be able to warn doctors and patients about possible negative side effects that might occur when drugs are mixed. In a study, researchers designed an algorithm that analyzes data on drug-drug interactions listed in reports -- compiled by the Food and Drug Administration and other organizations -- for use in a possible alert system that would let patients know when a drug combination could prompt dangerous side effects. Let's say I'm taking a popular over-the-counter pain reliever and then I'm put on blood pressure medicine, and these medications have an interaction with each other that, in turn, affects my liver. Essentially, what we have done, in this study, is to collect all of the data on all the diseases related to the liver and see what drugs interact with each other to affect the liver." Drug-drug interaction problems are significant because patients are frequently prescribed multiple drugs and they take over-the-counter medicine on their own, added Kumara, who also is an affiliate of the Institute for CyberScience, which provides supercomputing resources for Penn State researchers. "This study is of very high importance," said Kumara. "Most patients are not on one single drug.

Today's commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations -- wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else -- and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly. But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots? That's the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It's now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies. The new work appears in the October issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, in a paper by Jenett, Gershenfeld, fellow graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman, and CBA alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM '07, PhD '12, who is now at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he leads the ARMADAS project to design a lunar base that could be built with robotic assembly.

The process of patent application examination by USPTO examiners or by patent attorneys and registered patent agents in preparing applications is a significant intellectual activity that at present must be undertaken by individuals based on their knowledge of [among other things] the state of relevant technology and existence of prior art, the evolution of that technology, its scientific basis, its present and future use, and existing published work on the subject. Patent application preparation and examination to include the preparation of rejections by PTO examiners and responses to these rejections from applicants are driven by a "sacred" text called the Manual of Patent Examining Procedures (MPEP). The MPEP, a document of more than 3700 pages, is known to disturb the sleep of even the most brilliant and seasoned patent practitioners. While a detailed discussion of patent examination and prosecution procedures is far beyond the scope of this essay and the professional competence of its author, it is well worth noting some of the frequent activities included in patent prosecution and examination for reasons that will soon become apparent. For example, in determining if an invention is patentable, inventors and patent practitioners must identify links to prior art references.

"One of the most exciting things about deep learning reconstruction is how it redefines the usual negotiation between exam time and image quality. This could lead to significant downstream value for imaging operations and for patient experience," said Christopher Hess, MD, Chair of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF. SubtleMR delivers a significant improvement in the quality of noisy images, which is particularly beneficial for patients who have difficulty holding still for long periods of time. Artifact-ridden images and the need for re-scans are a challenge for both patients and physicians. SubtleMR integrates seamlessly into the radiology workflow, and it is compatible with any brand of MRI scanner and PACS.