Health & Medicine

SINGAPORE: By 2022, people living in Singapore will be able to report municipal issues via a chatbot that asks for details in real time and automatically identifies the correct government agency in charge. This will be made possible by artificial intelligence (AI), which is also set to power a tool that helps in the detection of diabetic eye disease and an automated marking system for English in primary and secondary education by the same year. More initiatives tapping on AI technologies, such as machine learning and computer vision, are in the pipeline over the next decade, according to five projects unveiled on Wednesday (Nov 13) as part of Singapore's new "National AI Strategy". The new strategy, which maps out how Singapore will develop and use AI to transform the economy and improve peoples' lives, was announced by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat at the final day of the "Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) x the Singapore Week of Innovation and TeCHnology (SWITCH) Conference". Describing it as the next step in Singapore's Smart Nation Journey, Mr Heng said: "Countries will need to keep pace with technology, and harness it to tackle common challenges and national priorities."

Dr Peter B Scott-Morgan has just turned from Peter 1.0 to Peter 2.0, to use his own term, and has become the world's first full Cyborg. He's real and you can see his posts on Twitter. Dr Morgan is a scientists who has a muscle wasting disease that has now taken its toll on his body. In other words, he is terminally ill with a motor neurone disease. As the muscles in his body lose their power completely, only his brain will be alive.

What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence Google Cloud on Thursday announced the general availability of Contact Center AI. The contact center software enables businesses to deploy virtual agents for basic customer interactions, and it offers an "agent assist" feature to transcribe calls, recommend workflows and provide other kinds of AI-driven assistance. Google also announced updates to Dialogflow, the development suite for building conversational interfaces such as chat bots and interactive voice responses (IVR). With a new agent validation feature, designers can get feedback on the quality and performance of their virtual agents. Dialogflow also now supports compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards.

New applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are emerging at a very fast pace, particularly in the healthcare industry. The industry is full of technology vendors, data science companies, researchers and innovators focused on creating predictive and prescriptive algorithms for improved diagnosis and treatment recommendations. By 2021, Gartner predicts that 75% of healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) will have invested in an AI capability that is explicitly improving either operational performance or clinical outcomes. The more activity there is around using AI in healthcare, the greater the need for HDOs to establish AI governance. AI governance is necessary, especially for clinical applications of the technology.

In the golden age of Artificial Intelligence, healthcare is the new frontier of research and development. Surgeons are routinely using robotic assists to operate with less invasiveness and more precision. Gene sequencing and gene editing aided by AI is transforming the way scientists obtain cures for diseases. But, most notably, research is underway to allow AI to transform the way doctors diagnose patients. You have symptoms of a cold.

Elon Musk's Neuralink has been on a hiring spree since summer. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk doesn't often publicly talk about his low-profile side hustle at biotech startup Neuralink. But when he does, the news is usually far more exiting than any of his updates on electric cars or rockets. In July, Neuralink published a white paper about an implantable brain chip it had been working on, which Musk said would help "merge biological intelligence with machine intelligence." This week, speaking on the Artificial Intelligence podcast hosted by MIT research scientist Lex Fridman, Musk shared a more detailed explanation of how things are unfolding at Neuralink and his ultimate vision for the sci-fi-sounding device that's in the making.

Elon Musk believes his neural technology company Neuralink will be able to "solve" schizophrenia and autism. Speaking on the Artificial Intelligence podcast with Lex Fridman, published Tuesday, Musk was asked what he thinks are the most exciting impacts he foresees for his company Neuralink. Neuralink's goal is to develop an AI-enabled chip that could be implanted in a person's brain, where it would be able to both record brain activity and potentially stimulate it. "So Neuralink, I think at first will solve a lot of brain-related diseases. So could be anything from like autism, schizophrenia, memory loss -- like everyone experiences memory loss at certain points in age. Parents can't remember their kids' names and that kind of thing," replied Musk.

So, how do I see the future of healthcare using AI? Well, let's just face it. AI is heading to transform medicine and somewhere even replace real-medicine workers. Every year we observe the appearance of new and more advanced solutions. This, by the way, provides a whole slew of advantages, one of the most important of them is reducing the time needed to reach a diagnosis that allows medical workers to better prioritize patient case.

Dan Jacobson, a research and development staff member in the Biosciences Division at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has a few ideas. For the past 5 years, Jacobson and his team have studied plants to understand the genetic variables and patterns that make them adaptable to changing environments and climates. As a computational biologist, Jacobson uses some of the world's most powerful supercomputers for his work--including the recently decommissioned Cray XK7 Titan and the world's most powerful and smartest supercomputer for open science, the IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer, both located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL. Last year, Jacobson and his team won an Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize after using a special computing technique known as "mixed precision" on Summit to become the first group to reach exascale speed--approximately a quintillion calculations per second. Jacobson's team is currently working on numerous projects that form an integrated roadmap for the future of AI in plant breeding and bioenergy.

Our nation is understandably grieving with each suicide, prompting our collective and tireless pursuit of evidence-based clinical interventions and expansion of community prevention strategies to reach each Veteran. As part of recent efforts to support Veterans in crisis, VA is using artificial intelligence (AI) systems capabilities leveraged by customer feedback industry best practices in partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Medallia, and Halfaker to detect and respond to Veterans in crisis. Starting in fall 2017, VA began digitally collecting customer feedback from Veterans receiving VA services and VA digital properties in the Veterans Signals (VSignals) program. Since then, Veterans have responded with more than 4.2 million surveys, including more than 1.6 million free-text comments. This feedback is accessible to VA employees across the country for action, often prompting customer service efforts and influencing VA decision making.