BenevolentTech CEO Pesenti: "What the company is doing here is not just the research but putting the drugs through the clinical trials ourselves." Pharmaceutical companies expend a lot of effort and millions of dollars developing new drugs -- and not the least of their problems is the amount of time spent researching potential advances that turn out to be a blind alley. A UK-based company believes that by the creative use of artificial intelligence, it can speed up that process by a factor of 10. BenevolentAI is using artificial intelligence tools to help it wade through millions of pages of drug research, analyse them, and come up with the most promising areas for research. The company recently appointed Jérôme Pesenti as CEO of its technology division, BenevolentTech.

A lot of (most) advances in Machine Learning lead to algorithms with results that can't be explained to, well, anyone. More problematic though, is that if we do explain the results, "interpretations are completely within the eye of the beholder." "Dmitry Malioutov can't say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM's corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. "We couldn't explain the model to them because they didn't have the training in machine learning." In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts. That's because the model was an artificial neural network, a program that takes in a given type of data--in this case, the insurance company's customer records--and finds patterns in them. These networks have been in practical use for over half a century, but lately they've seen a resurgence, powering breakthroughs in everything from speech recognition and language translation to Go-playing robots and self-driving cars. As exciting as their performance gains have been, though, there's a troubling fact about modern neural networks: Nobody knows quite how they work. And that means no one can predict when they might fail."

ComplyAdvantage, a new London-based startup, raked in 8.2 million in a Series A funding led by Balderton Capital. This money shall be pumped into growth across Europe and the U.S. Very quick to act, they're even opening a New York office this week! This startup claims to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help firms manage compliance obligations at reasonable prices. Not only are they going to take on your headaches for you, they're also not going to extort you for it. ComplyAdvantage was founded by Charles Delingpole, who has also previously founded Market Invoice.

Google has released an update to its Google Photos app with four new features made possible by machine learning. Today we're bringing you four new features for Google Photos -- three new ways for you to relive and the share moments that matter, and a quick way to fix some of those pesky sideways photos in your collection. Here's a look at the new features... 1. Google Photos will now help you rediscover old memories of the people in your most recent photos. As your photo library continues to grow, we hope that features like this one make it easier to look back at your fondest memories. If you take a lot of photos of your child, for example, you may occasionally get a card showing the best ones from the last month.

New research has shown that grocery retailers are struggling to optimise stock replenishment processes, with almost half saying that their decisions are still based on'gut feeling'. Retail applications provider Blue Yonder surveyed 750 grocery managers and directors in the US, UK, Germany and France. It found that, in spite of a rise in accurate algorithms for automated replenishment and demand planning, 46% of surveyed directors in the UK say that replenishment is still an entirely manual process and the same amount saying that it was fully automated. A further 30% believed that instinct-based decision making was slowing them down. Of the four countries involved in Blue Yonder's survey, Germany had the highest proportion of respondents using manual or partially automated systems, with just one-third of managers who had fully automated their stock replenishment processes.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Huawei's R&D arm, Noah's Ark Laboratory, announced on Tuesday a partnership with the University of California, Berkeley's artificial intelligence (AI) lab focused on researching AI in all its forms. Initially, the Chinese smartphone company will fund UC Berkeley 1 million as it covers areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision. Huawei is likely investigating AI in order to ensure its not left behind by rival smartphone companies like Samsung, Apple, and Google, all of which have begun implementing AI into their devices. As hardware shipments begin to decelerate, hardware companies are looking at AI as the next growth platform.

Washington, D.C. - IBM, a pioneer in the advancement of artificial intelligence, today welcomed the release of a White House report on the future and promise of this exciting technology: "We commend the Administration, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in particular, for launching an open and inclusive dialogue that helped shape today's report. The document recognizes what IBM has believed all along, that artificial intelligence (AI), or cognitive computing systems like IBM Watson, will jump start economic opportunity and help solve some of humanity's biggest challenges. Embedding ethical training into computer science education, as the report recommends, is a positive way to prepare the next generation of technology experts to appropriately guide the advancement of AI systems. Cybersecurity is one area in particular where IBM agrees that AI can be a true game-changer, and one where we are actively preparing IBM Watson to make a real and tangible difference in the push to better defend America's digital networks.

About GilPress I launched the Big Data conversation; writing, research, marketing services; https://whatsthebigdata.com/ & http://infostory.com/ Image This entry was posted in AI, Chatbots, robots and tagged Futurism.

The White House sees artificial intelligence as an increasingly critical technology that can fight cyberattacks, upgrade weapons of war, improve health care and even unclog traffic for the commute home. However, the Obama administration also expects that A.I. will reduce low-level jobs and create security and ethical issues. With critical pros and cons looming, the federal government wants to work with the private sector and academia to guide A.I. in a positive direction, according to a recently released report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The report was prepared by the National Science and Technology Council's subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. "A.I. can be a major driver of economic growth and social progress, if industry, civil society, government, and the public work together to support development of the technology, with thoughtful attention to its potential and to managing its risks," the report states.

We make a major error when we think of AI as a technology, or perhaps as just another technology. This error can turn out to be a costly mistake. Specifically, using the term "technology" to describe artificial intelligence can influence us to ignore the perils of AI, to accept it as we have accepted other technologies, and to incorrectly assume that in the past 3 centuries we have acquired enough experience to deal with technological revolutions. AI is different and hence it should be approached completely differently. Most importantly it should be approached humbly – and with an understanding that this is not something we have dealt before.