The Morning Download: AI Is Only as Good as the Data You Feed It

Artificial intelligence can't replace your doctor yet but it can help diagnose illness. Pfizer Inc. is expanding its AI-enabled analytics toolset to catch diseases that are easy to miss because they're rare or disguised by other illnesses a patient may have. The cloud-based system, called Virtual Analytics Workbench, brings together physicians notes, lab reports, demographics and other patient particulars, as CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos reports. Health care presents exciting opportunities to apply AI, but we're still far from Dr. McCoy's tricorder instant diagnostic device on Star Trek. One obstacle slowing AI's progress generally is a lack of suitable data with which to train algorithms, according to Kate Crawford, a distinguished research professor at New York University and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York, She spoke at the WSJ Future of Everything Festival this week.