Artificial intelligence applications in health care on the rise

Columbia University professor and robotics engineer Hod Lipson knows the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) on a global level. "It permeates everything we do, from the stock market, from predicting the weather to what product you're going to buy," he said Wednesday during the second day of the virtual Ai4 2020 conference. AI falls into the category of an exponential technology, meaning it accelerates with time. Both biopharma and med-tech companies are increasingly pulling the technology into their business operations, working on programs that can assist in everything from drug discovery and clinical trial recruitment to precision diagnostics and patient compliance efforts. Computing power has doubled every 20 months or so for the past 120 years, Lipson said, moving from mechanical instruments to graphics processing units (GPUs) today.