Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from "when will we do it?" AI passed some important tests during the pandemic, says David Tareen, director of AI and analytics at SAS. "The pandemic put AI and chatbots in place to answer a flood of pandemic-related questions. Computer vision supported social distancing efforts. Machine learning models have become indispensable for modeling the effects of the reopening process." But the future upside of AI is still considerable.

Our research team at Qwant works at the cutting edge of AI to quickly deliver the best possible results on our users search queries while ensuring the results are neutral, impartial and accurate. We see millions of searches each day for images alone. One of the latest AI innovations that we are implementing is a new class of image recognition model called ResNext, to improve our accuracy and speed when delivering image search results. We have been working closely with Microsoft and Graphcore to use IPU processor technology in Azure and are seeing a significant improvement – with 3.5x higher performance - in our image search capability using ResNext on IPUs, out of the box. There is huge potential for innovation with Graphcore IPUs on new machine intelligence models and we are working on these approaches to refine our search results so that we can deliver exactly what our customers are looking for.

NVIDIA and Baidu announced a broad partnership to bring the world's leading artificial intelligence technology j cloud computing, self-driving vehicles and AI home assistants. Speaking in the keynote at Baidu's AI developer conference in Beijing, Baidu president and COO Qi Lu described his company's plans to work with NVIDIA to bring next-generation NVIDIA Volta GPUs to Baidu Cloud, providing cloud customers with the world's leading deep learning platform. This partnership will adopt NVIDIA's DRIVE PX platform for Baidu's self-driving car initiative, and develop self-driving cars with major Chinese carmakers. Optimize Baidu's PaddlePaddle open source deep learning framework for NVIDIA Volta GPUs and make it widely available to academics and researchers. "NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI," said Ian Buck, NVIDIA vice president and general manager of accelerated computing.

Silicon Valley-based AnalyticsMD is an AI-based software platform that helps increase efficiency of health systems and improve margins. The platform is also supposed to enhance the patient experience by reducing provider burnout. AnalyticsMD acts as a virtual air traffic control by allowing hospital administrations and front-line teams to make the best decisions at critical moments. In 2016, AnalyticsMD won several awards in healthcare from Fierce Innovations. They took home best financial and operational solutions, along with best new product .