Artificial intelligence has come a long way from being just a component of science function stories to reality. Currently, we have a host of intelligent machines like self-driving cars, smart virtual assistants, chatbots, and surgical robots, to name a few. Artificial intelligence has now become more mainstream with the ongoing industrial revolution. As our society is growing more dependent on technology, top technologies like AI and machine learning have been augmenting human capabilities and disrupting decades of old and traditional lifestyles. With the emergence of algorithm-driven artificial intelligence, the usefulness of AI continues to grow.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed to us a very inconvenient truth: Regardless of all the technological advances of the last century and a half, our lives can be stopped and destroyed suddenly and unexpectedly by an invisible plague. The excitement over the most recent technological breakthrough--artificial intelligence or deep learning--has met the grim reality of our inability to adequately prepare for, manage, and overcome society's most important and consequential challenges. While Google's DeepMind set itself up to "solve intelligence," i.e., to advance the state of AI and then use the hoped-for "superior intelligence" to solve humanity's challenges, Sagie Davidovich and Ron Karidi co-founded SparkBeyond 7 years ago "to harness the world's collective intelligence in order to solve the world's toughest challenges." They aimed to use existing AI, algorithms, and knowledge to advance humanity's problem-solving capabilities. Most important, SparkBeyond wanted to go beyond the typical use of AI which is basically an extension and an upgrade of what has been called "predictive analytics" before the 2010s.