Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! In 2015, David Ferrucci – the award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) researcher who led the development of IBM Watson -- which won the television quiz show Jeopardy in 2011 against two of the game's top champions -- noticed that most AI systems failed to understand the meaning behind language. That meant they couldn't provide rich, reasoned explanations for any output. That's when Ferrucci founded New York City-based AI research and technology company Elemental Cognition, to tackle one of the most difficult challenges facing the future of AI: Developing the ability to reason and understand beyond statistical machine learning and data analytics, overcome bias and provide intelligence at scale.

NEC Corp. said it will develop cancer drugs using artificial intelligence, aiming to put new vaccines using peptides into practical use within the next eight years as key substances in next generation immunotherapy. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids with an enormous number of variations and helps increase cells that attack cancer. Whether a pattern works depends on the patient's leukocyte group, so NEC will use its AI technology to quickly choose the right type of peptide, the company said Monday. Under joint research with Yamaguchi and Kochi universities, NEC has already discovered a peptide that the developers hope will be effective for liver cell and esophageal cancer. A new company established for the project, Cytlimic Inc., plans to commercialize effective peptide vaccines in cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, NEC said.