As more doctors and nurses leave the profession, providers are turning to AI technology to help bridge the coverage gap, especially among older Americans. As many as 55% of older adults fail to take their prescribed medications, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Now a new artificial intelligence app aims to change that. "Together," a free iPhone app built on generative AI, is designed to help aging adults and their caregivers manage medications and other health care tasks. Using a smartphone camera, the person simply snaps a picture of a prescription bottle.

PwC has been undergoing a large digital transformation effort that includes upskilling its workforce to become more technology and analytics savvy. The benefits of those efforts are starting to bubble up. At a demo day in New York City, PwC outlined a bevy of uses for robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and analytics and how those tools could be incorporated in audits and other services the firm provides. "The goal is to free up a lot of time for auditors to do the human things that they need to do and democratize innovation," said Sherri Guidone, US Assurance Technology Leader at PwC. "Our people can solve unique problems and we've seen change in just a few years in understanding technology." PwC is spending $3 billion to invest in tools, training and technologies to advance its business.

Sahil Dua, developer at Booking.com, explained how they have been able to scale machine learning (ML) models for recommending destinations and accommodation to their customers using Kubernetes, at this year's QCon London conference. In particular, he stressed how Kubernetes elasticity and resource starvation avoidance on containers helps them run computationally (and data) intensive, hard to parallelize, machine learning models. Kubernetes isolation (processes not having to compete for resources), elasticity (auto-scaling up or down based on resource consumption), flexibility (being able to quickly try out new libraries or frameworks) and GPU support (albeit Kubernetes support for NVIDIA GPUs is still in alpha, it allows 20x to 50x speed improvements) are key for Booking.com to run a large number of ML models at their scale (around 1.5 million room nights booked daily and 400 million monthly visitors). Each model runs as a stateless app inside a container. The container image does not include the model itself, it is retrieved at startup time from Hadoop.

Dr. Sumeet Dua is currently an upchurch endowed associate professor and the coordinator of IT research at Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, USA. He received his PhD in computer science from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His areas of expertise include data mining, image processing and computational decision support, pattern recognition, data warehousing, biomedical informatics, and heterogeneous distributed data integration. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research (AFOSR), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Louisiana Board of Regents (LA-BoR) have funded his research with over $2.8 million. He frequently serves as a study section member (expert panelist) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF)/CISE Directorate.