Robotics and AI are poised to fundamentally change the future of healthcare. In a Swiss classroom, two children are engrossed in navigating an intricate maze with the help of a small, rather cute, robot. The interaction is easy and playful – it is also providing researchers with valuable information on how children learn and the conditions in which information is most effectively absorbed. Rapid improvements in intuitive human-machine interactions (HMI) are poised to kick off big changes in society. In particular, two European research projects give a sense of how these trends could influence two core areas: education and healthcare.

Education and Healthcare are the first two fields to benefit from deep learning where the impact will be significant and benefit overall humanity. It took a deep learning algorithm a fraction of a second to identify chimps and classify their genders. Expert human labelers were given nearly an hour to complete the same task.

The field of AI has reached an inflection point today, where it is on the cusp of revolutionising areas as diverse as security, finance, transport, healthcare and government service delivery. Availability of massive volumes of data, relatively inexpensive computational capabilities and improved training techniques, such as deep learning, have led to significant leaps in AI capabilities and will only continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The pace is accelerating and governments need to figure out how to deal with this era of AI 2.0, where AI is becoming all-pervasive. Where if they want to unlock the potential of the data being generated at an ever-increasing velocity, government departments need AI at their fingertips, in the here and now. On September 14, senior executives from a wide range of key public sector agencies in Singapore and institutes of higher learning gathered for a vibrant, insightful discussion on the next stage of artificial intelligence.