The spectre of artificial intelligence is worrying lots of workers, but one office is welcoming it with open arms and an apple pie in the oven. "There are many people who, at 2 a.m., are on their phones, looking at what's on the market," Fredrik Eklund, of the real-estate agency the Eklund Gomes Team, said the other day. He sat in the reception area of his Flatiron office wearing a pale-pink blazer, jeans, and thick black-framed eyeglasses. "Now they can talk to Maya. Her shop is open 24/7, and she is always there."

Digital marketing firm Voro is using ChatGPT, the popular new artificial intelligence program, to "supercharge" content creation for clients. Before ChatGPT, content had been "incredibly expensive" to create -- especially individualized content necessary for search engine visibility, said Chris Gauron, partner and CEO at the Minneapolis firm. Voro has created an artificial intelligence-assisted, but human-edited, process that increases speed at the same time it lowers cost. ChatGPT's power and potential have fueled explosive growth, reaching 100 million users in just two months. Reports that it passed exams in four University of Minnesota law courses, at the Wharton School of Business and the exam to become a licensed physician have only heightened interest globally.

In another step toward using artificial intelligence in medicine, a new study shows that computers can be trained to match human experts in judging the severity of prostate tumors. Researchers found that their artificial intelligence system was "near perfect" in determining whether prostate tissue contained cancer cells. And it was on par with 23 "world-leading" pathologists in judging the severity of prostate tumors. No one is suggesting computers should replace doctors. But some researchers do think AI technology could improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical diagnoses.

LONDON: Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) based method that is as good at identifying and grading prostate cancer as world-leading uro-pathologists. The AI-system has the potential to solve one of the bottlenecks in today's prostate cancer histopathology by providing more accurate diagnosis and better treatment decisions, according to the study published in The Lancet Oncology journal. "Our results show that it is possible to train an AI-system to detect and grade prostate cancer on the same level as leading experts," said Martin Eklund, an associate professor at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "This has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of uro-pathologists and allow them to focus on the most difficult cases," Eklund said. A problem in today's prostate pathology is that there is a certain degree of subjectivity in the assessments of the biopsies, researchers said. Different pathologists can reach different conclusions even though they are studying the same samples, they said.

For many people, the phrase "artificial intelligence" conjures up images of human-like robots and self-driving vehicles. For Kerrie Holley, AI has a much more human meaning. Holley had a long career, first as a distinguished engineer and later IBM fellow, before joining Eden Prairie-based Optum, a UnitedHealth Group unit that provides information and technology-based health services. At Optum, he's focused on developing technologies that make the health system work better and people's lives healthier. AI is one of those technologies.

A team from Appen, a global leader in speech and search technology services, recently attended the inaugural AI World Conference & Expo in San Francisco, where over 2,000 attendees from a variety of industries convened to hear from business leaders who are using Artificial Intelligence to drive growth for their companies. According to the conference organizers, "more than 55% of our attendees came from global 2000 organizations, including innovation leaders from Google, General Electric, Nielsen, McKinsey, Schlumberger, Facebook, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, NTT, IBM, SRI and Baidu." While the concept of AI is not new, the technology is experiencing a rebirth in the form of machine learning and cognitive computing, with companies from startups to enterprises looking to benefit from AI's potential. While AI may replace some human effort, it won't eliminate it. Dr. Neil Eklund, Chief Data Scientist, Schlumberger who spoke in the day 1 executive panel, suggested that human experts are still a necessity for fine-tuning AI. Further, Dr. Eklund recommended that as a best practice to set acceptable accuracy rates and when data shows a drop below those thresholds, human intervention is necessary.

The discovery of major software flaws could render thousands of fMRI brain studies inaccurate. The use of fMRI is a common method for scanning the brain in neuroscience and psychology experiments. To make sense of the data produced, researchers sometimes use a technique called spatial autocorrelation to identify areas of the brain that appear to "light up" during particular tasks or experiences. But some software flaws in the popular fMRI data analysis packages SPM, FSL and AFNI meant this technique routinely produced false positives, resulting in errors 50 per cent of the time or more. Anders Eklund and Hans Knutsson at Linköping University in Sweden and Thomas Nichols at the University of Warwick, UK, calculated this by analysing brain data from a collaborative open fMRI project called 1000 Functional Connectomes.