AI adoption is on the rise. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 55% of companies use artificial intelligence in at least one function, and 27% attribute at least 5% of earnings before interest and taxes to AI, much of that in the form of cost savings. As AI will dramatically transform nearly every industry it touches, it's no surprise that vendors and enterprises are looking for opportunities to deploy AI everywhere they can. But not every project can benefit from AI and attempting to apply AI inappropriately can not only cost time and money but also sour employees, customers, and corporate leaders on future AI projects. The key factors for determining whether a project is suitable for AI are business value, availability of training data, and cultural readiness for change.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is on the rise. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 55 per cent of companies use artificial intelligence in at least one function, and 27 per cent attribute at least 5 per cent of earnings before interest and taxes to AI, much of that in the form of cost savings. As AI will dramatically transform nearly every industry it touches, it's no surprise that vendors and enterprises are looking for opportunities to deploy AI everywhere they can. But not every project can benefit from AI and attempting to apply AI inappropriately can not only cost time and money but also sour employees, customers, and corporate leaders on future AI projects. The key factors for determining whether a project is suitable for AI are business value, availability of training data, and cultural readiness for change.

"The rule of thumb is that both images--the one from the satellite and the one from the autonomous vehicle--have to have identical content for current techniques to work. The differences that they can handle are about what can be accomplished with an Instagram filter that changes an image's hues," says Anthony Fragoso (MS '14, PhD '18), lecturer and staff scientist, and lead author of the Science Robotics paper. "In real systems, however, things change drastically based on season because the images no longer contain the same objects and cannot be directly compared." The process--developed by Chung and Fragoso in collaboration with graduate student Connor Lee (BS '17, MS '19) and undergraduate student Austin McCoy--uses what is known as "self-supervised learning." While most computer-vision strategies rely on human annotators who carefully curate large data sets to teach an algorithm how to recognize what it is seeing, this one instead lets the algorithm teach itself.

Zack Fragoso's passion is for pizza with plenty of data. Fragoso, a data science and AI manager at pizza giant Domino's, got his Ph.D. in occupational psychology, a field that employs statistics to sort through the vagaries of human behavior. "I realized I liked the quant part of it," said Fragoso, whose nimbleness with numbers led to consulting jobs in analytics for the police department and symphony orchestra in his hometown of Detroit before landing a management job on Domino's expanding AI team. The pizza maker "has grown our data science team exponentially over the last few years, driven by the impact we've had on translating analytics insights into action items for the business team." Making quick decisions is important when you need to deliver more than 3 billion pizzas a year fast.