Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? Language models -- AI systems that can be prompted to write essays and emails, answer questions, and more -- remain flawed in many ways. Because they "learn" to write from examples on the web, including problematic social media posts, they're prone to generating misinformation, conspiracy theories, and racist, sexist, or otherwise toxic language. Another major limitation of many of today's language models is that they're "stuck in time," in a sense. Because they're trained once on a large collection of text from the web, their knowledge of the world -- which they gain from that collection -- can quickly become outdated depending on when they were deployed.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Global Good have created a computer algorithm capable of identifying precancerous changes in women which place them at risk of developing cervical cancer. Known as automated visual evaluation, this new form of artificial intelligence (AI), "has the potential to revolutionize cervical cancer screening" for women in low income communities worldwide by giving their healthcare providers the ability to use digitized images collected during routine, annual screenings for cervical cancer to identify potential precancerous changes. According to America's National Cancer Institute (which is part of the NIH), this technology holds the promise of enabling physicians to more quickly catch and treat such potential changes before they develop into cancer, and could eventually replace visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) -- the current method of screening used by healthcare professionals who work with limited resources in challenging medical care environments -- a testing system which is "known to be inaccurate." The researchers involved in this project "trained" the machine learning algorithm (automated visual evaluation) to recognize patterns in medical images and other "complex visual inputs" by digitizing and entering more than 60,000 images from an NCI archive of photographs which had been collected from more than 9,400 women in Costa Rica during a 1990s cervical cancer screening study which included follow-up studies for roughly 18 years. These images subsequently enabled the algorithm to "learn" which "cervical changes became precancers and which did not," according to NIH representatives, who added that the AI approach to cervical cancer screening was developed by NCI researchers in collaboration with the Intellectual Ventures Fund, Global Good, with findings confirmed independently by personnel from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), another component of the NIH.

If you ask, many people will say we are in a new era of higher education, one where machine learning and big data analytics are driving rapid change. From the influx of adaptive learning technologies to the automated student support services and predictive analytics models driving new interventions, there are fewer spaces of college and university life that are not being touched by these technological innovations. These technological opportunities could offer a lot to higher education. Indeed, if we ignore the opportunities that machine learning and big data analytics might provide to complement our human capacities, we will do a disservice to those we claim to serve -- our students. But if we treat them as an opportunity to downsize the work force or largely replace human social interactions with automated ones, we are going to lose a lot more than we gain.

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence will significantly alter how many jobs are performed and how many workers are needed for various tasks, according to new research by Capgemini, a consulting and outsourcing firm. Some 83 percent of the 993 global executives surveyed by the firm between March and June said AI has generated new roles in their organizations. Specifically, organizations are producing jobs at a senior level, with two in three jobs being created at the grade of manager or above. Among organizations that have implemented AI at scale, 63 percent said that AI has not destroyed any jobs in their organization. Along with the trend toward job creation at the management level, the report provides evidence that organizations see AI as a way to reduce the time employees spend on routine and administrative tasks, enabling them to deliver more value.

In this Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016, photo, Chief of Surgery Dr. Dean Richardson, right, and Medical Director Dr. Barbara Dallap Schaer guide a horse into a room to undergo a computerized tomography scan at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center Hospital for Large Animals in Kennett Square, Pa. Veterinarians hope an innovative type of CT scan can advance health care for horses and possibly be adapted for people.