As the economy begins the slow process of re-opening, advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing are playing a key role not only in monitoring COVID-19 outbreaks, but how companies manage the unchartered landscape before them. Use of AI during the earliest days of the pandemic centered on tracking the spread of the disease around the world. Today, AI is playing a critical role in how pharmaceutical and biotech companies research and test treatments, and in the development of a vaccine. And now, as states begin to reopen, and businesses try to find the best path forward, these advanced technologies are enabling them to figure out how to do this safely and effectively. "Companies don't have historical data to work from because they've never dealt with a crisis like this before," said Katie Stein, chief strategy officer for Genpact, a global professional services firm that specializes in digital transformation.

We have all heard or read a lot about artificial intelligence. It is a controversial topic with many fearing that it may result in unemployment for humans. However, the big question is, what is artificial intelligence and what does it entail? Artificial intelligence (AI) is in other terms known as machine intelligence. This intelligence is demonstrated by machines which are programmed to perform tasks that humans would otherwise undertake.

Experts from across the AI world came together in New York for the O'Reilly AI Conference in New York 2016. Below you'll find links to highlights from the event. Building reliable, robust software is hard, says Peter Norvig. It's even harder when we move from deterministic domains, such as balancing a checkbook, to uncertain domains, such as recognizing speech or objects in an image. Watch "Software engineering of systems that learn in uncertain domains."

Artificial Intelligence is what enables any digital device to see and recognize objects, understand and reply to recognizable messages, make decisions, and even learn to change its thinking and behavior as it analyzes of data points in the distributed memory known as the cloud. IBM's Watson project is a good example of this last point especially. AI in all of these facets is already in use in the world of healthcare at a fairly basic level but what more extended role is Artificial Intelligence likely to play in healthcare in the future? Although we can't be certain about the future, we can look just a few years ahead and make several predictions upon which many experts in the healthcare technology space can agree. This includes smart individuals such as Dr. Eric Topol, Dr, Berci Meskó, and Dr. Bob Wachter, all of which have written about this. Most of the above are already starting to happen in healthcare.