Every year for the last six years, Unanimous AI has been more accurate than movie critics at predicting Oscar winners. It uses swarm intelligence the power of interactive group decisions enhanced by AI – to transform regular people into expert decision-makers. How did it do this year? Unanimous AI took a group of regular movie fans and created a'hive mind' in which their combined choices are smarter than those of any individual member. "We can take a group of people and turn them into a super organism," founder Louis Rosenberg told IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.

Last November, at Fort Campbell, Tennessee, half a mile from the Kentucky border, a single human directed a swarm of 130 robots. The exercise was part of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field. "The operator of our swarm really was interacting with things as a collective, not as individuals," says Shane Clark, of Raytheon BBN, who was the company's main lead for OFFSET. "We had done the work to establish the sort of baseline levels of autonomy to really support those many-to-one interactions in a natural way."

Swarms of drones have gotten a lot of time in the spotlight lately, mostly for their use in potential military operations. The U.S. military is testing out swarm operations in simulations, while the British Army is using live drones operating in swarms during actual training operations. Other militaries are also interested in deploying swarms. One of the biggest advantages a swarm of drones has when performing military operations is its resiliency. If a swarm enters combat and several individual drones get shot down or otherwise incapacitated, it really doesn't reduce the combat effectiveness of the swarm, nor the tactics that it uses.

From Gary Kasparov to Elon Musk, the list of those who say AI needs to be applied such that it augments us, not compete with us, is long. Yet the supply of reports warning that AI threatens jobs doesn't seem to have an end. On the other hand, a new report looking at a technology called Swarm AI may provide a much more benign fix. Speaking at a recent conference, chess legend, Gary Kasparov, said that the public perception of AI has been overly influenced by Hollywood: the reality is far more positive -- Kasparov's take on AI is a reason for optimism Swarms can be intelligent-- there is no great insight here. Those who study Emergence understand this, from ant colonies to cities, great things can be achieved from simpler entities working together.

Today we are joined by Gregg Willcox, Director of Research and Development at Unanimous AI. Starting out with a general interest in robotics, Gregg found himself in the world of machine learning and AI, inspired specifically by the idea of humans as smart data processors, instead of data points. With the team at Unanimous AI, Gregg uncovered a secret that many creatures in nature have been doing for centuries: using the collective intelligence of a group produces more accurate results, in a more efficient way, (also known as swarming), than an individual alone. From this research, 'Swarm' was born, a game-like collaboration platform that channels the beliefs and convictions of individuals to come to a consensus. Going one step further, using a behavioral neural network trained on people's behavior called'Conviction', the precision of the results is further amplified, leading to significant increases in detailed accuracy.

While AI may have a lot of potential to transform the future of medicine, humans are still much better at most complex intellectual tasks. The only thing that can be smarter than a human is a group of humans and new software from Unanimous AI, a company based in San Francisco, hopes to harness groups of doctors to improve the precision of diagnostic decisions. The software, called Swarm AI, presented separate radiologists with chest X-rays of potential cases of pneumonia. The doctors answered questions regarding their findings and the results went into the software that supposedly uses some soft of artificial intelligence techniques to produce a result based on all the doctors' findings. The researchers that performed the study are presenting some findings at the 2018 Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine's Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging (see abstract below).

With advances in artificial intelligence impacting every industry from healthcare to retail, it's no wonder people are scared. After all, these pesky machines can already perform a great many tasks better than us humans and it's only going to get worse. I'm not just talking about replacing mindless busywork like sorting mail and processing tax returns – I'm talking about AI systems taking on complex jobs like forecasting financial markets, diagnosing medical patients, even making optimized hiring decisions, and doing it all better than highly trained humans. Consider the field of radiology. To become a practicing radiologist in the US, an aspiring doctor must devote 4 years to undergraduate education, another 4 years to medical school and a final 4 years to a radiology residency program.

When Amazon launched in 1995, only 3% of Americans had ever been on the Internet, let alone purchased anything online. Both the concept of the web and e-commerce were startlingly new. Just a year earlier in fact, the New York Times had run a story with the headline: "Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open", breathlessly reporting the first online transaction, the sale of a Sting CD. Also in 1995, Auction Web went live, which was to become eBay. A broken laser pointer – to a collector of broken laser pointers no less – for $14.83.

Legal trials historically rely on a plethora of different steps before a conclusion is made. But for many cases heard in the US, it's not just juries, judges and magistrates who contribute to the final decision. COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is an artificially intelligent tool used as part of the sentencing process. It uses 137 different features to predict if a defendant will reoffend, and therefore influences the type and length of punishment. It makes sense to assume that this software had undergone strict trials itself.

Artificial intelligence might arguably be the newest frontier of human experience, but there's no denying that man has been fascinated with the concept for millennia. From the mythical stories of Hephaestus creating mechanical servants and brazen-footed bulls that puffed fire from their mouths, to the talking heads of the 13th century, to IBM Watson and modern forms of AI, the subject has been bubbling on the surface of human consciousness. The time is now here for AI to come of age; and, in many ways, it already has. But now there's a new problem, and it's not one of how AI can be implemented, as has been the major challenge in the past. AI has now sprouted into a plethora of forms, each rivaling the other in an attempt to showcase its superior capabilities.