The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. "I wouldn't fire the pollsters, but I would direct them to try to leverage machine learning, data mining and AI in their work more to get better projections," said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research center in Seattle. The size of this year's polling error is still unknown as the vote count continues. But polls generally predicted clear Democratic gains, not cliffhangers. No person or algorithm can predict human behavior accurately all the time, said Heidi Messer, chairman of New York-based Collective[i], which offers AI and predictive technologies for sales teams.

The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. "I wouldn't fire the pollsters, but I would direct them to try to leverage machine learning, data mining and AI in their work more to get better projections," said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research center in Seattle. The size of this year's polling error is still unknown as the vote count continues. But polls generally predicted clear Democratic gains, not cliffhangers. No person or algorithm can predict human behavior accurately all the time, said Heidi Messer, chairman of New York-based Collective[i], which offers AI and predictive technologies for sales teams.

Major League Baseball is entering uncharted waters with the start of its COVID-abridged season today. Nobody's really sure if the 60-game season will even be able to get through the World Series without disruption by the pandemic's spread. However, one crowd-sourced AI system already has a pretty good guess as to who will be taking home the Commissioner's Trophy. The folks at Unanimous AI have been making high profile predictions like these since 2016, when their UNU platform correctly figured 11 of 15 winners for that year's Academy Awards. In 2017, the company followed up by correctly guessing the Kentucky Derby's top four finishers -- in order, no less -- and in 2019, correctly figured that the Houston Astros would make it to the series (though nobody could have seen the Nat's miraculous postseason run coming). "The fundamental core of our system is a technology that captures input from groups of people by connecting them together in real time using AI algorithms modeled after swarms," Dr. Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous' founder and chief scientist, told Engadget.

You can probably walk up to any football fan right now and get their opinion on which team will win Sunday's Super Bowl LIV. But if you're looking for a really educated guess on the game's outcome, you'll want to ask Stanford computer scientist Louis Rosenberg, the founder of Unanimous A.I., a startup that combines the opinions of a lot of humans with artificial intelligence to make remarkably accurate predictions. In nature, many species exhibit something called swarm intelligence, meaning that they make smarter decisions as groups than as individuals -- in other words, a flock of birds or a school of fish is smarter than a single bird or fish. The idea behind Unanimous A.I. is to let well-informed humans create their own swarm intelligence. As a group, they can then answer questions, reach decisions, or make predictions with a greater accuracy than any one knowledgable person alone.

Think about it – what's the first thought that comes to your mind when you think about Data Science? Here's what I'm proposing – how about we explore the road less traveled? In this weird and wacky world, our data science work reflects surprising connections, such as – if you are buying diapers then you are most likely to buy beer. Or, people who go to bars are a higher credit risk! Oh, I cannot miss out on this one – Smart people prefer curly fries.

There are eight films nominated to win Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards. Following an impressive 94 percent score in predicting last year's Oscars, a San Francisco-based technology firm, thinks it has correctly predicted the winner for Sunday night's show. Unanimous A.I. uses its so-called "swarm A.I." technology to create an artificial intelligence comprised of a hive-mind of dozens of movie experts. The firm regularly predicts the results for the World Cup, NFL games, politics, and even Game of Thrones plot lines. This week, it shared the results of its 2019 Oscar predictions with Inverse.

The act of gambling on games of chance has been around as long as the games themselves. For as long as there's been money to be made wagering on the uncertain outcomes of these events, bettors have been leveraging mathematics to give them an edge on the house. As gaming has moved from bookies and casinos into the digital realm, gamblers are beginning to use modern computing techniques, especially AI and machine learning, to increase their odds of winning. But that betting blade cuts both ways, as researchers work to design artificial intelligences capable of beating professional players at their own game -- and even out-wagering sportsbooks. The rate at which machine learning AI systems have caught up and overtaken the skills of their human opponents has accelerated at a frightening pace in the past few years. IBM's Watson famously wiped the floor against Jeopardy's master-class of players in 2011.

Robots aren't playing professional soccer just yet, but they can certainly help predict it! With the FIFA World Cup kicking off, San Francisco-based tech firm Unanimous A.I. has used its considerable artificial intelligence expertise to predict the outcome of the 32-team men's soccer tournament. Given that the startup has previously predicted the Super Bowl results successfully right down to the exact final score, we totally think this is worth taking seriously. "These predictions were generated using swarm A.I. technology," Louis Rosenberg, founder and CEO of Unanimous A.I., told Digital Trends. "This means it uses a unique combination of human insights and artificial intelligence algorithms, resulting in a system that is smarter than the humans or the machines could be on their own. It works by connecting a group of people over the internet using A.I. algorithms, enabling them to think together as a system, and converge upon predictions that are the optimized combination of their individual knowledge, wisdom, instincts, and intuitions."

The World Cup 2018 has officially begun--which means, if you're a hardcore soccer fan, you're pretty tied up for the next month watching the matches. For those who can't or don't want to follow the action, here's a major spoiler: Germany is going to beat Vegas-favorite Brazil in the final, and Spain and France will round out the tournament's final four teams. That prediction comes courtesy of Unanimous A.I., an artificial intelligence startup that performs a kind of complex crowdsourcing. Founded by scientist and engineer Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous can be used to better understand the nuanced opinions of a population, which makes it useful for tasks like performing market research, diagnosing diseases, or making predictions about the future. Launched in 2014, the company's technology already has an impressive résumé of accurate forecasts.

Competitive sports are ultimately numbers games. Whether it's a gymnast racking up points on a balance beam, a tennis player acing her opponent, or a football team scoring on a last second Hail Mary, all matches are won and lost by numbers. There are upsets, comebacks, and situations when the losing team still seems to outperform the other -- but, even then, victory distills into digits. As such, it's obvious that many sports lend themselves nicely to the type of mathematical analyses that let keen-eyed statisticians predict outcomes -- maybe even exact scores -- just by crunching a bunch of numbers. After all, that's the basis of sports betting, and it's helped baseball managers craft winning teams on a tight budget just by considering little more than batting average, runs batted in, and stolen bases.