Confirming a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease requires an expensive PET scan that uses a high dose of full-body radiation. With seed grant support from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), a group of Stanford researchers can now diagnose Alzheimer's Disease just as successfully by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to low-dose PET scans and simultaneously acquired MRI images. "This work has the advantage for the patients of being safer, lower dose, faster, cheaper all the things you'd want as a patient," said Greg Zaharchuk, professor of radiology at Stanford University and 2018 HAI seed grantee. Using artificial intelligence, Zaharchuk's team has become adept at what's called image transformation. They can take one image or set of images and use a type of AI called a convolutional neural network (CNN) to produce a new set of images as the output.

Humanizing AI communication: What's needed to make IoT devices sound better There was an interesting blend in the audience at O'Reilly's AI conference that just wrapped up in New York. With AI all over the media and popular entertainment, you'd have to be living under a rock to not be familiar with the topic of AI, even if the definitions are as fuzzy as the logic that machines synthesize. And executives want to get an idea of what this new boardroom buzzword is all about. Executives have certainly heard about AI, but their organizations are still at early stages implementing it, according to a 2017 study of 3000 executives presented by MIT Sloan Management Review executive editor David Kiron. Only 23 percent of companies have actually deployed AI, with the upper 5 percent now starting to embed it across their enterprises.

More than 200 artificial intelligence startups applied for Nvidia's Inception contest, which seeks to identify the best AI startups. The company created the program to find new uses for its graphics processing units (GPUs), but it's also hoping these startups will change the world. So far, the company has identified more than 2,800 AI startups over the years through Inception. I listened to pitches from 12 finalists in a Shark Tank styled judging event last week. Each is competing to be one of three finalists to share the $1 million prize pool.