AI has demonstrated its potential in the field of healthcare, education, space, crowd management, and even in reading and interpreting human emotions. AI researchers and experts are experimenting with the limits of artificial intelligence and its potential in penning down poetry.

A recent survey on literature in the category of machine learning and AI learning has revealed a steady progression in developing techniques to automate poetry generation.

AI Researchers are Farsighted about AI in Poetry Making

“Her eyes, twin pools of mystic light,
Forever in her radiance white—, 
She sought the bosom of the Night. 
Away it came, that mystic sight!”

— Anonymous human writer in collaboration with a poetry algorithm.

This poem was created by a machine in collaboration with a human poet. It is a Google software program known as Verse by Verse. Verse by Verse takes the first line of poetry as input and produces the subsequent lines following a definite rhyme.

Although AI algorithms have successfully generated poetic results, the quality of the poetry is fairly mediocre. AI’s attempt to generate poetry has met with resistance and indignation from authors, poets, and critics. They opine that it is impossible for AI to touch the most sublime emotions and moods that humans possess.

A Glimpse of Verse by Verse

The Google software, Verse by Verse is demonstrating abilities in producing a text by learning and interpreting a corpus of poetry by twenty-two different poets. On the website of the program, users are invited to choose their ‘muses’, three poets, and create the first line of the poetry. The software pens down subsequent lines.

Users of Verse by Verse are unsatisfied with the results. However, the software is welcomed by academicians and institutions as it ushers a new dimension to machine learning and artificial intelligence as a whole. Verse by Verse utilizes language models and programs that use machines to establish a statistical representation of how words fall beside each other to form a coherent sentence. The paradigmatic language model that the software uses is GPT-3. GPT-3 is a program launched by an OpenAI startup in San Francisco in 2020. GPT-3, the language model has demonstrated its poetic abilities by re-writing a phrase by Franz Kafka.

Verse by Verse is now used to read and understand Shakespeare’s couplets. Results on this have not been disclosed yet.

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According to Zion Market Research, the global cloud-based payroll market “is expected to generate around USD 13,374 million by 2026, at a CAGR of around 6.8% between 2019 and 2026.”

Though cloud-based payroll software is the industry’s biggest disrupter thus far, artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t too far behind.

Artificial intelligence refers to technology designed to perform tasks needing some degree of intelligence to accomplish. In their revolutionary textbook, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” Russell and Norvig explore four schools of thought that historically define AI:

1. Thinking humanly
2. Thinking rationally
3. Acting humanly
4. Acting rationally

AI systems mimic human intelligence, to varying degrees. For instance, there’s artificial narrow intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and artificial superintelligence — which are progressively advanced in that order.

AI’s Contribution to the Payroll Function

In 2017, PwC reported that “business leaders believe AI will be a key contributor to gaining a business advantage in the future.” Further, a 2018 report by Ernst & Young states that HR executives are confident that combining HR administrative functions (including payroll) with AI will enhance the employee experience.

Most notably, in a 2019 survey by Robert Half Finance & Accounting, 47% of CFOs predicted that payroll will benefit the most from AI integrations. The top five effects these CFOs expect AI to have over the next three years are:

1. Eliminates human error (57%)
2. Lowers costs (56%)
3. Boosts employee efficiency and output (50%)
4. Decreases burden on finance and accounting professionals, allowing them to focus on higher value work (49%)
5. Improves the bottom line (43%)

It’s not hard to see why CFOs rank “eliminates human error” as No. 1. Payroll processing involves managing huge data sets, which are always shifting due to ever-changing regulations. By automatically applying payroll laws as they change, AI drastically reduces the risks of manual payroll errors while enhancing compliance.

Additionally, timekeeping systems with specific AI features can track and compute employees’ hours worked and pay rates and then send the information to payroll for processing, without employees having to input certain data or the payroll preparer having to make manual calculations.

Many AI systems have problem-solving and predictive abilities, which enable business leaders to make informed, future-thinking decisions. For instance, through machine learning, AI can spot the reasons behind payroll mistakes so new incidences can be minimized or eradicated.

AI can also provide different options for solving a payroll problem plus demonstrate the implications of each suggestion. Moreover, AI predictive tools can foresee whether a company is likely to exceed its payroll budget so preventive measures can be taken.

To top it off, some employers are incorporating AI into their compensation decisions. According to an article published by SHRM, artificial intelligence can establish compensation metrics for employee rewards plus evaluate massive amounts of labor market data to deliver targeted, current, and competitive pay rates.

Despite these strengths, there’s a lot of fear by industry professionals that AI will replace humans in payroll.

What Could Go Wrong?

While AI is extremely valuable to the payroll function, the process still requires human presence.

Employment regulations are constantly evolving, gig workers are on the rise, and business environments have gotten more complex as globalization continues to trend. However, AI systems respond according to how they are taught. As Ernst & Young aptly puts it, “It does what you want it to do.” Therefore, the program is susceptible to bias, and it will take a human to ensure complete payroll accuracy.

Note, as well, that AI is still in the development stage, which means it’s nowhere near perfect. If certain tools are incorrectly programmed or the system fails to consider relevant factors, you will end up with inaccurate information.

Drawing the Line

There needs to be a distinct, balanced line between how much reliance is placed on AI in a payroll environment and which areas are non-negotiable when it comes to human involvement.

The American Payroll Association says that due to AI and automation, payroll departments will have fewer clerks and data entry workers in the future. But there will still be a need for humans to handle creative and more mentally demanding payroll tasks, especially in nonroutine situations.

There’s also the human interaction side of payroll, which is often overlooked. Managers, employees, and business partners don’t always want to speak with a machine — no matter how sophisticated — when communicating with the payroll department. They want a living, breathing human, to whom they can relate.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a paradigm shift in the conservative insurance industry, as more market players introduce new sets of time-saving AI-powered platforms to enhance business efficiency.

It has been years since AI started appearing in almost all industries due to its usefulness in a wide range of applications and human-like versatility.

Most globally leading companies have gone all-out to incorporate the big data-driven technology into their platforms, in a desperate bid to take the lead in the promising growth area.

Despite the global AI sensation, local insurers have so far remained less agile in jumping on the bandwagon. But starting this year, they began to utilize the technology in their own ways by developing automated, data-driven AI software.

On the development front, the Korea Insurance Development Institute (KIDI) recently developed an AI-driven car repair estimation software program. This will streamline insurance payment processes, as the platform _ called AOS Alpha _ can calculate the cost of repairs by analyzing images of a damaged car.

The institute developed the AI platform by analyzing 1 million images via deep learning. It said AOS Alpha can estimate repair costs for 195 cars _ ranging from sedans to SUV. The figure will increase down the road, as the platform increases its datasets. The accuracy of the platform will also improve against the same backdrop.

The nation’s 12 non-life insurers, which operate car insurance, plan to bring in the service for their businesses. KIDI said they are training staffs before introducing the platform.

“The introduction of the platform in the local insurance industry will help improve insurance culture by reducing distrust and conflict between interested parties, as AOS Alpha is expected to set a standard in offering car repair costs,” said Park Jin-ho, research head at KIDI’s auto technology laboratory.

Staring from mid-January, Hanwha Life Insurance, one of the so-called big three life insurers here, also introduced an AI-driven insurance claim review system. This was the first time in the industry that a cloud-based platform was introduced for real-time insurance claim analysis here.

According to the company, the system can automatically make decisions on whether to provide insurance payments to its users. The company has racked up 11 million insurance claim datasets over the past three years, ever increasing the accuracy of the system.

For now, the system processes 25 percent of insurance claims, but the company plans to increase the figure to 50 percent in the near future. The Hanwha affiliate expects the platform to reduce fixed costs of more than 10 billion won ($8.16 million) for the next five years.

Kyobo Life Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance are also joining the AI drive by utilizing the technology in their insurance contract review process.

In October 2019, Kyobo Life developed BARO insurance contract review system. According to the company, BARO is capable of making human-like decisions in whether to approve an insurance contract. The AI system analyzes whether an applicant meets the standards of its insurance product.

The Samsung affiliate is also operating the AI-powered insurance contract review system. The software can automatically approve or reject users’ applications for the firm’s health and cancer insurance products by conducting computerized screening procedures without human labor, the company said.

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WeAreBrain is an award-winning AI solution provider in the business of ideas, entrepreneurship, and technological invention. The company was founded in 2014. WeAreBrain enables global clients to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. It’s  team consists of 70+ creators and entrepreneurs based in Amsterdam, Lausanne, Kyiv, Kramatorsk, and Cape Town.

The company develops AI-powered support tools and Intelligent Automation solutions empowering business and technology teams to run and scale their daily operations efficiently. WeAreBrain helps its customers to develop a better understanding of the potential AI has for their business through solutions that help reduce operational cost, increase profitability, and improve customer experience.

The company’s mission is:

Building the best version of the future

WeAreBrain imagines, creates, and develops intelligent design, thoughtful AI products, and solutions. The company endeavors to leave the world a better place than we found it. WeAreBrain empowers visionaries to create meaningful brands and is committed to shaping the most successful, sustainable, and customer-centric organizations of tomorrow.

Ownership

The company’s internal culture is based on trust, transparency, and unlimited personal and professional growth. WeAreBrain invests in these principles, not in word, but indeed. The company is also big on ownership – in its work and in its business – that’s why each member of its team has shares in the business.

Continuous transformation

WeAreBrain is in the business of ideas, entrepreneurship, and technological invention – researching, inventing and building groundbreaking products and services. The company invests itself in R&D and ventures to build the experience to apply to its clients.

A Futurist Leadership

Jack Myasushkin is WeAreBrain’s Co-founder and CTO. Originally from Ukraine, he has skipped between Ukraine, the United States, and the Netherlands throughout his career. Before co-founding WeAreBrain in 2014, Jack was a C-level executive of a leading Ukrainian software development company. He is an avid futurist and a regular guest speaker at industry events such as AI Ukraine. Jack is passionate about developing technology and AI solutions that improve lives. He is also a co-founder of Tur.ai, an exciting new player in Intelligent Enterprise Automation.

Democratizing Market for IA Solutions

Jack claims, in the midst of so many emerging technologies, WeAreBrain offers organizations unbiased advice to differentiate between hype and necessary innovation and change, in order to be in line with the customer expectations of the future. For example:

•  Which new technologies and frameworks are emerging? Which of them is hype, which is obligation?

•  How do business models have to change?

•  How can data be used profitably?

•  How can deep learning be used efficiently?

Quicker, Cheaper, and More Efficient!

The company democratizes the market for Intelligent Automation. WeAreBrain makes it accessible, affordable, and more widely available for small and medium-sized companies and organizations. The company enables its clients to unlock the true potential of bot interfaces, AI, and process automation at a massively reduced cost of ownership, increased flexibility, and a much quicker time to market.

Optimizing Business Operations with AI 

Today, organizations across the globe have started leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize their processes to reap higher revenues, reduce operational costs, and improve customer experience. Moreover, Jack thinks, post-COVID-19 will be an unprecedented time in the history. Organizations will need to be quick on their feet if they hope to get back on track and recoup financial losses. It’s time to adopt AI and Automation capabilities to ease the transition. Whether it is in Customer Service, Procurement or HR, AI, and Automation easily offer a return on investment of 40-60% in the first year. Here are some examples:

AI in Healthcare is benefiting both patients and healthcare practitioners. It helps doctors with diagnoses and can tell when patients are deteriorating to a point where medical intervention is necessary, pre-empting the need for hospitalization.

Medical chatbots can interact with patients, educate and inform them on healthcare issues, and allay any potential trauma due to mis-self-diagnosis.

AI helps analyze complex medical data, like X-rays, CT scans, and different screenings and tests. Using a patient’s data together with clinical research, medical professionals are able to develop personalized treatments for each patient.

AI in Cybersecurity is most effective with regard to data protection. AI and ML allow businesses to detect vulnerabilities, anomalies, and nefarious user behavior in certain business applications and various financial systems. AI systems constantly analyze a business’s network packet and map out what is normal traffic, and what is abnormal. The main benefit and draw to AI technology are that it beats traditional firewall rules and works automatically to find anomalies.

AI in Human Resources is widely regarded as the perfect point, the ‘primordial glue’ of where AI can fully flourish. This is largely due to the fact that human resources is brimming with top quality, clean data and it is a department often pressed for time in most businesses.

Artificial intelligence in Retail is most commonly used and accepted in the digital retail, or ‘e-retail’ space. Just a few minutes on any e-commerce website and users are confronted by intelligent chatbots driving sales and assisting with commendations and purchases.

Conversation intelligence software such as natural language processing (NLP) helps companies interact with customers and follow up leads by analyzing user behavior and partitioning sales calls using speech recognition. Chatbots and virtual customer assistants allow retail companies to run a full-time customer service operation and answer basic questions without the involvement of human staff.

Recommendation engines use the power of machine learning and predictive analysis to provide personalized recommendations to each customer. Large e-commerce platforms like Amazon rely heavily on recommendation systems which boost their revenue of about one third.

AI in the Workplace seeks out inefficiency to adapt and improve service delivery. Any rules-based, repetitive task is in AI’s crosshairs which frees up time for employees to concentrate on tasks that require human thinking, strategy, and emotional intelligence. Through chatbots and virtual assistants, artificial intelligence helps businesses improve communication internally and externally by enabling individual personalization for each professional, allowing for enhanced focus and increased productivity.

Essentially this means that soon offices leveraging AI in the workplace will have two sets of teams, with each employee having a ‘digital duplicate’ handling the administrative, repetitive tasks, while the employee benefits through more time to create and innovate.

Innovating through Cultural Diversity

Embracing cultural diversity is one of WeAreBrain’s key values. Cultural diversity has made the work it does smarter! Jack says, “We’ve all heard the 21^st-century catchphrases like ‘Innovate or die’, ‘Innovation is life’, ‘Growth is born from Innovation’ (notice the trend?). It’s something every good business keeps top of mind. If you don’t continually strive towards new ways to do what you do now, you’ll be left behind.”

It seems now more than ever the best way to boost one’s business ability to change is by having culturally and gender diverse teams. In a study published in Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, the authors analyzed levels of gender diversity in research and development teams from 4,277 companies in Spain. The study found that those companies with more women in their employ were most likely to ‘introduce radical new innovations into the market’.

Another study based on the London Annual Business Survey revealed that businesses run by culturally diverse leadership teams were more likely to introduce new products than homogenous teams. Added to this, it’s well known that managers and leaders often hire those that are similar to them — but this can threaten innovation because teams are likely to conform to one school of thought. Often these are unconscious decisions so it is key for the business to actively promote a culturally diverse agenda.

Prestigious Achievements and Accolades  

WeAreBrain has been voted in the Emerce Top 100 and is a proud member of DDA, representing the leading digital service providers in the Netherlands. Alongside nominations for DIA Awards and Best of Swiss Web, the company’s Tur.ai platform was selected among the Top 25 innovations in the Accenture Innovation Awards and won a prestigious Spin Award.

WeAreBrain’s contribution to female entrepreneurship and gender equality in IT has been recognized by TheNextWomen and EY Winning Women.

Envisioning Future Implications of Technology

Jack envisions, “As AI becomes the norm in society, important decisions impacting much of the world’s economy and way of life are increasingly being made by machine algorithms. We are seeing that the consequences of technology built a few years ago have much broader ramifications on our society: election results, information spread, autonomous vehicles and weapons, fighting, and diagnosing diseases. These developments are now requiring us to think far more closely not only about our design principles for responsible AI, but also its role in our society and the moral and legal implications of its use.”

To address these concerns, many scientific and higher learning institutions such as Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and MIT, have established human-centred artificial intelligence research institutes. The aim is to bring awareness to the development and deployment of AI, bring a common ethical agenda into AI development, and use it to guide the development of intelligent machines. As a leading pioneer of the HAI methodology, Professor Li has outlined the guiding principles of HAI:

•  Development of AI must be guided by a concern for its human impact

•  AI should strive to augment and enhance humans, not replace them

•  AI must be more inspired by human intelligence

Jack notes that the aim of HAI is clear: to develop AI/ML systems to mimic human intelligence, decision-making, and emotional intelligence spectrums in order to benefit humanity’s growth raided by ethical machines. As one looks to a more technologically-advanced world with algorithms becoming key drivers in socio-economic growth, it is indeed comforting to know researchers such as Li are calling for collaboration and ethical review in AI development.

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Microsoft’s writing assistant for Microsoft 365 users is getting new AI-powered features like Rewrite Suggestions, which lets you highlight a sentence and then right-click for multiple AI-generated revision ideas, and is coming to Chrome and Edge browser extensions and Outlook.com. AI Editor can also now review text for more gender-related inclusivity and issues that can arise like brevity, formality, or lack of clarity, and review edit recommendations in a dashboard. Similarity Checker is also being introduced today with a plagiarism checker and the ability to check whether a paper includes necessary citations.

Susan Hendrich, Microsoft’s group program manager of AI and NLP for Office, told VentureBeat that Rewrite Suggestions uses a Transformer-based model, and that all new features were developed in conjunction with Microsoft Research. Experts who spoke with VentureBeat around the beginning of the year said advances in text generation and other Transformer-based AI models are among the greatest advances in the field of the artificial intelligence.

“We’ve definitely used machine learning models in our writing intelligence before, and this is one of the first times we’ve actually used deep neural networks to provide writing suggestions or intelligence.” Hendrich said. “It’s a pretty big deal for us.”

Creating a large blocklist was also part of building Rewrite Suggestions, she said, in order to ensure convolutional neural networks or modeling techniques do not make inappropriate recommendations. Due to an exploited vulnerability, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot became famous in 2016 for a laundry list of inappropriate recommendations like “smoking kush” in front of the police.

The plagiarism predictor launching today is designed to help appropriately cite sources. It builds on Editor’s previous ability to quickly incorporate research from the web into Word documents.

“What this does, which we didn’t do previously, is it actually scans your entire document, compares it to Bing’s corpora of data that’s available via the web, and then recommends how you actually cite it and citation source,” she said.

In addition to recommending the removal of gender-specific language, the Editor’s inclusivity recommendations also attempt to remove racial or ethic ethnic slurs, as well as derogatory terms for people who are physically disabled or people with cognitive disabilities.

Microsoft’s Editor was first introduced in 2016 for Word. It has always been able to do basic spelling and grammar corrections, as well as recognize things like when you use certain words or expressions too often or take actions like removing adverbs. The Microsoft Editor is currently available in more than 20 languages, and its AI models were built using Azure Machine Learning.

Upgrades to 365’s AI text editor were released today alongside a number of changes, such as merging Office 365 with Microsoft 365. Both offer productivity apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but Office 365 currently has 38 million paid subscribers and 200 million monthly active business users.

New Microsoft 365 features that will begin rolling out today and continue over the coming weeks include new Edge web browser features like alerts when a password is compromised and the launch of the Microsoft Family Safety app for location tracking and screen time management across Android, iOS, and Xbox operating systems. Also new today: Money in Excel, which lets you add accounts from over 10,000 financial institutions to power personal finance management in spreadsheets.

Presenter Coach, which uses AI to teach people how to make better PowerPoint presentations, also got an update today that critiques monotone voice expression and offers suggestions about how to phrase your work. New Presenter Coach features will be available in preview for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

In other app growth numbers shared today, Skype is seeing 40 million users a day, with usage up 70% month over month. Earlier this month, Microsoft Teams reported it has 44 million daily active users.

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“Your eyes are captivating!!!” A majority of people have been lucky enough to get this compliment from their loved ones, family members, friends, secret crushes, or anyone. Eyes are considered to be one of the most beautiful creations showered upon us by the Almighty. The eyes allow us to enjoy the scenic beauty breathing around us as well as helps us to see and appreciate the beauty of our near and dear ones. Our visionary power helps us in perceiving things more accurately, quickly, and with ease. Being one of the sense organs, the eyes are undoubtedly one of the most precious possessions one can have and we should be thankful to the Omnipresent to shower us with this amazing power to see the world.

Unfortunately, some people are not blessed by God with the power to cherish the beauty with their eyes. While some people are blind by birth, others lose their vision due to some tragedy such as an accident, medical illness, or any other unwelcoming incident in their lives. With the advancement of technology and medical science, an array of operations and surgeries are being practiced upon by the doctors worldwide to get back the vision of the patients. These surgeries cost a hefty amount and are often quite complicated.

To everybody’s surprise, we present to you a more economical and effective solution which can help blind people in seeing once again. The product is tech giant Google’s new AI-powered smart glasses branded by the name of Envision Glasses, and have been designed to cater to the requirements of visually impaired people. Google has collaborated with a Dutch startup named Envision to unveil a new pair of smart glasses for the blind and visually impaired people. By infusing the excellence of artificial technology, the new glasses have the capability to read out loud the description of the things at which the owner is looking at. The glasses will give the users a golden opportunity to enjoy the real-time description of what they are seeing. This will give them a feeling of seeing things though not with their eyeballs for sure.

The glasses help in the extraction of large quantities of visual information and then describing it back to the user. Some common usage examples include reading a recipe from a book, identifying friends, analyzing surroundings, etc.

The official report affirms that the smart glasses are capable of reading out the text written in more than 60 languages from any surface. The company has started accepting pre-orders for the smart glasses from March 9, 2020, with an opening price of $1699. The glasses will retail for a price of $2,099 after the starting of shipping in August 2020. Ironically, the hefty price tag is likely to keep the product limited to the access of the rich class and is certainly not going to fall in the budget of the estimated 253 million people surviving with visual impairment.

Envision glasses are created with a view to give a near-to-real experience to the users by describing the surroundings aloud to them. The technology is quite innovative and is likely to grab the attention of many, keeping the price value aside.

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Situational awareness and battlefield intelligence is often the most crucial part of warfare. Aircraft carriers, jets, tanks, and the most advanced technologies mean close to nothing if lacking solid intelligence and enemy detection capabilities. 

The United States Army is now planning to utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, target recognition, and drones to predict where an enemy attack will likely take place.

The Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS) program intends to operate autonomous ground and air robots over the battlefield to keep a continuous watch on the enemy. The autonomous robots will then identify the enemy’s weapon systems and pass on the findings to be processed by artificial intelligence. The AI will then create a “common operating picture” (COP) of the battlefield, based on the findings. 

Situational awareness is crucial in warfare. Fighting forces out in the field may lose situational awareness during or immediately after combat, disorienting soldiers and wasting valuable time. However with a COP of the battlefield, soldiers can take a quick look at the COP and immediately regain their battlefield intelligence and situational awareness.

The COP data is also processed by AI to enable a decision support agent, which can make recommendations to soldiers regarding the prioritization of enemy threats to target. For example, if the system picks up that there are four enemy tanks on road towards U.S. troops, and on another road there are only two enemy tanks, the system may recommend the troops to target the tanks first as it is the bigger threat at the moment.

ATR-MCAS will never replace a human intelligence officer, however it can help humans quickly analyze and prioritize information in a convenient and practical order. Popularmechanics.com reports that the AI can help minimize information overloads for intelligence officers by quickly scanning hundreds of enemy equipment, troops, vehicles, and weapons, thus ensuring that intelligence officers, commanders, and troops are best prepared for combat from a situational awareness and intelligence standpoint. 

Such systems save crucial time for soldiers and officers alike, granting them the capability to quickly analyze the battlefield and make educated assumptions regarding the enemy.

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We are standing at the cusp of a massive shift, all set to take place with artificial intelligence (AI), as this is rapidly and emphatically coming to the forefront and becoming a decisive force in the future of humanity. At this point in time, nobody is in a position to affirmatively predict or profess whether or not this shift will pan out positively. However, one thing is for sure: this is going to be really BIG. A series of incidents in which AI-bots earned a bad reputation lately, are a strong testimony to claim that AI will determine the course of humanity in the years to come. AI-powered chatbots have powerfully manifested what they can do, if let loose, without human intervention. This also portends a bad time ahead. Warnings must be immediately perceived and acted upon, particularly given the fact that like any other technology, AI is no less than a double-edged sword, which – if given in naïve hands – might unleash terror, destruction, devastation and, worst, end of human race.

Researchers and their promoters must take into cognizance the outcomes of popular incidents – that occurred at Facebook, Microsoft and in China, among others. Misbehavior of bots forced researchers to bring them down and offline. Facebook had to shut down chatbots after they discovered a language of their own – full of slangs. In China too, chatbots had to be taken offline after they refused love for the Communist Party. In an another incident last year, Microsoft had to take down the AI-bot – Tay, which responded to tweets in a racist language, even though the bot was not originally designed to speak ill or do bad-mouthing. As per the company, the bot learnt it gradually from the Twitter users whom it interacted with.

The curiosity around AI is no longer limited to organizations and businesses. AI has also grabbed diplomatic and political eyeballs. One big example is Vladimir Putin’s admission to the endless power which AI has in store. The Russian president warned that the nation which leads in AI would ‘be the ruler of the world’. He also said that AI brings ‘colossal opportunities’ as well as dangers. The rhetoric was immediately followed by others with comments and opinions. In addition to Putin, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors too predicted the World War III which might be triggered by AI-powered solutions. In India, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly acknowledged the power of AI. The opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was too seen showing interest in AI on a recent trip to the US where he had to speak on AI. The increased interest of the people from political and social circles shows that AI has begun to engulf its wings around everybody. In other words, it is a good sign that everyone is waking up to the fact that AI is ready to ink a new chapter in the history of the world.

Yet, these are early days for AI. A long way has to be undertaken to realize the actual potential of this technology. Many would agree that incidents at Facebook and Microsoft are the result of early experiments. AI has to gradually mature. But wouldn’t you agree that AI is capable of reshaping the whole world on its own? Researchers should increase their focus on reining in and exploiting the best of it. Even governments and business entities should restrain themselves from exploiting the darker aspects of AI to fend off their enemies. Such acts are bound to backfire scathingly.

On the brighter side, the use of AI can prevent diseases, conduct critical surgeries, save humans from natural disasters (cyclones/earthquakes), help rebuild and help manage natural resources efficiently. Many organizations have also begun to promote research for developing AI-based solutions in order to solve today’s business and social problems. These efforts should multiply so that AI could be partner in human evolution.

All said and done, only time will reveal the true aspects of AI. Right now, we can only guess, opine, imagine and speculate. And all of us are best at it.

The post Artificial Intelligence: The Race into the Future appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Human financial advisors may keep their jobs for a while, but they would be well advised to start considering a new career. On 7 June, Singapore’s regulatory body, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, released a consultation paper on how it planned to “facilitate the provision of robo-advisory services” in the city-state.

By cutting out the need for human intermediaries, the online, automated portfolio management services, which can often be accessed through mobile applications, have “the potential to improve consumers’ access to low-cost investment advice”. It is the reason given by MAS for promoting such services, though the regulatory body likely has its eye on becoming a leader in an industry that professional services firm Deloitte recently predicted will manage $16 trillion worth of assets by 2025.

However, in the eyes of Shankar Narayanan, co-founder of Singapore-based Active AI, such services are not advanced enough to do away with homo sapiens quite yet: a human analysing the insights of an advanced algorithm was the best option for now, he said.

Narayanan’s company is one of many that have decided to focus their attention on the immediate future by developing artificial intelligence that allows people to communicate with their banks more naturally through a mixture of informal texts and voice recordings, referred to as unstructured micro-conversations. The software powering these companies automatically corrects for spelling errors and is able to respond with contextual chit chat: where computers of yesteryear might have said “affirmative”, these robots might say “cool, no worries”.

“The future of engagement will be in unstructured micro-conversations,” he said. “AI-powered conversational banking will enable banks to have intuitive customer engagement, which will create opportunities for banks to offer creative products and solutions to their customers.”

Narayanan added that the technology has the potential to help the region’s fintech players overcome the challenge of low user adoption by allowing them to ask questions about new technologies in an exchange that more closely resembles a human conversation than perusing an FAQ section or watching a video tutorial.

“AI can power agent-to-institution communication, knowledge access and transactions in a completely unstructured data format,” he said. “This will enable agents to be effective and empowered. Given that this can be done over voice or messaging interfaces in multiple languages it makes the proposition of last mile connection easier.”

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You may remember that back in February, the folks at Microsoft Research shared a series of tools meant to help create safer and more aware Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the search for improvement never stops, and the Research division has now shared something else they’re working on, inspired by the way nature operates.

Taking cues from birds and the way they stay aloft, the team has created an AI system which can keep a sailplane in the air “without using a motor, by autonomously finding and catching rides on naturally occurring thermals”.

In contrast to a bird, which does this naturally, for an AI to even be able to keep a vehicle in the air autonomously, it needs to not only gather a multitude of data points – be it wind speed, temperature, and others -, but it also needs to make predictions regarding how these data points will affect its trajectory. Moreover, the system needs to be sophisticated enough to also act in accordance to these predictions.

Similar to Facebook’s take, Ashish Kapoor, principal researcher at Microsoft, says that one day, this autonomous sailplane could replace cellular towers, therefore negating the need for any ground infrastructure. Not only that, but in conjunction with solar panels, the vehicle could stay aloft indefinitely.

The sailplane itself is still in testing, so it does include a battery and a motor, the latter of which is there in case a ground operator needs to take manual control. That said, when the vehicle gets in the air, it’s designed to adjust itself sans the need for an operator or a motor.

To achieve this high level of self-sufficiency on the AI’s part, the team has combined a few so-called frameworks of thinking, chief among which, the “partially observable Markov decision process”. This is used in cases where you need to plan for decisions “in an environment in which you can’t know everything”. Building upon this initial idea, for the AI to absorb and learn as much of the environment cues as quickly as possible, the Markov framework was combined with Bayesian reinforcement learning. Finally, in order for the AI to elect the most promising course of action, the team has also combined the previous two approaches with something called the Monte Carlo tree search.

For the AI system to be ever perfected, it’s split into two parts, the low-level and high-level planners. The high-level planner takes into account all sensory data from the environment, thus creating policies for trajectories the vehicle should take in order to go and look for thermals. In essence, the more times it does this, the better it gets at making these predictions. In the words of researcher Andrey Kolobov, “The system will perform better on Friday than on Thursday because it incorporates information based on past flights.” The low-level planner however, incorporates the Bayesian reinforcement learning approach to detect thermals in real time, or what’s thought of as “learning by doing”.

After months of work on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, the testing was finally conducted in Hawthorne, Nevada for a number of reasons. First, the open area allowed for higher flexibility, and the fact that it was in the real world as opposed to a simulation, revealed problems that need to be fixed in order to improve the system’s operation – such as the fact that it needs to know when to avoid obstacles like mountains, steer clear of restricted air space, a lake, or “scores of munitions that the U.S. Army stores in the area near the test flight site”.

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