Since the coronavirus pandemic took hold of our lives, virtual events have taken centre stage. With evolving time, virtual events are becoming the new normal, and AI is no longer something that business owners, marketers or organisers can afford to ignore. There is no denying that AI is proving to be one of the most important resources available for creating top-notch, successful events.

But before we go any further, let’s understand, what is AI?

Most of us relate Artificial intelligence (AI) to sci-fi movies like Matrix or Inception. But AI is simply the human-like intelligence of a computer. One of the most intriguing aspects of AI technology is its ability to process vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

According to Grand View Research, global virtual events industry was worth USD 77.98 billion in 2019, and is estimated to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.2 percent from 2020 to 2027, reaching USD 404 billion. Artificial Intelligence will be an integral part of this progress. From matching-making, personalised recommendations, automated updates and alerts, to pre and post-event analytics, AI plays a significant role in making the entire process of virtual events smoother and more efficient.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the key aspects of AI technology that can assist you in planning and organising successful virtual events:

Valuable Event Insights

Manually processing data of each event participant can take days or even weeks, and it is more vulnerable to errors. AI technology, on the other hand, processes all the information (name, interests, contact information, business of an individual etc) with 100 percent accuracy in seconds. Event platforms can be enabled to use this data to extract meaningful event reports and insights.

For example, based on data from pre-event activities and previous events, an AI-enabled event platform can predict the traction of the upcoming event. These predictions can help the organiser in evaluating their marketing strategies and allocation of resources, and overall effective event planning.

Matchmaking

What do you think of finding the right sellers of a product you’re looking at buying in an exhibition of hundreds and thousands of exhibitors? Well, AI can come to your rescue in formats like large exhibitions and buyer seller meets.

Event platforms that offer AI-powered matchmaking between buyers and sellers can help connect participants with the right opportunities and people, allowing them to make the best of the experience and achieve their goals in the shortest period of time.

Now, imagine the system telling you from the shortlisted sellers, which are the ones that are offering discounts! Possible. With AI-enabled event platforms.

Automated Alerts & Teleportation

An AI-enabled virtual platform can make the whole event experience enriching for participants. For instance, if you wish to visit a virtual event with a friend, it can send you an alert and help you visit specific areas together.

It can record and remind you of the important events that you don’t wish to miss in a virtual show and teleport your virtual self from an inauguration hall to the sponsor booth or a networking lounge within seconds, making sure that you miss out on nothing important.

AI is the future of the events industry. AI technology is making events more organised, targeted, customised in order to offer ideal experiences. Each event participant is unique and therefore should be and can be given a custom experience using artificial intelligence.

The Covid era is the prime time for companies and organisers to leverage the advantages and make the most of AI technology. Event trends will keep on evolving as technology advances. Business and event organisers will have to adapt to changing needs and demands of the audiences to survive and succeed.

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Neetu Chandra Sharma

• Biotechnology companies have accelerated their use of cloud computing, machine learning (ML), and analytics for advancing research and development.
• More than 100,000 customers use AWS for ML today, right from creating a more personalized customer experience to developing personalized pharmaceuticals.

Covid-19 pandemic has majorly accelerated healthcare digitization in India. Rahul Sharma, president, public sector–Amazon Internet Services Private Ltd (AISPL), Amazon Web Services (AWS)-India and South Asia talked about patterns that have emerged in healthcare digitization, data, adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence in India’s healthcare ecosystem. Edited excerpts from an interview:

How covid-19 pandemic brought digitization of healthcare to the fore?

There are broadly two patterns that have emerged in healthcare digitization since the start of the pandemic. The first is the adoption of digital technologies by the central and state governments to monitor and track the spread of the pandemic, connect with various authorities for decision-making, and provide healthcare services that can help citizens. The pandemic created the need for collaboration among various stakeholders at an unprecedented scale – multiple departments and decision-makers in governance at the ward, city, district, state and national level; administration and medical staff at hospitals; drug manufacturers and distributors; care-givers and health counselors; volunteers; and police and security personnel.

This meant a large volume of data flow, data storage, analytics, and visualization, necessitated the need for a robust, scalable, and secure cloud platform to deliver it. The second trend is how technology has been adopted by healthcare organizations and companies developing products and services for the healthcare sector. Biotechnology companies have accelerated their use of cloud computing, machine learning (ML), and analytics for advancing research and development. Startups and independent software vendors (ISVs) that are focusing on the healthcare sector are applying these technologies to develop telemedicine and remote patient monitoring solutions, as well as analyse lab and radiology tests at scale in minutes.

How does AWS empower healthcare service providers with data?

The largest healthcare providers, payers and IT vendors to the smallest ISVs and newest startups, across the globe are applying AWS ML services to store, transform, and analyse health data. For example, we’re seeing ML being used to derive important insights and trends from healthcare and patient data to help medical specialists make better and quicker decisions – be it precision diagnosis using genomic sequencing, early-stage cancer detection or advanced cardiac visualization. At the same time, healthcare and life science customers are using ML to uncover new insights from scientific research and data by enabling researchers to quickly and easily search thousands of research papers and documents using natural language questions.

Data has also played a critical role in government decision-making. As part of the NASSCOM task force, AWS helped enable a covid-19 data platform for the government of Telangana. The solution was deployed within five days to help the state tackle the pandemic. The solution deploys more than 100 dashboards using anonymized government and public datasets, with hundreds of thousands of covid-19 related data points. This platform features the covid-19 India Vulnerability Map, which provides anonymized mobility data at a district-level, to enable a holistic view of the pandemic within the Telangana state. It also offers more than 10 ML models for covid-19 response, which enables decision-making to manage the lockdown and sustainable recovery scenarios in the industry zones across the state, including disease transmission predictions, citizen mobility analytics, situational awareness of disease spread, and hospital care readiness.

There is a lot of interest in ML. More than 100,000 customers use AWS for ML today, right from creating a more personalized customer experience to developing personalized pharmaceuticals. ML went from being an aspirational technology to mainstream extremely fast. For a long time, the technology was limited to a few major tech companies and hardcore academic researchers. Things began to change when cloud computing became widely used. Compute power and data became more available, and now, ML is now making an impact across every industry, moving from the peripheral to a core part of every business and industry.

India is a growing economy and the scope of ML applications and AI is broad, and our customers are using these technologies to reinvent entire areas of their business. The scope of ML is vast even in application areas such as drones. AWS is working with the Drone Federation of India (DFI) to support the adoption of ML and AI-driven drone solutions among startups. The Adopt Drones Program from DFI will recognize ML-based solutions by drone application developers to generate deep insights from the data collected using drones, with a focus on 20 sectors, including agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare, and rural development.

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AI-based detection systems usually work with uncertainty, they are useful not only to raise alerts when something seems to be wrong but also to give a score on how close a given event is from a cyberattack.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of technology to think and act like a human and is being utilized to help fight off potential cyberattacks. Employing AI and machine learning to detect vulnerabilities significantly enhances human capabilities, as AI can analyze and report millions of cyberthreats in the time it might take a person to do the same.

AI can get “smarter” and “learn;” as an AI algorithm continues to search and monitor data, it can improve its understanding of diverse types of potential attacks.

According to a study by PwC and Data Security Council titled “Cyber Security India Market: What lies beneath”, Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will be powering the ‘cyber war rooms’ in organisations to help them protect from increasing cyberattacks, as well as detect, predict and respond to the same.

Defining an attack

You have heard a lot about cyberattacks and data breaches on the news lately, but what exactly is a cyberattack and why is it important to protect our data?

“In short, a cyberattack is a deliberate and often targeted attempt to mount an action via or against digital technology,” says IEEE Senior Member Steven Furnell. “In practice, cyberattacks can take many forms, but we tend to most commonly associate things like hacking and malware, and perhaps phishing. However, there is a far broader range of labels that can be used to reflect the specific approaches and motivations that may be involved.”

“After the attack, the computer or the network will be destroyed, exposed, modified or lose some functions,” adds IEEE Senior Member Guangjie Han. “And your personal information or important data will be acquired by someone else without authorization. Consider the potential benefit behind the data — that’s why these attacks exist.”

Junior hackers might only have an interest in stealing money, acquiring personal data or merely for the joy of hurting others. More senior hackers have the potential to breach entire companies or governments.

How AI prioritizes security needs

Once AI has effectively identified the potential risks and threats, the next step is to prioritize what gets addressed and in what order.

“Since AI-based detection systems usually work with uncertainty, they are useful not only to raise alerts when something seems to be wrong but also to give a score on how close a given event is from a cyberattack,” says IEEE Member Marcos Simplicio.

“Events with higher scores can then be prioritized accordingly. For example, above a certain score, automated measures may be taken to stop the highly probable attack without any human intervention. Events with a lower score can then be forwarded to administrators for further analysis, and some events with low scores may be simply logged without any additional action, since handling them may not be worth the effort.”

Other methods of stopping cyberattacks

AI and machine learning are not the only mechanisms used to prevent and fight off cyberattacks. A wide range of robust technologies protect our systems and help fend off severe breaches.

IEEE Senior Member Aiyappan Pillai explains that in addition to AI, cryptography, emerging quantum cryptography, analytics, IoT security, blockchain security and hardware authentication technologies are also helping technologists keep our digital infrastructure secure.

Lastly, another way to prevent cyberattacks is continuing to educate users to stay away from suspicious activity. “It is important to remember that security is largely a matter related to processes and behaviors and therefore administrative, education and awareness processes play a key role in any well-designed security strategy,” stresses IEEE Senior Member Raul Coucher.

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Founder and CEO, Analytics Insight, providing organizations with strategic insights on disruptive technologies. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is considered one of the most revolutionary developments in human history, and the world has already witnessed its transformative capabilities. Not surprisingly, AI-based innovations are powering some of the most cutting-edge solutions we use in our daily lives.

Today, AI empowers organizations, governments and communities to build a high-performing ecosystem to serve the entire world. Its profound impact on human lives is solving some of the most critical challenges faced by society. Here are a few innovations for social causes that I find most notable. 

Developing New Drugs: The healthcare industry is ripe with disruptive applications of AI, including the discovery and development of new drugs. AI and machine learning have been used to identify potential molecules by leveraging a large volume of data. Pharmaceutical companies use predictive analytics to discover these molecule candidates and optimize them with several rounds of iteration to select the best one for drug manufacturing.

Reporting Sexual Harassment: Artificial intelligence offers new ways of reporting gender-based violence, child sex abuse and more. AI programs are being designed to monitor internal communications, such as corporate documents, emails and chat, for inappropriate content. Various applications and platforms have been developed to help victims share their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse along with the time and location these events took place.

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