Accelerating AI

As artificial intelligence (and specifically machine learning) firmly takes hold in industry, there has been a significant increase in the amount of AI snake oil being developed, pitched, and sold. Joshua Joseph shares a practical guide for detecting AI products of questionable value or benefit, whether intentional or not.

Much like the rise of electricity, which started about 100 years ago, AI will revolutionize every major industry. Andrew Ng explains how AI can transform your business, shares major technology trends and thoughts on where your biggest future opportunities may lie, and explores best practices for incorporating AI, machine learning, and deep learning into your organization.

Lili Cheng shares two examples of AI inspired by nature. In the first, Microsoft researchers created a system that uses artificial intelligence that draws on the way birds fly to keep a sailplane aloft. The second explores what makes people unique, our language instinct, and our ability to model how people socialize and accomplish work.

Paco Nathan explains how O'Reilly employs AI, from the obvious (chatbots, case studies about other firms) to the less so (using AI to show the structure of content in detail, enhance search and recommendations, and guide editors for gap analysis, assessment, pathing, etc.). Approaches include vector embedding search, summarization, TDA for content gap analysis, and speech-to-text to index video.

Mercy and Intermountain, two of the largest and most innovative hospital systems in the United States, have recently applied AI to tackle clinical variation within their systems. Todd Steward and Lonny Northrup discuss the application of machine intelligence for optimizing care and provide valuable insights into practice variation for improving clinical pathways.

Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. Tim O'Reilly says, "Only if that's what we ask them to do!" Tim has had his fill of technological determinism. He explains why technology is the solution to human problems and why we won't run out of work till we run out of problems.