Latest AI Articles:

1 - A Robot Monk Captivates China, Mixing Spirituality With Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence may be making the world smarter, safer, more functional and accessible. But can it make the world more beautiful? A number of researchers hope to do so by developing AI systems that can paint, write, and colorize photographs.

Big data is big business. But in an age of digital privacy paranoia, it isn’t always easy for tech companies to get their hands on information – particularly when some of the most potentially beneficial data is also confidential, locked up in healthcare and finance companies who aren’t comfortable sharing.

Episode Summary: This week's in-person interview is with Dr. Adam Coates, who spent 12 years at Stanford studying artificial intelligence before accepting his current position of Director of Baidu's Silicon-Valley based artificial intelligence lab. We speak about his ideas around consumer artificial intelligence applications and impact and what he's excited about, as well as what he thinks may be more 'hype' than reality. He gives a an idea about applications that Baidu is working, to potentially influence billions of mobile and computer users worldwide. If you're interested in the developments of speech recognition and natural language processing, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

How secure is your company’s online data?
Probably not as secure as you think. Recent statistics from a security risk benchmarking startup called SecurityScorecard suggest that the United States federal government ranks dead last among major cybersecurity industries, despite having spent $100 billion on cybersecurity measures over the past decade.

Episode Summary: People often mark progress by what they see, but there’s often much more going on behind the scenes, the up and coming, that marks actual current progress in any particular field. The same can said to be true for natural language processing, and Dr. Dan Roth’s research in this field makes him privy to the advancements that most of us are bound to miss.

1 - Bots May be Cool, but DigitalGenius Thinks it Found a Better Way

London- and New York-based DigitalGenuis released a new product this week, Human+AI Customer Service Platform, that links to customer service platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce and supplements the chatbot experience. The service analyzes customer service logs from emails, chats, and other social interactions in order to assess the most common issues and determine the best or most likely response by the automated system. Each response has a 'confidence threshold', or how likely the response is to be accurate. The customer then decides the threshold with which they're most comfortable receiving an automated response; any responses below the threshold are routed to a human agent. In addition to the rollout of its new hybrid customer service model, DigitalGenuis also raised another $4.1 million in venture funds from companies like Salesforce Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Singularity Investments.

Despite what the media tends to depict, artificial intelligence is being put to better use than winning video games and board games. In fact, two of the world’s leading tech giants have begun using AI to help the blind perceive the world in helpful new ways.

Last week, Goldman Sachs led a $30 million investment round into Persado, a company that offers AI-based copywriting and marketing services. Persado claims its system "outperforms man-made messages 100% of the time” in a process they call "persuasion automation." In other words, according to Persado's promotional video below, human marketers hardly stand a chance.
Persado’s unique selling point is its ability to create and test the strength of words, phrases, and entire sentences used in marketing content. The company claims to have tagged, scored, and categorized some 1 million of these terms to determine their effectiveness in marketing copy.
Backed by this database, Persado says its software can “effectively parse hundreds of thousands of ways to convey emotions” and apply those expressions to augment marketing campaigns. Thus, the software can alternate copy between feelings of safety, intimacy, and anxiety, depending on a client’s needs. (See below for their "Wheel of Emotions" infographic). This automated system enables the company to generate and test more texts than human-managed marketing departments, which tend to rely on individually created A/B test samples. For international clients, Persado boasts that its software can translate texts into 23 languages.

[This interview has been revised and updated.]

Episode Summary: How do neural networks affect your life? There’s the one that you walk around with in your head of course, but the one in your pocket is an almost constant presence as well. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Yoshua Bengio about how the neural nets in computer software have become more ubiquitous and powerful, with deep learning algorithms and neural nets permeating research and commercial applications over the past decade. He also discusses likely future opportunities for deep learning in areas such as natural language processing and individualized medicine. Bengio was a researcher at Bell Labs with Yann LeCun, now at Facebook, and was working on neural nets before they were the "cool" new AI technology as it's often perceived today.