In a world overshadowed by the rapid deterioration of its climate, AI engineers are beginning to apply machine learning technology to issues of environmental justice and crisis. In California, where wildfires have ravaged over 570,000 acres of land and forced 41,000 evacuations already this summer, AI is being used to prevent and monitor forest fires throughout the state.
As an AI Consultant, I get a front row seat to AI and innovation; I repeatedly see when it succeeds, and when it fails. I’ve been building AI and machine learning based systems for over 20 years, in many different companies, cultures, and problem domains. During this time, I’ve noticed a number of patterns that cause the deployment of AI systems and AI powered features to fail.
In 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada and sank. Unfortunately, there were not enough lifeboats onboard to accommodate all passengers and 67% of the passengers died. In this article, we walk through the use of SHAP values to explain, in a detailed manner, why an AI model decides to predict whether a given passenger will or will not survive.
Explainable AI refers to the ability to interpret model outcomes in a way that is easily understood by human beings. We explore why this matters, and discuss in detail tools that help shine light inside the AI "black box" -- we wish to not just understand feature importance at the population level, but to actually quantify feature importance on a per-outcome basis.
How we communicate and conduct business will likely forever be changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While telecommunication technologies have helped ease our burden, we simultaneously face a looming mental health crisis. With a burdened healthcare system and a large population at risk in isolation, innovative solutions are required to help those in need and to facilitate more informed communication.
The national weather service operates a massive sensor array including sensors located on weather balloons, in airplanes, on land, in sea buoys, and from satellites. Just like a confluence of variables can indicate a hurricane is on the way, we believe an infectious disease forecasting service powered by AI can predict the likelihood of a new wave of C19 and other infectious diseases.
AI can be used to generate regional forecasts of infectious disease rates that, in turn, empower government and other leaders to make prudent social distancing and other preemptive modifications. As a case study, we will look at influenza data supplied by the Centers for Disease Control. Our goal is to use ILI data to train a model that will accurately predict future seasonal flu levels.
Professional athletes have long had the advantage of analysis from expensive body worn sensors. AI models, when applied to readily available video, however, offer much promise to more cost conscious amateur athletes. We ask the question, can we better an individual goalie’s chances of stopping a penalty kick with advanced AI?
Can amateur athletes improve their performance using artificial intelligence and nothing more than a smart phone? As an AI practitioner and a dedicated runner, I decided to find out leveraging body pose estimation, an advanced AI technology that automatically generates a skeleton for people in each frame of a video.
Every day, billions of people communicate via email, chat, text, social media, and more. Understanding the conversation begins with understanding one document. Once we can teach a machine to understand everything in a single document, we can project this understanding up to a collection, thread or larger corpus of documents to understand the broader conversation.
From detecting pests to predicting which crops will deliver the best returns, artificial intelligence can help humanity oppose one of its biggest challenges: feeding an additional 2 billion people by 2050 without harming the planet. AI is steadily emerging as an essential part of the agricultural industry’s technological evolution including self-driving machinery and flying robots that are able to automatically survey and treat crops.
Imagine a world where at home AI healthcare tools get smarter and more able to heal you every day. These tools are incredibly data driven — where they are continuously collecting data off your body, about your environment, your nutrition and activity — and then these algorithms are continuously learning from this data not just from you, but from millions of other patients and doctors who know how to make sense of this information.
