Four Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Lives

In my previous blog post, I presented a brief history of artificial intelligence (AI) and helped differentiate the terms “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” and “deep learning.” In this post, I’ll present a few examples of AI developments that showcase how the technology is quickly reshaping our lives.

Most of us are familiar with AI for its advanced search capabilities or for automated assistants, like Siri and Alexa. In addition, stories about autonomous cars appear in the news quite frequently, as car and technology companies vie for dominance in that emerging field. But AI (and its subset fields of machine learning and deep learning) is infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives, sometimes in ways we might not notice. Here are four examples of groundbreaking AI uses that are in development or use today.

Cancers are caused by complex interactions of mutations. By better understanding those mutations, doctors can put together better treatment plans that are specific to each case.

But with so many possible interactions, it’s not possible for an oncologist to examine all the fragmented pieces of genomic information to identify specific mutations for each patient.

To address this problem, a team at Microsoft is developing AI machine learning techniques that allow cancer experts to evaluate each individual patient in ways that humans can’t on their own.[i]

The team is working on a cloud-computing system that sifts through millions of research papers to find genomic data that might be applicable for diagnosing and treating a specific case.

The eventual goal of this project is to provide doctors with a tool they can use to model treatment options based on all the gathered data; this would enable them to then use those models to determine what would work best for each individual patient.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children fields several million reports every year regarding child pornography and sexually abused children.[i] But with only 25 analysts, the organization struggles to keep up by hand. The analysts need to collate reports, identify where they originated from, and then make the reports available to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The problem isn’t solved after handing off the data either: local law enforcement agencies complain that they are inundated by the volume of data they receive.

Artificial intelligence helps the analysts by rapidly analyzing massive volumes of images for known clues to identify and prioritize leads. When done manually, that process can take up to 30 days. But AI has the potential to shrink that analysis and identification time down to a single day. The resulting leads are much more likely to be tangible and actionable for both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and law enforcement. For the children in need of intervention, the impact of AI could literally be life changing.

Precise water management is essential for growing vibrant, high-yield grape crops. For generations, wine growers have controlled water use by checking and adjusting irrigation systems manually. But today, E. & J. Gallo Winery is making use of satellite data and AI supplied by IBM Watson to optimize its irrigation.