The use of evolving technologies, scientific developments, data and algorithms can help us transform many aspects of our life & world.  Similarly, Uber, the company which helps us drive around is rigorously trying to bring about a substantial transformation in transportation around the globe by using AI to power technologies supporting Uber’s platform, giving freedom to engineers to make spontaneous decisions to improve user experiences.

Uber has a center named Uber AI which powers application in computer vision, intelligent location and sensor processing, advanced optimization methods and much more, which helps Uber with transportation and mobility, to customer support and driver-partner navigation. It has been able to achieve notified increase in demand prediction and applaudable pick-up experiences. Uber has been working on increasing its location accuracy, speed, coverage and heading of vehicle locations using sensing and perception. If the rider and driver have more accurate locations of each other, cancellations can be reduced, ETA improved and finding one another becomes easier.

Furthermore, Uber’s idea is to use computer vision to its fullest for maximum customer safety and making the ride efficient. The Computer Vision team enables quick validation of driver identity when they come online. ML models powered by neural networks forecast rider-demand, pick-up and drop-off ETA’s and hardware capacity planning requirements. Uber has also leveraged its conversational AI platform to improve communication with customers and solve their issues timely & accurately. This also allows drivers to comfortably speak with customers via hands-free-pick-up and one-click chat while driving.

Uber continues to promise to widely use Artificial technology throughout its platform to improve routes, to receive more accurate forecasting of rider demand and deliver safer and more reliable experiences to customers. In the world around us, slowly and steadily, companies are coming in terms with Artificial Intelligence and believing that adapting to AI is fundamental to one’s growth and success in the coming times.

Sources : https://eng.uber.com/applying-artificial-intelligence-at-uber/

https://www.uber.com/us/en/uberai/

The business potential of artificial intelligence has been on the horizon for a long time but not every business has started to make use of AI, simply because it can be super hard to implement AI alone, envisioning use cases, hiring a team to implement and then figuring out how to integrate that AI into a business’s workflow can be a complex undertaking. Further, its computationally intensive and expensive. Buying and running the compute power, necessary to implement deep learning can be cost prohibitive.

Amazon Web Services is uniquely positioned to take on both of these challenges. AWS uses the same advanced machine learning algorithms powering everything from search recommendations on its website to voice interactions with its globally famous product Alexa. To remove the complexity of developing AI applications, AWS developed the Amazon SageMaker platform making it easy to get started with and scale machine learning. Users can select from pre-installed algorithms that have been optimized to perform ten times better and label your data to get to ground truth for training. Amazon SageMaker also takes advantage of new techniques such as reinforcement learning. Crucially, it allows agnostic support, meaning developers have the flexibility to use whichever deep learning frameworks they are most comfortable with including TensorFlow, PyTorch and Apache MXNet. To meet the computational demands and high costs of machine learning, Amazon EC2 P3 instances harness the power to   NVIDIA Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs. New P3 instances also provide the fastest network throughput by three times.

What this means is that any business can accelerate machine learning in the cloud with high performance compute. Industry leading companies are already using AWS to achieve business breakthroughs. For example, Machine learning on AWS has enabled leading finance companies data scientists to train new machine learning models in hours instead of days or even weeks. Model’s that the company’s agents rely on, like one that helps them troubleshoot customer problems can now be trained in as little as 30 minutes. In banking, cyber security risks are being mitigated, major financial institutions use machine learning to flag fraudulent or questionable activity and alert account holders in real time. In medicine, drug discovery is sped up, scientists of biotechnology companies have used AI technology to make sense of genes in clinical trials work more quickly with the help of algorithms. Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize the way we do business but it needs to be easy to use. Thanks to tech breakthroughs like these from AWS, businesses of all sizes can utilize the power of artificial intelligence.

Source : https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/what-is-ai/

https://aws.amazon.com/ai/

I’m guessing many of us consider ourselves as good drivers but are horrible when it comes to routes just like me? Not knowing the way to your destination while sitting on the driving seat alone in the car can be quite hectic as well as risky. Yes, GPS and google maps are readily available to all but driving while looking towards our phone for directions can be very dangerous and lead to car accidents. People get lost for hours looking for the right way, leading to delayed arrival and waste of precious time.

WayRay is a swiss based, up-and-coming technology startup that generates displays in real-time on a car’s windshield like a hologram. The company raised $18 million from China’s Alibaba and the renowned company Hyundai, which together with Porsche, is investing in it.

WayRay Navion is the first holographic futuristic head-up display with augmented reality technology. The inventor got the idea after nearly crashing his car as he was seeking into his phone for directions. Navion’s true AR synchronizes with actual driving conditions and gives you navigation information on the go, allowing the driver to focus on the road. The information displayed gives vital real time details and makes driving safer and enjoyable. Navion has a built-in Full HD camera for consistently mapping the environment while simultaneously keeping track of the car’s location, this process is called SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). It compromises of a photopolymer film which enables the holographic or 3D display. It generates an unreal AR experience without special eye-wear and headgear.

Advancements in Augmented Reality are starting to have a significant impact on the Head-up-Display market. According to Stratview Research, the market for Head-up Display will reach USD 1.75 billion in 2022, growing at 22.4% CAGR. Such developments & inventions around the globe can be extremely beneficial, especially to delivery services, transportation companies and car rentals.

Source : https://wayray.com/navion

Yes, we have google maps and other mobile GPS applications to navigate us to reach our desired house, office, building etc. but what after that? Whenever we go to a new place, say a new office, building or the first time we came to our university, can we remember how hard it was to reach the exact room where we were expected to show up? With the evolving technology it is not going to be so difficult to find the right place in a building, just with the help of Augmented Reality’s Indoor Navigation. Indoor navigation technologies usually do not include GPS due to its limitations in large complexes.

AR core, an augmented reality development for Android and OS scans a special information plate using augmented images located on the entrance which helps determine the exact location of the user in the building, he then has to select the desired location he wishes to reach at, simultaneously the AR core builds the optimal route to the destination. Only recently this technology is made available to the mass public through mobile phones, namely SLAM or Simultaneous Localization And Mapping : the SLAM algorithm available in ARCore from Google.

Convenient indoor navigation is essential to modern airports, shopping malls, large office buildings, factories and hospitals. It optimizes passenger flows, allows visitors to find easiest routes to shop, saving time and energy, increasing efficiency and productivity of office and hospital staff. It can be easily integrated with security solutions that restrict access to specific areas. Finally, it facilitates satisfaction of citizens, helping them easily navigate their path indoors.

In a world where time is considered money and every second is valuable to people, real time indoor navigation is becoming the need of the hour. A lot of precious time is wasted while looking for our destination in multi-storey buildings & if evolving technology is ready to help us navigate through our problem, what could be better?

Source : https://mobidev.biz/blog/indoor-navigation-augmented-reality-demo-video

https://blog.raccoons.be/arcore-powered-indoor-navigation-unity

It is often said that we can’t understand one’s struggles until we face them ourselves. Think of being in the shoes of a late 16th century human, the world moved at a slow pace, workers had to create by hand and mass production never existed. To workers of that era, our tech savvy world is magical, building a 40- storeyed building unimaginable. What changed now from then are machines, the industrial revolution enabled us to build products more rapidly than we’d ever seen and allowed us to up scale our creations to sizes never possible before.

AI has been hailed as the next Industrial Revolution, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ which is going to change the world in unknowable ways and unless you get involved in it or make some career changes quickly, you’ll be swept up and passed on by. People think that they will change the world by providing smart solutions, everything solved by AI. Customer service, replace that with a bottom; data analysis, replace it with unsupervised learning algorithms; cashier, replace it with Amazon go. All people can think is how AI can solve existing problems, what they don’t understand is that it will solve problems that they didn’t even know existed at the first place.

‘AI is a journey. And the journey to AI starts with ‘the basics’ of identifying and understanding the data. Where does it reside? How can we access it? We need strong information architecture as the first step on our AI ladder’.

We must stop thinking AI as only solving current problems or slight variance of them. An average 17^th century man did not know that he wanted a 50-story building or a machine that would allow him to travel 100km/h. Henry Ford is known for saying ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would say faster horses’.

Instead of thinking of improvements in current systems, think of completely new industries. AI has the power to create, for it is the products that create fresh industries that do the best. Where our thought process ends, AI’s begins. It has the capacity to understand way more than we can imagine. The barricades of seemingly incomprehensible theories of science will be defeated effortlessly by the machines of the future. Not only AI will optimize many of our systems but also create new jobs. We don’t know the rate at which it will do this, however research firm Gartner confirms the hypothesis of AI creating more jobs than it replaces, by predicting that in 2020, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs while eliminating 11.8 million traditional jobs. Just like AI took away the physical constraints of people, AI will be able to take away our mental constraints. Just like machines whose strength is hundreds if not thousands of times stronger than us, AI’s intelligence will be hundreds if not thousands of times smarter than us.

What do you think are the most fantastical things yet to be solved by Artificial Intelligence?

Sources:

https://www.information-age.com/artificial-intelligence-fourth-industrial-revolution-123475170/

https://insidehpc.com/2018/02/artificial-intelligence-industrial-revolution/

In the age we’re living, ever known as the age of technology, AI has crossed all limits, being used as an ally in every field. Once perceived as a threat to us, AI is now ready to evolve the world and its inhabitants.

Not intended to replace clinicians or clinical judgement, AI serves the purpose to enhance and complement the very human interaction, provider and patient. In healthcare, AI is changing the game with its applications and decision support, image analysis and patient triage. With AI’s superpowers to   minimize variation and duplicate testing, decision support systems swiftly interpret large amounts of data within the electronic medical record. Further, AI technology is also taking the skepticism out of viewing patient scans by throwing light on problem areas on images, aiding in the screening and diagnosis process. Artificial intelligence helps with the issue of physician burnout by collecting patient data via an app or text messaging. Chat bots now ask patients a series of questions regarding their symptoms taking the guesswork out of self-diagnosis and saving both the patient and provider time and money. With the AI integration, working smarter enables solutions to a variety of issues for patients, hospitals and the healthcare industry.

Health care is a dynamic and critically important sector, one where PwC’s AI driven solutions are already revealing exciting new possibilities at every step along the patient’s journey. When symptoms appear, doctors have millions of studies and results that could be relevant and getting through this amount of medical data can be extremely time-consuming. PwC has developed a deep learning model that outperforms traditional queries by using natural language processing to scan, analyze and summarize medical text, helping doctors hone in on possible diagnosis in a fraction of the time. They are developing deep learning models for detecting and classifying cancerous growths from CT and MRI scans. Models of this kind are faster and more precise than traditional computer-aided models and continue to improve their detection and classification performance through machine learning. Fusing analytics and science, PwC’s 40 logical is a human’s digital twin allowing for a lower risk integrated picture of health interventions. Audiological simulates individual patients based on their specific data predicting and optimizing outcomes with an entirely new level of precision. After patients have prescribed a medicine, sometimes they experience unexpected and dangerous side effects, PwC is leveraging AI to automatically recognize and interpret these adverse reactions across data sources, dramatically improving the response time of healthcare leaders who can quickly stop the problem in its tracks.

AI is enhancing every aspect of the world we live in; research shows that by 2030 global GDP could significantly increase due to AI making it the biggest commercial opportunity in today’s fast-changing economy.

Sources: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/healthcare/publications/ai-robotics-new-health/transforming-healthcare.html

Davenport, Thomas, and Ravi Kalakota. “The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare.” Future healthcare journal vol. 6,2 (2019): 94-98. doi:10.7861/futurehosp.6-2-94

It has been debated over a period of time that AI and the evolving technology has the tendency to take over human labor and increase poverty ratio in the world. This looks contradictory with the developing AI & AR experiments only to make our work more efficient and easier. Various companies are coming up with mind-blowing devices powered with AI & AR to help evolve the universe.

The company named ‘Roked’ specializing in the research and product development of Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics developed revolutionary AI powered AR glasses which debuted at CES 2018. Awarded two CES innovation awards, Rokid Glass garnered instant global media attention as a powerful, lightweight, and fashionable near-eye display. Purpose built for enterprise use, Rokid Glass’ proprietary on-device AI allows it to be used across a broad range of industries and a variety of situations. Remote assistance applications allow for the seamless sharing of on-site field of vision, with off-site expertise.

This collaborative vision technology allows workers in the field to connect with remote experts for assistance, while remaining hands free for whatever task the job requires. Rokid glass displays location, weather and case data in real-time, providing extensive data support to inspectors, and allows for instant and accurate assessments of structural building and factory safety. Rokid Glass allows Warehousing and Logistics employees to work smarter and faster, driving the AR revolution by providing real-time task information on the glasses via voice activation, keeping them eyes-up and hands free. Rokid Glass’ full suite of AI and AR development tools is also included for both local and cloud-based computing. With Glass SD, companies are able to iterate quickly and observe rapid value, and then build out robust and scalable solutions utilizing full customization.

This is only one product powered by AI, developed by one china company. Like this there are hundreds of companies, in full speed researching, experimenting and trying to develop devices incorporated by AI & AR intelligence, not to take place of our human labor but to only be their companion at workplace and in the world.

Sources :

https://www.wearable-technologies.com/2019/05/rokid-begins-mass-production-of-ai-powered-augmented-reality-ar-smartglass/

https://www.rokid.com/products/ar-glass/rokid-glass/

The project Diva started by Lorenzo caggioni to help people with physical disabilities and other problems, interact with the Google assistant in a nonverbal way using buttons and RFID tags to trigger commands. This device is built with raspberry pi and Google assistant SDK to help the user interact with the Google assistant by using different means like sense of touch,  for example touching objects helps the people with disabilities to express themselves. The use of physical object is must when it comes to interacting in a nonverbal way. Google is currently identifying more solutions to the functioning of sdk with the sense of touch and object as speech and text don’t help in the case of people who cant speak and write. The project diva currently are working on a subject to make the interaction with the google assistant better, the subject  affected by Down Syndrome, is almost blind and is not able to speak . So the aim of the assistant is to gain autonomy on starting entertainment content on his TV and speakers. The process of using the google assistant is very easy, firstly , it simply waits for the button to be pressed or an RFID tag to be tapped. Then the assistant retrieves the command associated with the button or with the specific RFID tag, after that it sends the command and then the answer is reproduced. The best part is this makes the Assistant  accessible to a lot of people with limited or no speaking skills. Lorenzo caggioni is working on the Diva to make more products like there for special people and are gonna start the selling chain soon. These techniques of control and communication used by Lorenzo caggioni are referred to as alternative and augmentative communication. Lastly, individuals won’t be diverse collaboration with the Collaborator Ecosystem.

Source:

“Project DIVA: Making the Google Assistant More Accessible by Lorenzo Caggioni | Experiments with Google.” Google, Google, 2019, experiments.withgoogle.com/project-diva.

Mobile phone is a priceless innovation that has on a very basic level changed the way we communicate and get data. But as with anything great, as well much of it can lead to issues. I feel that spending too much time on your phone can affect a lot of things like as we know all these new smartphones have many features and incredible functionalities which can lead to a lot of time wastage. I think a lot of people spend time on social media just chatting or scrolling through posts which is pointless. All these things lead to affecting one’s health and also because of the overusage the users sometimes don’t get proper rest also. Special projects are a design and invention consultancy founded by creative director and industrial designer Clara Gaggero Westaway and experience designer and magician Adrian Westaway with the mission to enhance the unquantifiable aspects of life like empathy and wellbeing, with meaningful design and invention. So they decided to make a printable paper phone which helps you take a break from your digital world. The paper phone simply replaces your phone for a day. It is a AI innovation as its making things way better and also working towards well being by reducing daily screen usage. It works with the help of a software that basically takes all the apps you employ the foremost in a day, and these apps are moreover the ones who expend most of the screen time, and after that it basically printes all the things on a page which can be collapsed and made like a phone and has the essential data in connection with the apps most utilized by the client. A few examples of the apps which can be used by paper phone are like maps,calendar, temperature, mobile pay etc.The paper phone is built with android sdk and works with all the apps on android play store. The paper phone is fundamentally utilized to donate a break from utilizing the phone by essentially printing a individual booklet of the key data the individual will require that day. The app is an test open source app and is available for use.

“Special Projects: Paper Phone.” Special Projects, 2019, specialprojects.studio/project/paper-phone/.