The implications of recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have spurred heated debate globally. As science fiction starts to become reality, AI products are slowly infiltrating homes and workplaces. This is raising concerns about the potential detrimental effects of AI on the job market, or even about the dangers of an AI singularity, where sentient robots take over the world and destroy humans.

While these are all valid discussions, I believe that the focus of AI should not be just on cool home gadgets or on process optimisation and automation. Instead, AI can be used to fundamentally rethink how we solve the world’s problems.

Let’s have a look at ten A.I. technologies to watch out in 2019.

1. Natural Language Generation

Natural language generation is an AI sub-discipline that converts data into text, enabling computers to communicate ideas with perfect accuracy.

It is used in customer service to generate detailed reports and market summaries and is offered by various companies like Attivio, Automated Insights, Cambridge Semantics, Digital Reasoning or Lucidworks.

2. Speech recognition

Alexa is just one of the systems that can understand you. Every day, more and more systems are created that can transcribe human language, reaching hundreds of thousands through voice-response interactive systems and mobile apps.

3. Virtual Agents

A Virtual Agent is an computer generated, animated, artificial intelligence virtual character (usually with anthropomorphic appearance) that serves as an online customer service representative. It leads a intelligent conversation with users, responds to their questions and performs adequate non-verbal behavior.

Virtual agents are currently being used mostly for customer service and support and as smart home managers.

Some of the companies that provide virtual agents include Amazon, Apple, Artificial Solutions, Assist AI, Creative Virtual, Google, IBM, IPsoft, Microsoft and Satisfi.

4. Machine Learning Platforms

These days, computers can also easily learn, and they can be incredibly intelligent! Machine learning (ML) is a subdiscipline of computer science and a branch of AI. Its goal is to develop techniques that allow computers to learn.

By providing algorithms, APIs (application programming interface), development and training tools, big data, applications and other machines, ML platforms are gaining more and more traction every day.

They are currently mainly being used for prediction and classification.

Some of the companies selling ML platforms include Amazon, Fractal Analytics, Google, H2O.ai, Microsoft, SAS, Skytree and Adext.

5. AI-Optimized Hardware

AI technology makes hardware much friendlier.

How?

Through new graphic and central processing units and processing devices specifically designed and structured to execute AI-oriented tasks.

And if you haven’t seen them already, expect the imminent appearance and wide acceptance of AI-optimized silicon chips that can be inserted right into your portable devices and elsewhere.

You can get access to this technology through Alluviate, Cray, Google, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.

6. Decision Management

Intelligent machines are capable of introducing rules and logic to AI systems so you can use them for initial setup/training, ongoing maintenance, and tuning.

Decision management has already been incorporated into a variety of corporate applications to assist and execute automated decision, making your business as profitable as possible.

Check out Advanced Systems Concepts, Informatica, Maana, Pegasystems, and UiPath for additional options.

7. Deep Learning Platforms

Deep learning platforms use a unique form of ML that involves artificial neural circuits with various abstraction layers that can mimic the brain, processing data and creating patterns for decision making.

It is currently mainly being used to recognize patterns and classify applications that are only compatible with large-scale data sets.

Deep Instinct, Ersatz Labs, Fluid AI, MathWorks, Peltarion, Saffron Technology and Sentient Technologies all have deep learning options worthy of exploring.

8. Biometrics

This technology can identify, measure and analyze human behavior and physical aspects of the body’s structure and form. Systems like this can be used for example during the interrogations to detect If suspect is lying or telling the truth. Biometric “lie detector” would be able to monitor much more than only heart rate, breathing or blood pressure.

9. Image Recognition

Image recognition is the process of identifying and detecting an object or feature in a digital image or video, and AI is increasingly being stacked on top of this technology to great effect. Artificial intelligence can search social media platforms for photos and compare them to a wide range of data sets to decide which ones are most relevant during image searches.

Image recognition technology can also be used to detect license plates, diagnose disease, analyze clients and their opinions and verify users based on their face.

Clarifai provides image recognition systems for customers to detect near-duplicates and find similar uncategorized images.

SenseTime is one of the leaders in this industry and develops face recognition technology that can be applied to payment and picture analysis for bank card verification and other applications. And GumGum’s mission is to unlock the value of images and videos produced across the web using AI technology.

10. Cyber Defense

Cyber defense is a computer network defense mechanism that focuses on preventing, detecting and providing timely responses to attacks or threats to infrastructure and information.

AI and ML are now being used to move cyberdefense into a new evolutionary phase in response to an increasingly hostile environment: Breach Level Index detected a total of over 2 billion breached records during 2017. Seventy-six percent of the records in the survey were lost accidentally, and 69% were an identity theft type of breach.

Recurrent neural networks, which are capable of processing sequences of inputs, can be used in combination with ML techniques to create supervised learning technologies, which uncover suspicious user activity and detect up to 85% of all cyber attacks.

Startups such as Darktrace, which pairs behavioral analytics with advanced mathematics to automatically detect abnormal behavior within organizations and Cylance, which applies artificial intelligence algorithms to stop malware and mitigate damage from zero-day attacks, are both working in the area of AI-powered cyber defense.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is truly revolutionary. Its impact can be heard almost every section of our society. However, many experts think that it can lead to many job losses, increasing unemployment. Many prominent experts also believe that artificial intelligence. driven machines can be a threat to the whole human kind. For now, we can only focus on the positive aspects of artificial intelligence, and its role in changing our daily lives.

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