artificial intelligence Archives — Page 3 of 3

December 19, 2019

The potential for emotion recognition is huge, but scientists at the university argue the technology is still too new to be reliable

A growing number of employers are requiring job candidates to complete video interviews that are screened by artificial intelligence (AI) to determine whether they move on to another round. However, many scientists claim that the technology is still in its infancy and cannot be trusted. This month, a new report from New York University’s AI Now Institute goes further and recommends a ban on the use of emotion recognition for important decisions that impact people’s lives and access to opportunities.

Emotion recognition systems are a subset of facial recognition, developed to track micro-expressions on people’s faces and aim to interpret their emotions and intent. Systems use computer vision technologies to track human facial movements and use algorithms to map these expressions to a defined set of measures. These measures allow the system to identify typical facial expressions and so infer what human emotions and behaviours are being exhibited.

The potential for emotion recognition is huge. According to Indian market intelligence firm Mordor Intelligence, emotion recognition has already become a $12 billion (Dh44bn) industry and is expected to grow rapidly to exceed $90bn per year by 2024. The field has drawn the interest of big tech firms such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, startups around the world and venture capitalists.

Advertisers want to know how consumers respond to their advertisements, retail stores want to know how shoppers feel about their displays, law enforcement authorities want to know how suspects react to questioning, and the list of customers goes on. Both business and government entities want to harness the promise of emotion recognition.

As businesses the world over look to AI to improve processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs, it should come as no surprise that AI is already being applied at scale for recruitment processes. Automation has the strongest appeal when an organisation has a volume of repetitive tasks and large volumes of data to process, and both issues apply to recruitment. Some 80 per cent of Fortune 500 firms now use AI technologies for recruitment.

Emotion recognition has been hailed as a game-changer by some members of the recruitment industry. It aims to identify non-verbal behaviours in videos of candidate interviews, while speech analysis tracks key words and changes in tone of voice. Such systems can track hundreds of thousands of data points for analysis from eye movements to what words and phrases are used. Developers claim that such systems are able to screen out the top candidates for any particular job by identifying candidate knowledge, social skills, attitude and level of confidence – all in a matter of minutes.

As with the adoption of many new AI applications, cost savings and speed are the two core drivers of AI-enabled recruitment. Potential savings for employers include time spent on screening candidates, the numbers of HR staff required to manage recruitment and another safeguard against the costly mistake of hiring the wrong candidate for a position. Meanwhile, the message for candidates is that AI can aid better job placement, ensuring that their new employer is a good fit for them.

However, the consensus among scientific researchers is the algorithms developed for emotion recognition lack a solid scientific foundation. Critics claim that it is premature to rely on AI to accurately assess human behaviour, primarily since most systems are built on widespread assumptions not independent research.

Emotion recognition was the focus of a report published earlier this year by a group of researchers from the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers spent two years reviewing more than 1,000 studies on facial expression and emotions. The study found that how people communicate their emotions varies significantly across cultures and situations, and across different people within a single situation. The report concluded that, for the time being, our understanding of the link between facial expression and emotions is tenuous at best.

Unintentional bias has become the focus of growing scrutiny from scientists, technology developers and human rights activists.

Many algorithms used by global businesses have already been found to have bias related to age, gender, race and other factors, due to the assumptions made whilst programming them and the type of data that has been used to feed machine learning. Last year, Amazon shut down an AI recruiting platform after finding that it discriminated against women.

One thing is for sure: regardless of the potential merits of emotion recognition and whether it prevents or promotes your chances of being offered a job, it is likely to remain the subject of debate for some time to come.

This story was first published by The National

November 22, 2019

With the US and China dominating artificial intelligence development, what chances do smaller nations have?

Over the past two years, a national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy has come to be seen as a pre-requisite for digital competitiveness and an essential pillar of national governance for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. So, Singapore unveiling a new, updated national AI strategy last week has received global attention.

In common with the UAE, Singapore was one of the first countries to announce a national AI strategy, back in 2017. The new one, unveiled by the Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat on the last day of Singapore’s FinTech Festival last week, is holistic and zeros in on some specific national goals. Importantly, it also leverages investments already made by the government in education, technology development, infrastructure and innovation.

Developed by the Smart Nation Digital Government Office (SNDGO), the AI strategy not only identifies key areas that can be enabled by AI and the necessary resources to support nation-wide AI adoption, but also aims to set out Singapore’s stall as a leading global hub for the development, testing and export of AI applications. Recently ranked by the think tank Oliver Wyman Forum as the city most ready for AI, Singapore’s play for a greater role in the development of commercial and government AI systems has many things going for it.

Against the backdrop of the China-US trade war, Singapore is geographically and politically well placed to encourage both Chinese and American investment in AI ventures, at a time when cross-border foreign direct investment and venture capital between the two AI powerhouses is at its lowest level since 2014. Meanwhile, the combination of the country’s willingness to implement AI and the small size of the nation itself, make it an ideal testbed for AI developers to try-out their solutions before exporting them to larger countries, where implementation may face more obstacles and have higher costs.

Singapore’s strategy identifies key enablers for AI innovation and adoption, including the development of talent, data infrastructure and creating a progressive and trusted environment for AI. However, crucially, it also picks five core development projects designed to bring early benefits, plus create opportunities for local innovation and investment. By choosing AI-enabled projects that both address national challenges and deliver a visible impact on society and the economy, Singapore is also preparing the proof of concept for its goal of becoming a global hub for the development of AI technologies.

It’s no coincidence that the UAE, Finland and Singapore all first committed to national AI strategies in 2017, alongside large nations such as Canada and China, but well ahead of most of the world. All three countries have populations under 10 million, have relatively large economies and have been able to stay ahead of the technology curve.

The forward-looking policy and smaller size of these countries has helped to make embracing new technologies faster and more achievable than for many larger countries with bigger budgets, often allowing them to leapfrog global competitors.

Finland, Singapore and the UAE were all early pioneers of e-government, helping to develop new digital government processes. They were all also early adopters of new mobile standards and consumer services including mobile broadband.

So, it makes perfect sense that smaller digital-savvy countries should be able to take leadership positions in the fast-developing world of AI.

It is now well-known that the UAE was the first country in the world to bring AI decision-making into government at a cabinet level, naming His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in October 2017. In April of this year, the cabinet approved the UAE’s AI Strategy 2031.

The UAE has also made strategic investments in a number of new ventures to ensure that the UAE becomes not only an early adopter, but also a leading producer of AI applications. Last week Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), one of the world’s largest oil production companies, announced a joint venture with UAE AI group G42 to create artificially intelligent applications for the energy sector.

Other high profile AI investments in the UAE include a world-class AI research institute in its capital, the world’s first dedicated artificial intelligence university and Chinese AI provider SenseTime’s plans to open a Europe, Middle East and Africa research and development centre in Abu Dhabi.

Singapore’s new national AI strategy makes a convincing case for prioritising the development of a homegrown AI industry, in line with the country’s core strengths and challenges. The UAE has its own set of strengths and challenges, and these too, provide a golden opportunity for it to become one of the world’s leading AI producers.

This story was first published by The National

November 2, 2019

Do brands need AI avatars of themselves? Last week at London’s One Young World Summit, Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter and Lars Buttler, CEO of San Francisco-based The AI Foundation, announced a new concept they called ‘personal media’ and claimed that artificial intelligence is the future of social change. The Foundation is working on new technology that Buttler says will allow anyone to create an AI avatar of themselves, which would look like them, talk like them and act like them. Empowered by AI avatars, people will then be able to, potentially, have billions of conversations at the same time.

So, what does this new kind of AI communications mean for brands?

Continue reading this story on Linkedin

October 31, 2019

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Lars Buttler, chief executive of San Francisco-based The AI Foundation, introduced a new concept of ‘personal media’, enabled by artificial intelligence at last week’s One Young World Summit in London. The company is developing technology to allow anyone to create an artificial version of themselves to represent their interests anytime, anywhere. These personal avatars will look, sound and act like their creators.

According to the Stone and Buttler, just as the world moved from the mass media era to the social media era, it will now begin to move into the age of ‘personal media’.

Continue reading this story on The National.

September 19, 2019

Google CEO Sundar Pichai delighted the audience at the Internet giant’s annual developer event Google I/O last year with a demonstration of an upcoming feature for Google Assistant currently called Duplex. Live in front of the Mountain View audience, Pichai showed Google Assistant making a telephone call to a hair salon, talking to the salon representative who answered the phone, negotiating the time of the appointment and making a booking for the user.

The Google Duplex demo gave the audience (and Youtube viewers around the world) a tiny glimpse into our artificial intelligence future: a future where our intelligent devices will be able to make our calls, restaurant reservations, flight bookings and buy us tickets for the theatre.

Continue reading this article on Arabnet.

August 4, 2019

PayPal co-founder and tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an opinion piece in the New York Times at the end of the week — ‘Good for Google, Bad for America’ — in a follow-up to his Washington DC speech a couple of weeks ago, during which he called for a probe into Google’s ‘seemingly treasonous acts’.

In the current atmosphere of ‘China fever’ and President Trump’s new trade tariffs, this has naturally gone down rather well in some circles and I’m sure Mr Thiel will be delighted with the publicity.

Continue reading this story on Asia AI News (Medium)

July 8, 2019

The first Modi 2.0 budget has been called cautious, incremental and lacking a blueprint; Will India be able to implement the right programmes at the speed required to remain competitive?

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Modi government’s budget for 2019/2020 to India’s parliament on Friday, in a statement full of vision for the future, drawing heavily on the themes from the national Economic Survey 2018–19 released last week. In a speech that aimed to garner popular appeal, Sitharaman prioritised infrastructure, digital economy and job creation. You can review the government’s online presentation here.

As expected, the new budget has received both praise and criticism, while inspiring some tough questions, depending on the economic and political leaning of the commentators.

Continue reading this story on Asia AI News (Medium)

June 28, 2019

According to the news media, there is enormous focus on AI development in the defence space and, in fact, global military spending on AI is projected to reach nearly $19 billion per annum by 2025.

Virtually anyone with a social media account must have now seen the Boston Dynamics videos of Atlas and his robot pals. Military aircraft, vehicle and systems manufacturers are heavily invested in AI and other new technologies. However, a great deal of a nation’s AI development for defence purposes has nothing to do with robots or even weapons and every government, one could easily assume, is doing it. Or are they?

Continue reading this story on Asia AI News (Medium)

November 28, 2017

Much is being made of Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition technology and the voice platform’s ability to recognise speech and respond to voice requests. Early adopters of Alexa assistants seem to be delighted with the ease at which they can discover new content, control other devices. participate in interactive content and make onlin purchases. However, the best is probably still to come. As artificial intelligence (AI) develops further and leverages other technologies, digital assistants are likely to begin anticipating your needs rather than simply serving them efficiently.

Could artificial intelligence powered digital assistants, such as Alexa, take de facto control of your daily routine? And, if so, how much influence could they wield over your brand choices?

Continue reading this story on the Spot On blog.

Newer Posts

artificial intelligence Archives — Page 3 of 3 — Carrington Malin

Should emotion recognition be banned? NYU says it should

The potential for emotion recognition is huge, but scientists at the university argue the technology is still too new to be reliable

Singapore leverages strengths with new AI strategy

With the US and China dominating artificial intelligence development, what chances do smaller nations have?

Do brands need AI avatars of themselves?

Will AI redistribute power and influence?

Have your AI call my AI’

Is Google really helping to fuel Beijing’s military AI ambitions?

Will the first Modi 2.0 budget boost India’s AI readiness?

The first Modi 2.0 budget has been called cautious, incremental and lacking a blueprint; Will India be able to implement the right programmes at the speed required to remain competitive?

Is your military AI-ready?

Will AI help make your brand part of someone’s daily routine?

20 things I've learned from LinkedIn

So, you think you can lead the market without selling?

Saudi Arabia's ambitious AI goals

20 things I've learned from LinkedIn

So, you think you can lead the market without selling?

Saudi Arabia's ambitious AI goals