AI good, AI bad (part 2): the Facebook bot dialect scare

August 2, 2017 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ghosty.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]Eeek! Scary! Bots develop their own argot. Facebook AI Research (FAIR) tested two chatbots programmed to negotiate. In short order, they developed “their own creepy language”, in the words of the Telegraph, to trade their virtual balls, hats, and books. “Creepy” to FAIR was only a repetitive ‘divergence from English’ since the chatbots weren’t limited to standard English. The lack of restriction enabled them to develop their own argot to quickly negotiate those trades. “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” said Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research. “This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.” like soldiers, stock traders, the slanguage of showbiz mag Variety, or teenagers. Because Facebook’s interest is in AI bot-to-human conversation, FAIR put in the requirement that the chatbots use standard English, which as it turns out is a handful for bots.

The danger in AI-to-AI divergence in language is that humans don’t have a translator for it yet, so we’d never quite understand what they are saying. Batra’s unsettling conclusion: “It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought. The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” So this shorthand can look like longhand? FastCompany/Co.Design’s Mark Wilson sees the upside–that software talking their own language to each other could eliminate complex APIs–application program interfaces, which enable different types of software to communicate–by letting the software figure it out. But for humans not being able to dig in and understand it readily? Something to think about as we use more and more AI in healthcare and predictive analytics.

AI good, AI bad. Perhaps a little of both?

August 1, 2017 | by

Everyone’s getting hot ‘n’ bothered about AI this summer. There’s a clash of giants–Elon Musk, who makes expensive, Federally subsidized electric cars which don’t sell, and Mark Zuckerberg, a social media mogul who fancies himself as a social policy guru–in a current snipe-fest about AI and the risk it presents. Musk, who is a founder of the big-name Future of Life Institute which ponders on AI safety and ethical alignment for beneficial ends, and Zuckerberg, who pooh-poohs any downside, are making their debate points and a few headlines. However, we like to get down to the concretes and here we will go to an analysis of a report by Forrester Research on AI in the workforce. No, we are not about to lose our jobs, yet, but hold on for the top six in the view of Gil Press in Forbes:

  1. Customer self-service in customer-facing physical solutions such as kiosks, interactive digital signage, and self-checkout.
  2. AI-assisted robotic process automation which automates organizational workflows and processes using software bots.
  3. Industrial robots that execute tasks in verticals with heavy, industrial-scale workloads.
  4. Retail and warehouse robots.
  5. Virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri.
  6. Sensory AI that improves computers’ recognition of human sensory faculties and emotions via image and video analysis, facial recognition, speech analytics, and/or text analytics.
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/AI.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]For our area of healthcare technology, look at #5 and #6 first–virtual assistants leveraging the older adult market like 3rings‘ interface with Amazon Echo [TTA 27 June] and sensory AI for recognition tools with broad applications in everything from telehealth to sleepytime music to video cheer-up calls. Both are on a ‘significant success’ track and in line to hit the growth phase in 1-3 years (illustration at left, click to expand).

Will AI destroy a net 7 percent of US jobs by 2027? Will AI affect only narrow areas or disrupt everything? And will we adapt fast enough? 6 Hot AI Automation Technologies Destroying And Creating Jobs (Forbes)

But we can de-stress ourselves with AI-selected music now to soothe our savage interior beasts. This Editor is testing out Sync Project’s Unwind, which will help me get to sleep (20 min) and take stress breaks (5 min). Clutching my phone (not my pearls) to my chest, the app (available on the unwind.ai website) detects my heart rate (though not giving me a reading) through machine learning and gives me four options to pick on exactly how stressed I am. It then plays music with the right beat pattern to calm me down. Other Sync Project applications with custom music by the Marconi Union and a Spotify interface have worked to alleviate pain, sleep, stress, and Parkinson’s gait issues. Another approach is to apply music to memory issues around episodic memory and memory encoding of new verbal material in adults aging normally. (Zzzzzzzz…..) Apply.sci, Sync Project blog

Tunstall pairing with Inhealthcare digital health for NHS remote monitoring

August 1, 2017 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Big-T-thumb-480×294-55535.gif” thumb_width=”150″ /]A digital link of hope for Tunstall’s future? Announced at The King’s Fund Digital Health & Care Conference but oddly not receiving much notice was the UK collaboration of Tunstall Healthcare and Inhealthcare. Inhealthcare builds infrastructure for digital health services, and currently works extensively with multiple NHS regions and programs, such as the North of England Regional Back Pain Programme, NHS England’s Sheffield City Region Test Bed and the Darlington Healthy New Town project. Their services include telehealth monitoring for INR, COPD, medication reminders, a smartphone app platform, chronic pain management, and a surprising one that addresses undernutrition in older adults. The Tunstall-Inhealthcare objective is to integrate health and social care with clinical care systems in six areas: LTC home monitoring, identifying vulnerable patients, involving family members, 24/7 clinical care coordination centers, post-discharge management, and digital health at home innovation. Also noted is that Inhealthcare has programming technology that can reduce the time to build out services and apps.

Inhealthcare Ltd is part of Intechnology plc, owned by Peter Wilkinson, who has developed several UK internet and technology companies at scale–Planet Online, Freeserve, and Sports Internet (now Sky Betting and Gaming). Tunstall release