New Florence. New Renaissance.

Autonomous Traffic Management

The company (NoTraffic) claims its cloud- and artificial-intelligence-based traffic control system can halve rush-hour times in dense urban areas, reduce annual CO2 emissions by a half-billion tons in places like Phoenix/Maricopa County, and slash transportation budgets by 70 percent.

Here's how it works: Sensors perceive, identify, and analyze all traffic approaching each intersection, sharing data to the cloud. Here light timing and traffic flow is adjusted continuously, prioritizing commuting patterns, emergency and evacuation traffic, a temporary parade of bicycles—whatever. Judicious allocation of "green time" means no green or walk-signal time gets wasted.

Motor Trend

 

Self-healing Maps

Keeping maps updated in over 200 countries is hard—so the team had to pivot from just making maps to something more meta. “We needed to start making the machine that makes the map,” Lookingbill explains.

The way this is happening is through machine learning algorithms that are good enough to take imagery—like the pictures produced by those street view cars, or from satellites—extract the information they need from them, and then update the map. That information is likely data such as the name of a road, a house number, or the shape of a building seen from above. Google has boasted about this topic before: a 2017 blog post describes their efforts creating an algorithm that can read street names in France and mentions that algorithms like that could update addresses on the map.

Popular Science

another version of self-healing from Here HD for autonomous cars

 

 

McDonald's and Dynamic Yield

When you drive up to place your order at a McDonald’s today, a digital display greets you with a handful of banner items or promotions. As you inch up toward the ordering area, you eventually get to the full menu. Both of these, as currently implemented, are largely static, aside from the obvious changes like rotating in new offers, or switching over from breakfast to lunch.

But in a pilot program at a McDonald’s restaurant in Miami, powered by Dynamic Yield, those displays have taken on new dexterity. Algorithms crunch data as diverse as the weather, time of day, local traffic, nearby events, and of course historical sales data, both at that specific franchise and around the world. In the new McDonald’s machine-learning paradigm, significant display real estate goes toward showing customers what other items have been popular at that location, and prompting them with potential upsells. Thanks for your Happy Meal order; maybe you’d like a Sprite to go with it.

Wired

 

Kai-Fu Lee: The Oracle of AI

Despite what you hear about artificial intelligence, machines still can't think like a human, but in the last few years they have become capable of learning. And suddenly, our devices have opened their eyes and ears and cars have taken the wheel. Today, artificial intelligence is not as good as you hope and not as bad as you fear, but humanity is accelerating into a future that few can predict. That's why so many people are desperate to meet Kai-Fu Lee, the oracle of AI.

CBS

 

HR Moneyball

More than a million job seekers have already undergone this kind of testing experience, developed by Pymetrics, a five-year-old startup cofounded by Frida Polli. An MIT-trained neuroscientist with an MBA from Harvard, Polli is pioneering new ways of assessing talent for brands such as Burger King and Unilever, based on decades of neuroscience research she says can predict behaviors common among high performers. “We realized this combination of data and machine learning would be hugely powerful, bringing recruiting from this super-antiquated, paper-and-pencil [process] into the future,” explains Polli, sitting barefoot on a couch at her spartan office near New York’s Flatiron District on a humid May morning, where about four dozen engineers, data scientists, and industrial-organizational psychologists sit behind glowing iMacs.

Pymetrics is part of a legion of buzzy startups leveraging artificial intelligence, big data, and other tech tools to disrupt the hiring space. Research firm CB Insights expects VC investments in HR-tech startups to hit $2.9 billion in 2018, up 138% year over year.

FastCompany

 

Automation and real estate appraisal

In the real estate business, Zillow Group Inc. says its algorithms are learning to capture not only the crude facts about values in the surrounding neighborhood but also more sophisticated price indicators, such as whether the living room has hardwood floors or the kitchen has granite countertops. While Zillow’s software isn’t used in appraisals—its numbers are available on its website for free—lenders have long used internal and third-party computer models to help value homes.

And now mortgage financers such as Freddie Mac are starting to get comfortable with transactions that don’t involve a human appraiser.

Bloomberg

Zillow CEO explains some of the variables that go into the algorithms that calculate its Zestimate

 

AI applications proliferate

Couple of perspectives in this McKinsey article

Gary Bradski, chief technology officer, Arraiy: AI will be used for big, high-impact applications. It is a big enabler for robotics, so autonomous vehicles is a big one. Speech recognition is really starting to work—it’s a very useful interface—that’s big. It’s going now to natural language, you see that showing up with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s products. I call that ambient AI, where you can just ask questions and things happen.

Medicine’s a big one. You’re diagnosing problems, and you can already see these things can often do better than a doctor, in certain circumstances. They don’t get distracted, and they can ferret out very subtle patterns.

Mohak Shah, lead expert, data science, Bosch Research and Technology Center, North America: Broadly, the advancements will come into what we like to call the Internet of Things. That would mean things like developing your service efficiencies, advancing your manufacturing capabilities, reducing scraps, and looking into your operation of the fleet. And that can happen all the way from small devices to very large devices, like aviation aircraft.

Also listen to 5 super smart ladies at various parts of Alphabet/Google talk past, present and future of AI and Machine Learning

 

Remaking companies around AI

Google is not alone in this rapid re-orientation. Amazon is building a similar group cloud computing group for AI. Facebook and Twitter have created internal groups akin to Google Brain, the team responsible for infusing the search giant’s own tech with AI. And in recent weeks, Microsoft reorganized much of its operation around its existing machine learning work, creating a new AI and research group under executive vice president Harry Shum, who began his career as a computer vision researcher.

Oren Etzioni, CEO of the not-for-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says that these changes are partly about marketing—efforts to ride the AI hype wave. Google, for example, is focusing public attention on Fei-Fei’s new group because that’s good for the company’s cloud computing business. But Etzioni says this is also part of very real shift inside these companies, with AI poised to play an increasingly large role in our future. “This isn’t just window dressing,” he says.

Wired

Gogole’s Fei-Fei Li explaining how they use computers to understand pictures

 

 

Microsoft’s new age of intelligence

They included, but were not limited to:

• Using health insights to help the Cortana assistant notice that a user tends to binge on junk food when traveling and might miss a gym appointment while on the road
• Working with Volvo to make cars less dangerous by analyzing motorists' faces to ensure that they're alert, undistracted, and in a mood conducive to safe driving
• Bringing football/baseball legend Deion Sanders onstage to try an in-the-works NFL fantasy football bot, which Microsoft hopes to have ready for next season
• Verifying the identity of Uber drivers by having them snap a selfie and analyzing it using Microsoft facial recognition technology
• Calling on HoloLens augmented reality to preview a kitchen remodel project at a Lowe's store, with recommendations based on a shopper's Pinterest pins
• Translating "War and Peace" in a fraction of a jiffy using Azure's cloud computing service and leveraging Microsoft-designed Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips

FastCompany

The AI future

The best minds in the business—Yann LeCun of Facebook, Luke Nosek of the Founders Fund, Nick Bostrom of Oxford University and Andrew Ng of Baidu—on what life will look like in the age of the machines

Wall Street Journal