When it comes to caregiving, the human touch is irreplaceable. With AI’s help, that might actually happen more often.

In 2017, the CDC estimated that the average wait time in a US emergency room was about 40 minutes, with more than 22 million visits requiring patients to wait for over an hour. While going to the emergency room is never fun — with long wait times, frustration and exhaustion becoming the norm — part of the issue stems from the fact that not all cases are true emergencies. Global pandemic aside, health care simply takes a lot of time and resources. It also scales with the quantity, quality and speed of the human personnel involved.
Continue reading Somebody Will Be Last at Medical School: The Case for AI in Healthcare

(Article first appeared on Forbes)

Automation: A word that simultaneously evokes technological and societal progress and a deep sense of fear.
Continue reading Why ‘Explainability’ Is The Next Step For AI In Manufacturing

When it comes to deploying AI for an application, manufacturers need to think deeply not only what to develop, but also the physical incarnation of the envisioned AI system.
Continue reading Cloud vs Edge: an Industrial Manufacturing dilemma

There has been a lot of hype around the potential for AI in the manufacturing industry, but historically, AI has been too expensive or complex to deploy at scale. But now, with pressure to maintain quality products and keep up with irregular consumer demands with fewer people on the factory floor, new solutions are emerging.
Continue reading AI In Manufacturing – A Second Set of Eyes

What’s in store for 2020 Industrial Manufacturers as they cope with the “new reality”? Manufacturers are in dire necessity of great ideas these days. During the Coronavirus pandemic, production activity in factories has plunged because, contrary to popular beliefs, the level of automation, AI and robotics is nowhere near to guarantee operations without heavy human intervention.
Continue reading A first step to pandemic-proof Manufacturing with AI

Why the fear-spreading opponents of robotics, automation AI are today hiding under a rock? COVID-19 deficiencies tell you why. Let them stay under that rock.

My perception of time has warped considerably since the lock-down… if feels like two decades, but it was a little more than two years ago when Elon Musk came out with his umpteenth warning against AI and Robots, according to him (and some other misinformed ones) the most probable cause of our impending Armageddon.

In September 2017, it was finally too much for me, and, sharing my sentiment with many other real AI scientists and entrepreneurs, I gave an interview on CNBC explaining why this was just plain wrong and misleading.

Invariably, warnings were coming from people who weren’t competent in AI: if they were, they would have realized that building Skynet by mistake was as likely as for my 3-years-old to accidentally build a functioning Space Station out of Legos.

Musk friends did not consider the huge value derived from fielding AI and robotics at scale. Ironically, and hypocritically, since Tesla’s cars make use of AI to avoid slamming into things and people….
April 2020: how the story has changed

Where are intelligent, autonomous Robots in the fight against the closest thing to Armageddon that has happened in the life of many of us alive today?

Nowhere to be found. In particular, in critical sectors where they are needed the most — where workers are either at high risk, such as in Healthcare, of can’t go, such as in Manufacturing.
And don’t be mislead by the false image of Manufacturing as the place where robots are the kings. Humans are kings in factories… and when they are not there, factories shut down.

At the time of this writing, more than 60 doctors have died of COVID-19 in Italy, and more than 12K Health Care workers have been infected in Spain. In US, the story is not much different, with Minnesota and Ohio reporting 28% and 16% of its cases involving doctor or nurses, respectively.

Where are smart robots to help doctors and nurses in the most repetitive and potentially dangerous tasks? Where are powerful AI diagnostic tools deployed to help streamline and relief healthcare workers? Where are factories operating basically autonomously carrying out production while humans are quarantined?

While timid attempts are made, e.g., with robots armed with UV lights to disinfect hospitals, not much has been deployed at a scale to make a difference.

So, critical Healthcare workers are alone in the flight, and factories are shut down.

History repeat: take 2!
AI-powered Robots substituting augmenting humans in dangerous situations? Where have I heard that before?!
In 2010, when I was still working as an AI Professor at Boston University, my Lab was approached by NASA to design AI able to power autonomous robots exploring an uncharted territory without human supervision. The need was clear: NASA was not interested in risking human lives to explore remote, potentially dangerous environments, and wanted to design intelligent robots, with human-like abilities and autonomy, to take over those tasks.
In 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic is resonating the same exact needs. This time, not for astronauts going to Mars, but to help nurses and doctors in their day-to-day, hazardous interactions that may put thousands of them at risk of infection, in the best case scenarios putting them into quarantine, and worse case scenarios, killing them.

Make them stop
In the past several years, the debate around AI, automation, and robots has invariably, and unfortunately, converged around themes of job losses, at best, and Armageddon at worst. Too many have rallied against the development of autonomous robots for fear of omniscient evil AI taking over the world… perhaps those AI-powered robots could have saved lives, were they developed and fielded to help with pandemics such as COVID-19. Maybe we could have had thousands of smart Robots AI technologies deployed, saving many lives along the way.
And no nurse or doctor would have lost a single job to them!

In fact, automation and robotics not only can save lives, but they have been shown by credible research as not being the root cause of job loss in many fields, such as, for instance, in manufacturing. According to a recent report by MIT has conclusively shown that job losses in US and EU manufacturing were caused by lower-wages workers in Asia rather than robots.

When I joined the field of AI 20 years ago, I did it with the conviction that AI, robotics, and automation are here to help us solve massive challenges ahead of us. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has shown up in 2020 as one of such challenges only to find us totally unprepared.
We could have done better. Let’s make sure in our next challenge, we have the best technology to help automate tasks, streamline the work of humans, and relieve them of situations you don’t want them in.

Neurala is on a mission to make artificial intelligence more applicable and useful in the real world.  Its core technology allows you to build a brain, a custom neural network modeled after the human brain that can interact with its environment and imitate human learning.

The idea for Neurala came about in a coffee shop in 2006; cofounders Max Versace, Anatoly Gorshechnikov and Heather Ames were working together on their PhDs at the Boston University Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. The team came to the realization that major developments in the latest graphics processors for gaming, also had vast potential for artificial intelligence.

In the past, the only way to train AI –a deep neural network (DNN) was to load a large number of images, train the network on a server, and then deploy it on a compute edge. The resulting DNN was ‘fixed’.  If for some reason the network misclassified an orange for an apple, for instance, there was nothing that could be done other than retrain the DNN on the server with an augmented dataset that would make the distinction between the two objects.
Continue reading Living at the Edge: 1st AI SDK that learns at the compute Edge released!

Is AI only a ‘digital thing’, or is it radically changing our very physical world?

Pioneering Physicist John Archibald Wheeler once summarized the intricate interconnection between the ‘ethereal’ concept of information and our material physical reality with the poetic “It from Bit”. Intangible entities like the ones flooding our electronics devices, made of 1s and 0s, are literally ‘making up’ and shaping our physical universe.
Continue reading It from Bit: how AI is shaping our physical world

How an overlooked feature of deep learning networks can turn into a major breakthrough for AI

At an early age, as we take our first steps into the world of math and numbers, we learn that one apple plus another apple equals two apples. We learn to count real things. Only later are we introduced to a weird concept: zero… or the number of apples in an empty box.

Continue reading Whats coming in AI in 2020? Nothing