The collaboration between tech giants and academics on COVID-19 is a welcome move as the pandemic continues to ravage people across the globe.

From Italy, to Spain and the United States, COVID-19 is increasing with hospitals under strain because of excess patients.

Businesses are announcing layoffs and working remotely is becoming the norm as companies adopt AI powered Contact Center Messaging for customer service.

What next for humanity as COVID-19 crisis escalates? There is hope as WHO and CDC work with researchers to develop measures to combat the virus and extending assistance to countries around the world.

As the AI race between China and the West continues, what are the possible implications of this with data privacy becoming a concern in the US? AI is data hungry and as privacy concerns linger, both power blocs will continue to harness AI in the race for global domination.

AI is offering business solutions including customer support, fraud detection and personalizing social interactions. Nevertheless, there is misunderstanding about AI as some claim AI could become more powerful than earlier thought.

AI enabling Brands Customer Experience

Brands will spend $8 billion more on customer service agents in 2020. Due to the growing demand, CX professionals may be replaced by AI.

Moreover, Forrester predicts 1 out of 4 CX professionals will lose their jobs in 2020. But the reality is- Instead of replacing them, AI will be on their side to add more value to their services.

Delivering a five-star customer experience makes a huge difference for any brand. Gartner predicts 89% of organizations will compete primarily on CX, and Forrester says CX is the only sustainable competitive advantage remaining. Organizations are smartly investing in AI¹ to enable CX professionals to get things right for them.

AI delivers some amazing benefits to the contact center enabling agents to personalize interactions and make smarter decisions in real-time while equipping organizations with customer feedback and intelligence to transform operations. But CX professionals will be there to solve complex issues and form emotional connections that ensure customers are satisfied.

The analytical capabilities of AI are game-changing.

An organization was able to screen and analyze as little as 3% of customer interactions. Advanced machine-learning and AI allows an organization to analyze 100% of calls in the contact center.

Women defining 21st Century AI movement

Countless women in the fields of entrepreneurship, policy, and research defining the 21st Century AI movement² in the United States. The rest of the world is also filled with trailblazers, geniuses, trendsetters, and visionaries that are forming the very world we are inhabiting now.

The International Women defining AI

1. Foteini Agrafioti: Chief Science Officer at Royal Bank of Canada and head of Borealis AI-Canada

Agrafioti is in charge of the intellectual property portfolio in the fields of AI and machine-learning at RBC. She also serves as co-chair of the advisory council on artificial intelligence, advising the federal government on how to build on Canada’s strengths and global leadership in AI.

2. Jennifer Gibbs: VP and Head of the Office of the Chief Data Officer for TD Bank-Canada

Gibbs is interested in helping lift up other women in the field of AI, data, and analytics. Gibbs serves as the founder and executive lead for the Women in Data & Analytics community at TD. She bridges the spans between strategic data initiatives and regulatory and compliance expectations related to data.

3. Veronique Ventos: Founding CTO NukkAI- France

She is widely recognized as one of the leading artificial intelligence researchers in France.

AI Powered Contact Center Messaging

Customer service centers are experiencing an unprecedented uptick in overall call volume due to the continued spread of Covid19 as workplaces and travel plans are interrupted.

As the situation gets worse customer representatives are increasingly ordered to work from home. COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI powered contact center messaging³ and companies are turning to AI to bridge the resulting gaps in service.

LivePerson⁸, a global tech company that develops conversational commerce and AI software observed significant increases in volume on its conversational platform, which is used by over 18,000 brands, including Sky, IBM, Vodafone, Virgin Atlantic, and RBS.

Overall conversation volume has jumped by about 20% since mid-February, with verticals like airlines and hotels experiencing 96% and 130% climbs, respectively.

Another startup platform that leverages AI trained by subject matter experts to analyze contact center interactions said it has faced significant service adjustments for clients like Microsoft, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Autodesk, Samsung, and SAP.

The move to AI and automation into customer service is business as usual as consumers were preferring it more even before the pandemic. Salesforce says roughly 69% of consumers choose chatbots.

AI-Open Source and Object Detection

Google AI open-sources EfficientDet, an AI tool that achieves state-of-the-art object detection while using less compute. The tool achieves faster performance when used with CPUs or GPUs than other popular objection detection models like YOLO or AmoebaNet. It also achieves exceptional performance when tasked with semantic segmentation and object detection.

EfficientDet uses the less expensive method of scaling object detection and a resource-hungry way to deploy object detection on the edge or in the cloud with a method that uniformly scales the resolution, depth, and width for all backbone, feature network, and box/class prediction networks⁴ at the same time.

A bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) acts as a featured network in EfficientDet, and ImageNet pre-trained EfficientNet acts as the backbone network. It optimizes for cross-scale connections in part by removing nodes that only have one input edge to create a simpler bidirectional network. It also relies on the one-stage detector paradigm, an object detector known for efficiency and simplicity.

This is the latest object detection news from Google, whose Google Cloud Vision system for object detection recently removed male and female label options for its publicly available API.

The AI Race between China and the West

China’s purported edge in the artificial intelligence race⁵ leading anxiety in both the technology and foreign policy world. China will overtake the West, as the West emphasizes on privacy, whereas AI is hungry for more and more data.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t delineate specific technological advances rather it only references a subjective measure of tasks that we classify as intelligent. For example, the adornment and “deepfake” transformation of the human face, now common on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, was introduced in a startup sold to Google called image processing 15 years ago, but now termed as AI.

AI might be achieving unprecedented results in diverse fields, including medicine, robotic control, and language/image processing. AI might be a threat to the human future, as is often imagined in science fiction, or it might pave a way of thinking about what makes technology more effective and responsible.

The very idea of AI might create a diversion that makes it easier for a small group of technologists and investors to claim all rewards from a widely distributed effort. Computation is an essential technology, but the AI way of thinking about it can be murky and dysfunctional.

Tech Companies and Academics Collaborating on COVID-19 Research

More than 2,000 papers have been published on the health effects, possible treatments, and the dynamics of the resulting coronavirus pandemic.

It is quite unbelievable to stay up to date with the literature and get an insight about the virus, its behavior, or possible treatments. But artificial intelligence may help.

The White House recently announced a project in collaboration with tech companies⁶and academics to make a massive amount of coronavirus research accessible to AI researchers and their algorithms for the first time.

To help medical and public health experts AI to answer many questions mine through the avalanche of research. AI algorithms might help to discover new treatments or make the virus worse for some patients.

But the potential of machine-learning is huge to help wrangle and draw insights from scientific research. But the approach is at an early stage and is unlikely to help address the current crisis.

Over 29,000 papers related to the new virus gathered and prepared by MicrosoftResearch, the National Library of Medicine⁹ and the Allen Institute for AI (AI2)¹⁰ so that computers can read the underlying data, about the authors and their affiliations.

The new project is an opportunity to feel useful for some AI researchers.

ML for Content Moderation during the COVID-19 Crisis

Machine-learning tools have always been the ideal content moderators for Facebook, Google, and Twitter. But the coronavirus is forcing these tech giants to use AI before they are ready. The actions taken by Facebook and YouTube over the past few days will have significant implications for the future of the business.

With the constantly increasing problems like nudity, legal, terrorist propaganda, child abuse imagery and many more social networks outsourced tens of thousands of moderators around the world through firms including Accenture¹¹, Cognizant¹², and Genpact¹³ to manage and monitor billions of users. But still, there was a privacy issue.

Every social network to put artificial intelligence in charge considering the long term goals now. But Google said it is still far away.

YouTube will now rely more on AI⁷to moderate videos during the coronavirus pandemic since many moderators are being sent home. So videos may be taken down because they are flagged by AI due to potential policy violations. YouTube says some mistakes are going to be made because of the over-reliance on AI.

Facebook and Twitter said that the decision was to rely more on automated tools. Twitter would not ban users based solely on automated enforcement, because of accuracy concerns.

Misunderstood AI

Have we actually thought about AI the wrong way from the beginning?

The artificial intelligence researcher and professor @Stuart Russell discussed the threat from AI also how to make AI human-compatible.

Russell unleashes in his thesis “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,” is that AI has been developed on the false premise that we can successfully define the goals and the result is that the more powerful they are, the worse they are capable of.

We don’t actually think that paperclip-making AI will consume the Earth to maximize production, but a crime-prevention algorithm could very easily take badly constructed data and objectives and turn them into recommendations that cause real harm.

The solution is to create systems that aren’t so sure of themselves — essentially, knowing what they don’t or can’t know and looking to humans to find out suggested by Russell.

Do you think that we have understood AI in the wrong way so we think they are more powerful than us and they will take over us? And, actually, we can control AI if we are able to understand AI as it is.

AI Powered Business Solutions

Artificial intelligence has become the technology to solve many business challenges.

Here are a few key challenges businesses face and how AI powered solutions from specific companies are addressing those obstacles.

1. Fraud

Companies are struggling to meet constantly increasing demand while ensuring each transaction is scanned for potential fraud. AI has become the only technology solution to help companies process speedy transactions. For instance:- Sift Science, Inc. and Feedzai leverage AI and machine-learning algorithms to sort and assess data in seconds.

2. Customer support

Companies deliver faster transactions than ever before but still struggle with round-the-clock customer support. That’s where AI steps in to help companies offer responsive customer support across multiple channels without human assistance. For example, Agara is helping B2C companies adopt AI-enabled support for enhanced customer experience.

3. Personalization

Companies are struggling with how to personalize each experience with a much larger customer base and without the connection of face-to-face, and in-store transactions. @Amazon was one of the first to use AI to create personalized recommendations. It proved what AI-powered solutions are to implement.

AI aiding to Space Commercialization

Humans can now focus more on the parts that computers can’t assemble as AI-enabled systems and robotics are being used to help the manufacturing process of Satellites and Spacecraft.

AI helps not only speed up the process but it can also analyze the process itself to see if there is something that can be improved. Despite that, AI is also monitoring the process to ensure that everything is done properly.

Satellites are generating thousands of images every minute and process about 150 terabytes of data every day. AI is helping with a number of challenges and opportunities regarding capturing images of Earth automatically.

The power of deep learning and AI-enabled recognition provides significant power to analyze images and provide the ability to review the millions of images produced by spacecraft. Artificial intelligence can rapidly process a lot of data as it doesn’t take a break.

AI is used to monitor the health of satellites to ensure the satellites functioning properly. AI can constantly review sensors and equipment, provide alerts, and carry out corrective action in some cases.

SpaceX uses AI to keep its satellites from colliding with other objects in space. The benefits of AI in space enables further venturing into the unknown.

Forecasts for AI Solutions Investments: 2023 and 2030

Professional services giant PwC claims AI could add nearly $16 trillion to the world economy by 2030. The consultancy group McKinsey & Company predicts $13 trillion in the same time frame.

AI will provide businesses a competitive edge to adapt to technological advancement.

AI will have more impact on healthcare rather than any industry. AI is poised to transform healthcare from streamlining drug research to help with diagnoses and making treatments more efficient.

This artificial intelligence will replace existing energy grids with smart grids to analyze vast amounts of sensor data to automate resource allocation decisions which will result in higher efficiency and the ability to seamlessly integrate a more diverse set of energy generators.

AI solutions will keep companies’ data safe and help extract useful information from enormous datasets too complex for manual analysis. Moreover, AI-based startups received $18.5 billion in venture capital. Overall investment in the sector is predicted to nearly hit $100 billion by 2023.

In 2020 AI’s ability to natural language processing is increasing through the use of deep learning and other advanced algorithms. AI will provide actionable insights by analyzing massive amounts of data without investing in real-world testing.

Works Cited

¹Smart AI Investments, ²Women leading 21st Century AI Movement, ³AI-Powered Contact Center Messaging, ⁴Class Prediction Networks, ⁵Artificial Intelligence Race, ⁶Tech Companies, ⁷AI Video Content Moderation

Companies Cited

⁸LivePerson, ⁹National Library of Medicine, ¹⁰Allen Institute for AI (AI2), ¹¹Accenture, ¹²Cognizant, ¹³Genpact