U.S. Department of Defense Adopts Ethical Principles For Artificial Intelligence

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In a statement released yesterday, the U.S. Department of Defense officially adopted a series of ethical principles surrounding military applications of Artificial Intelligence. The adoption of these principles follows recommendations provided by the Defense Innovation Board, which resulted from 15 months of deliberation with leading AI experts in the commercial industry, government, academia, and the American public.

The recent adoption of these AI ethical principles closely aligns with the Department of Defense’s AI strategy objective directing the U.S military to consider AI ethics and the lawful use of AI systems. These ethical principles address new challenges faced in the digital era and build upon the U.S. military’s existing ethical framework based on documents such as the Constitution, and existing international norms and treaties.

The Department of Defense recognized the need to “accelerate the adoption of AI and lead in its national security applications to maintain [the United States’ strategic position, prevail on future battlefields, and safeguard the rules-based international order.” Despite this, the adoption of AI ethical principles was still considered necessary. According to the Department of Defense, “AI technology will change much about the battlefield of the future, but nothing will change America’s steadfast commitment to responsible and lawful behavior.”

These ethical principles will apply to both combat and non-combat functions and assist the U.S military in upholding legal, ethical, and policy commitments in the field of AI.

The Department of Defenses’ AI ethical principles encompass five main areas:

  1. Responsible – Department of Defense personnel will exercise appropriate levels of judgment and care, while remaining responsible for the development, deployment, and use of AI capabilities. 
  2. Equitable – The Department will take deliberate steps to minimize unintended bias in AI capabilities.
  3. Traceable – The Department’s capabilities will be developed and deployed such that relevant personnel possess an appropriate understanding of the technology, development processes, and operational methods applicable to AI capabilities, including with transparent and auditable methodologies, data sources, and design procedure and documentation.
  4. Reliable – The Department’s AI capabilities will have explicit, well-defined uses, and the safety, security and effectiveness of such capabilities will be subject to testing and assurance within those defined uses across their entire life-cycles. 
  5. Governable – The Department will design and engineer AI capabilities to fulfill their intended functions while possessing the ability to detect and avoid unintended consequences, and the ability to disengage or deactivate deployed systems that demonstrate unintended behaviour. 

 

Artificial Intelligence is used to Discover a Powerful Antibiotic

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have had a major breakthrough in the fight against antibiotic drug resistance.

MIT researchers have harnessed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology which utilizes a unique algorithm having the capability of analyzing over 100 million chemical compounds in just a few days. The team at MIT trained their AI on 2,500 molecules that included a combination of 1,700 established drugs and 800 natural products. This led the AI to discover an antibiotic compound, halicin, which has proven extremely effective in combatting many types of resistant bacteria in a novel way. Unlike most traditional antibiotics, halicin destroys bacteria by limiting the bacteria’s ability to maintain the electrochemical gradient necessary to produce energy-storing chemicals. The powerful properties of halicin was highlighted when the team at MIT ran tests alongside E.coli; E. coli did not develop any resistance to halicin even after 30 days. Conversely, E. coli developed resistance to a more conventional antibiotic, cipoflozacin, within just three days.

Antibiotic resistance has been referred to by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “one of the biggest threats to global health security and development today”, due to the threat of antibiotics becoming ineffective when they are really needed. Without the discovery of new antibiotics, the WHO has estimated 10 million lives around the world could be at risk each year from infection by 2050.

James Collins, a bioengineer at MIT said, “[halicin] is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date, due to its remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens”. Collins added, “[as a team, we] wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery.”

This breakthrough highlights the power of computer-aided drug discovery, and AI’s ability to be utilised to fast-forward the early stages of drug discovery to make a substantial impact.

NBA Uses Artificial Intelligence Developed by WSC Sports for Highlight Clips

NBA Uses Artificial Intelligence Developed by WSC Sports for Highlight Clips

With the increasing reliance on social media in today’s society, social media has quickly become an important platform to reach sports fans. The NBA has recognized this, and the ever growing need to create customized content for its fans. Since 2014, the NBA has partnered with Israeli company, WSC Sports, to experiment with artificial intelligence to analyze highlights and key moments of the game.

During All Star weekend, the NBA employed software developed by WSC Sports to create multiple clips and content for every single player on the court. Shaka Arnon, the general manager of WSC North America, described the software as “[using] machine learning or AI to take a combination of visual, audio and data cues to identify big moments in the game, as well as identify each and every play of the game, to create shareable highlights”.

Bob Carney, Senior Vice President of social and digital strategy for the NBA noted that this level of personalized content is something that the NBA would not do in the past, as it was tedious work requiring manual labour to push content out across 200 social and digital platforms across the U.S. Prior to this evolutionary software, it could “take an hour to cut a post-game highlights package”. Now, according to Carney, “it takes just a few minutes to create over 1,000 highlight packages”.

The NBA is pioneering the way in which sport and media can be integrated with technology and innovation to create more personalized content for its fans. By employing WSC Sports’ artificial intelligence software, the NBA is able to provide fans with the content they want to see, when they want at their fingertips.

WayBlazer Makes Travel Planning “Smarter” with Artificial Intelligence

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Planning a romantic trip for your partner this upcoming holiday? Maybe a family vacation to a kid-friendly resort? Or perhaps you want to take a solo trip for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure? Whatever your desired destination, we all know travel planning can be a headache. Looking online for the best deals isn’t a walk in the park either. “The average traveler searches over 30 sites before booking,” Terry Jones told Digital Journal. Founder of Travelocity.com and Kayak.com, Jones is keenly aware of the difficulties behind travel planning logistics. To improve the long-winded process, Jones together with Manoj Saxena, former General Manager of IBM Watson Solutions, merged travel planning with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and started WayBlazer.

Founded in 2014, the Austin-based software startup developed an interactive platform for travel companies to help travelers plan their next trip, whether it’s booking the flight, accommodation, tours, and so forth. However, more than just a way to find the cheapest plane tickets or hotel rooms, the AI-driven tool provides contextually relevant recommendations for the user. Unlike traditional computing, AI is able to recognize and communicate in natural languages and can therefore vet out irrelevant keywords to better grasp the kind of experience a traveler is looking for. It can sift through travel reviews, location descriptions, and blogs. Better yet, AI can also comprehend images and videos to gather even more information about a desired location.  Jones explained, “By communicating in natural language, suppliers can derive the consumer’s actual intent in trip planning (i.e. ‘I want to vacation on an island in January for my anniversary’).” WayBlazer’s technology also gets smarter with every use because of AI’s capacity to learn and acquire new knowledge.

The company offers its AI platform to existing travel companies. Most recently, Fareportal, the company behind CheapOair and OneTravel, partnered with WayBlazer and after a trial, the company was pleased with the AI technology. Fareportal founder and CEO Sam S. Jain said, “Using their artificial intelligence product to optimize our hotel offerings, we’ve seen significant improvements in engagement on our website and an average conversion lift of 10% for hotel bookings.” Notably, WayBlazer isn’t out to replace human travel agents just yet. Jones asserted that it can be used by humans. For one, the AI can help human travel agents better answer their clients’ requests, especially the more difficult ones.

Because of its ingenuity, WayBlazer received the “Top Innovator” and “People’s Choice” Awards at the Lion’s Den’s “Digital Meets Travel” competition in 2017.

Are you a software company seeking to incorporate Artificial Intelligence to improve existing software? Did you know that your experiments with AI, even if unsuccessful, are eligible for the R&D Tax Credit and you can receive up to 14% back on your expenses? To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today.

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE credits as well as CPE credits for CPA’s.  For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.

 

Worldwide Innovation Leaders Come Together Over AI

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Tech leaders Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have joined forces to form the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI) announced in September.

Just as the name suggests the organization will carry out research and development on artificial intelligence with the fundamental purpose of identifying potential AI challenges for people and society. The partnership hopes that their discoveries will effectively self-regulate the industry independent of government intervention.

Why Be Apprehensive of AI?

Artificial intelligence has enabled major improvements in areas such as manufacturing and transportation, as well as education and healthcare. Despite these developments many people are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of increasing intelligence in machines designed to think and problem solve independently.

Among experts in the industry, the concern is that these intelligent machines will continue to learn from their environment, eventually outsmarting humans. Two of these people are Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking – both who have warned of the destruction of the human race. Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford, believes these machines will supersede humans within decades.

Goals of the Partnership on AI

LeCun, Facebook’s AI research director, has said, “We aim to push new boundaries every day, not only within Facebook, but across the entire research community. To do so in partnership with these companies who share our vision will help propel the entire field forward in a thoughtful responsible way.”

Designated areas of research highlighted in Business Insider include;

  • Ethics, fairness and inclusivity;
  • Transparency , privacy and interoperability;
  • Collaboration between people and AI; and
  • Trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of technology.

The interview also included an eight point plan to benefit and empower as many people as possible, actively engage stakeholders and the public, open research to dialog, address challenges and maximize benefits, allow information to be interpretable and accessible, and to create a beneficial culture of openness.

The partnership has agreed to include academics, non-profits and other organizations such as Open AI, AAAI and AI2 in their research and findings.

Research and Development Tax Incentive

While we know many of our readers are most likely not performing research and development with Elon Musk or developing dogs with artificial intelligence, you may still be eligible to receive benefits from the R&D tax incentive.

Many companies deem themselves ineligible before reading the requirements.

If  you would like to discuss the R&D Tax Incentive further, please do not hesitate to contact one of Swanson Reed’s offices today.