Impact of AI on Business and Society

Purpose, a well-defined problem, and trust from people are important factors to any system, especially those that employ AI. Chris Butler leads you through exercises that borrow from the principles of design thinking to help you create more impactful solutions and better team alignment. Read more.

In neuroscience, the wiring diagram of the brain is a connectome. Jana Eggers and Elsie Kenyon built a connectome of the AI/ML "brain" via arXiv papers. They share the results of how papers, topics, keywords, authors, institutions, publication dates, citations, and more are linked and with what strength, offering interesting insights on how the AI research world is connected. Read more.

Drawing on the McKinsey Global Institute's groundbreaking research, Mehdi Miremadi explores commonly asked questions relating to AI and its impact on work, including: How big is the AI opportunity? Which sectors and functions will capture the most value? As AI takes hold, will there be enough jobs for humans? What will they be, and what skills are needed? What are the implications for leaders? Read more.

Danny Lange discusses the role of intelligence in biological evolution and learning and demonstrates why a game engine is the perfect virtual biodome for AI’s evolution. You'll discover how the scale and speed of simulations is changing the game of AI while learning about new developments in reinforcement learning. Read more.

Here at the dawn of the cognitive era, we must focus our design talents upon a new type relationship with machines—machines that can hold a conversation, interpret nonverbal cues, and draw from vast stores of human knowledge. But what should these relationships look like? Adam Cutler explains why designing for AI requires new considerations and new rules. Read more.

Data-driven companies making intelligent products must design for security and privacy to be competitive globally. Amanda Casari details the high-level changes that EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant businesses face and how this translates to teams designing products driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Read more.

Rachael Rekart offers an overview of Autodesk Virtual Agent (AVA), which has revolutionized the way Autodesk approaches customer service. Customers chat with AVA as they would a human, in natural language, and AVA processes transactions quickly, returns accurate answers, or gathers information to pass to a human counterpart to resolve the query. Read more.

Allison Duettmann offers an overview of AI philosophy and explains why traditional approaches need updating, because they pave the way for a singleton AI that will hardly be benevolent. Allison then discusses potential alternative AI safety strategies and their shortcomings and shares a brief survey of interesting problems in AI safety and what we can hope for if we get it right. Read more.

The future isn’t about AI or machine learning; it’s about human-machine teaming. Candace Worley explains why, as long as there are human adversaries behind cybercrime and cyberwarfare, there will always be a critical need for the human beings teamed with machines in cybersecurity. Read more.

Join in for a panel discussion on how AI and data are transforming the enterprise as we know it. Panelists will discuss data, talent, and technology challenges, enterprise adoption barriers, areas of disruption, and talent concerns (enterprises' willingness to pay) as AI turns the enterprise world as we know inside and out. Read more.

Susan Etlinger explores how AI fundamentally changes the relationship between people and businesses, lays out its risks and opportunities, and demonstrates emerging best practices for designing customer-centric and ethical products and services. Read more.

Deep learning (DL) has transformed much of AI and demonstrated how machine learning can make a difference in the real world. With DL, the massive expansion of available training data and compute gave neural networks a new instantiation that significantly increased their power. Evolutionary computation (EC) is on the verge of a similar breakthrough. Risto Miikkulainen explains why. Read more.

Executives are often asked to "innovate with AI," but barriers to successful adoption for most enterprises are organizational, not technical. Mariya Yao explains why effective AI requires not only technical talent but extended interdisciplinary coordination between teams, investments in retraining your workforces at all levels, and cultivation of an experimental, data-driven culture. Read more.

Much attention in enterprise AI today is focused on automation. Jake Saper explains why the more interesting applications focus on worker augmentation and offers an overview of coaching networks, which gather data from a distributed network of workers and identify the best techniques for getting things done. Read more.

Leveraging structured knowledge will be a critical ingredient in the design of the next wave of intelligent applications. Mike Tung offers an overview of the current open source and commercial knowledge graphs and explains how consumer and business applications are already taking advantage of these to provide intelligent experiences and enhanced business efficiency. Read more.

Video games have used sophisticated AI techniques for decades to drive everything from area design to navigation to enemies to conversation and planning. Paris Buttfield-Addison, Mars Geldard, and Tim Nugent offer an overview of the history of AI in video games and explain how the needs that drove AI advancement in the game development world map to almost-identical problems in the real world. Read more.

Jake Porway sheds light on AI’s true potential to impact the world in a positive way. Drawing on his experience as the head of DataKind, an organization applying AI for social good, Jake shares best practices, discusses the importance of using human-centered design principles, and addresses ethical concerns and challenges encountered when using AI to tackle complex humanitarian issues. Read more.

AI-powered chatbots are increasingly becoming viable solutions for customer service use cases. Technology leaders must consider adopting a multichannel chatbot strategy to avoid siloed chatbot solutions. Sharad Gupta shares a framework to ensure long-term strategic investment in chatbots. Read more.

AI - everyone is talking about it but who is actually doing it (and generating business results). This session takes an industry by industry perspective on true AI adoption disambiguating the hype from the reality, the theoretical from the practical and the research labs from ROI. Read more.

AI possesses an incredible potential to help address the challenges of our planet. Drawing on her experience as the head of AI foundations and codirector of Science for Social Good at IBM Research, Aleksandra Mojsilovic shares innovative examples of applying AI to humanitarian problems and discusses gaps that challenge us from making larger impact with our work. Read more.

For AI to serve each individual customer, we need much more complex natural language understanding, ideas, and behaviors. Will compositional deep learning put us on a new curve? Read more.

Microsoft's AI for Earth team helps NGOs apply AI to challenges in conservation biology and environmental science. Jennifer Marsman outlines Microsoft’s objectives for AI for Earth and highlights recent successes in applying AI to agriculture, poacher detection, animal identification in camera trap and citizen scientist photography, and more. Read more.

We haven't figured out how to make the perfect robot tutors. But we have figured out how make them much more effective in improving student learning outcomes with modern AI techniques. Varun Arora covers some of those important techniques, along with real-world examples. Read more.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery. Online sex advertisement activity on portals like Backpage provide important clues that, if harnessed and analyzed at scale, can help resource-strapped law enforcement crack down on trafficking activity. Mayank Kejriwal details an AI architecture called DIG that law enforcement have used (and are using) to combat sex trafficking. Read more.