ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS)

1. MANUFACTURING

In factories, machine learning and artificial neural networks are employed to support
predictive maintenance of critical industrial equipment, which can accurately predict asset
malfunction. It helps the management take timely measures to restore the equipment and
prevent costly unplanned downtime.

In quality control, AI algorithms are being used to notify manufacturing units of potential
production faults that can lead to product quality issues. Faults can include deviations from
processes, subtle anomalies in machine behaviour, change in raw materials, and so on.

2. FINANCE

(BANKING) In many scenarios, human agents are being replaced by intelligent software
robots for processing loan applications in fractions of a second. Similarly, Robo-financial
advisors are sifting through multiple levels of data in split seconds to recommend the right
investment decisions for customers.

Another important application of AI in the finance sector is fraud detection. For instance,
Mastercard uses AI-based Decision Intelligence technology to detect fraudulent transactions
by analyzing various data points.

3. HEALTHCARE

The entry of the technology giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple and IBM in the healthcare
sector holds significant importance for the industry. AI is currently being applied for a range
of healthcare needs, including data mining for identifying patterns and then carrying out the
more accurate diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions, medical imaging, medication
management, drug discovery and even robotic surgery.
A case in point in this regard is the application of IBM Watson (an AI tool) to derive the
meaning and context of a set of structured and unstructured data that might be critical for
selecting a treatment plan, and then analyze the patient’s medical record to identify a
potential treatment plan. In other words, IBM Watson functions like a human doctor.
The utilization of AI in patient diagnosis is getting progressively predominant also. This is on
the grounds that artificial intelligence software can filter through a lot of information rapidly
and offers up insight on explicit ailments and the treatment for those conditions. 

4. Customer Experience
Customer experience is rising as an early example of overcoming adversity for AI across
enterprises. While retail is the most pervasive part utilizing AI today, others are additionally
paying heed. Travel organizations, for instance, are seeing genuine value in utilizing chatbots
to create always-on, personalized concierge level service at scale. From aircrafts and lodgings
to travel offices, AI is relieving dissatisfaction during challenging travel circumstances by
understanding the context of the client’s situation and giving logically important choices to
determine the issue.

5. ENERGY AND MINING

The value of an AI system can bring to the energy market is colossal. At the point when
machine learning is applied to drilling, thermal gradients, strata permeability, pressure
differentials, and more are gathered. By analyzing this information, AI programming can
assist geoscientists with bettering assess variables, removing a portion of the guesswork out
from equipment repair and failure, unplanned downtime, and even help to determine potential
locations of new wells. AI carries better predictive innovation and productivity to mining
activities.
 DAILY APPLICATION
COMMUTING

1 – Google’s AI-Powered Predictions

Using anonymized location data from smartphones, Google Maps (Maps)

can analyze the speed of movement of traffic at any given time. And, with
its acquisition of crowdsourced traffic app Waze in 2013, Maps can more
easily incorporate user-reported traffic incidents like construction and
accidents. Access to vast amounts of data being fed to its proprietary
algorithms means Maps can reduce  commutes by suggesting the fastest
routes to and from work.

2 –  Ridesharing Apps Like Uber and Lyft

How do they determine the price of your ride? How do they minimize the
wait time once you hail a car? How do these services optimally match you
with other passengers to minimize detours? The answer to all these
questions is ML.

 Uber’s use of machine learning for ETAs for rides, estimated meal delivery
times on UberEATS, computing optimal pickup locations, as well as for
fraud detection.

3 — Commercial Flights Use an AI Autopilot

AI autopilots in commercial airlines is a  surprisingly early use of

AI technology that dates as far back as 1914, depending on how loosely
you define autopilot. The New York Times  reports that the average flight of
a Boeing plane involves only seven minutes of human-steered flight, which
is typically reserved only for takeoff and landing.

Glimpse into the future

In the future, AI will shorten your commute even further via self-driving cars
that result in up to 90% fewer accidents, more efficient ride sharing to
reduce the number of cars on the road by up to 75%, and smart traffic
lights that reduce wait times by 40% and overall travel time by 26% in a
pilot study.
Email
1 – Spam Filters

Your email inbox seems like an unlikely place for AI, but the technology is
largely powering one of its most important features: the spam filter. Simple
rules-based filters (i.e. “filter out messages with the words ‘online
pharmacy’ and ‘Nigerian prince’ that come from unknown addresses”)
aren’t effective against spam, because spammers can quickly update their
messages to work around them. Instead, spam filters must
continuously learn from a variety of signals, such as the words in the
message, message metadata (where it’s sent from, who sent it, etc.).

It must further personalize its results based on your own definition of what
constitutes spam—perhaps that daily deals email that you consider spam is
a welcome sight in the inboxes of others. Through the use of machine
learning algorithms, Gmail successfully filters 99.9% of spam. 

2 – Smart Email Categorization

Gmail uses a similar approach to categorize your emails into primary,

social, and promotion inboxes, as well as labeling emails as important. In a
research paper titled, “The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox”, Google
outlines its machine learning approach and notes “a huge variation
between user preferences for volume of important mail…Thus, we need
some manual intervention from users to tune their threshold. When a user
marks messages in a consistent direction, we perform a real-time
increment to their threshold.” Every time you mark an email as important,
Gmail learns. The researchers tested the effectiveness of Priority Inbox on
Google employees and found that those with Priority Inbox “spent 6% less
time reading email overall, and 13% less time reading unimportant email.”

Glimpse into the future

Can your inbox reply to emails for you? Google thinks so, which is why
it  introduced smart reply toInbox in 2015, a next-generation email
interface. Smart reply uses machine learning to automatically suggest three
different brief (but customized) responses to answer the email. As of early
2016, 10% of mobile Inbox users’ emails were sent via smart reply. In the
near future, smart reply will be able to provide increasingly complex
responses. Google has already demonstrated its intentions in this area
withAllo, a new instant messaging app which can use smart reply to
provide both text and emoji responses.
Grading and Assessment   
1 –Plagiarism Checkers

Many high school and college students are familiar with services
like Turnitin, a popular tool used by instructors to analyze students’ writing
for plagiarism. While Turnitin doesn’t reveal precisely how it detects
plagiarism, research demonstrates how ML can be used to develop a
plagiarism detector.

Historically, plagiarism detection for regular text (essays, books, etc.) relies
on a having a massive database of reference materials to compare to the
student text; however, ML can help detect the plagiarizing of sources that
are not located within the database, such as sources in foreign languages
or older sources that have not been digitized. For instance, two researchers
used ML to predict, with 87% accuracy, when source code had been
plagiarized. They looked at a variety of stylistic factors that could be unique
to each programmer, such as average length of line of code, how much
each line was indented, how frequent code comments were, and so on.

The algorithmic key to plagiarism is the similarity function, which outputs a

numeric estimate of how similar two documents are. An optimal similarity
function not only is accurate in determining whether two documents are
similar, but also efficient in doing so. A brute force search comparing every
string of text to every other string of text in a document database will have
a high accuracy, but be far too computationally expensive to use in
practice. One MIT paper highlights the possibility of using machine learning
to optimize this algorithm. The optimal approach will most likely involve a
combination of man and machine. Instead of reviewing every single paper
for plagiarism or blindly trusting an AI-powered plagiarism detector, an
instructor can manually review any papers flagged by the algorithm while
ignoring the rest.

2 –Robo-readers

Essay grading is very labor intensive, which has encouraged researchers

and companies to build essay-grading AIs. While their adoption varies
among classes and educational institutions, it’s likely that you (or a student
you know) has interacted with these “robo-readers’ in some way. The
Graduate Record Exam (GRE), the primary test used for graduate
school, grades essays using one human reader and one robo-
reader called e-Rater. If the scores differ substantially, a second human
reader is brought in to settle the discrepancy. This addresses the primary
concern with robo-readers: if students can deduce the heuristics e-
Rater’s use for determining their grade, they could easily exploit them to
write nonsensical essays that would still score highly. This hybrid approach
contrasts with how the ETS handles the SAT, where two human graders
evaluate essays and a third is brought in if the scores differ substantially
between the two humans. The synergistic approach in the former shows
that by pairing human intelligence with artificial intelligence, the overall
grading system costs less and accomplishes more.

Glimpse into the future

There are many promising avenues for AI to improve education in the
future. One-size-fits-all classes may be replaced by personalized, adaptive
learning that is tailored to each student’s individual strength and
weaknesses. ML may also be used to identify at-risk students early on so
that schools can focus extra resources on those students and decrease
dropout rates.

Banking/Personal Finance
One of Emerj’s most popular guides is on machine learning in finance.
While the guide discusses machine learning in an industry context, your
regular, everyday financial transactions are also heavily reliant on machine
learning.

1 – Mobile Check Deposits

Most large banks offer the ability to deposit checks through a smartphone
app, eliminating a need for customers to physically deliver a check to the
bank. According to a 2014 SEC filing, the vast majority of major banks rely
on technology developed by Mitek, which uses AI and ML to decipher and
convert handwriting on checks into text via OCR. 

2 – Fraud Prevention

How can a financial institution determine if a transaction is fraudulent? In

most cases, the daily transaction volume is far too high for humans to
manually review each transaction. Instead, AI is used to create systems
that learn what types of transactions are fraudulent. FICO, the company
that creates the well-known credit ratings used to determine
creditworthiness, uses neural networks to predict fraudulent transactions.
Factors that may affect the neural network’s final output include recent
frequency of transactions, transaction size, and the kind of retailer involved.

3 – Credit Decisions
Whenever you apply for a loan or credit card, the financial institution must
quickly determine whether to accept your application and if so, what
specific terms (interest rate, credit line amount, etc.) to offer. FICO uses
ML both in developing your FICO score, which most banks use to make
credit decisions, and in determining the specific risk assessment for
individual customers. MIT researchers found that machine learning could
be used to reduce a bank’s losses on delinquent customers by up to 25%.

Glimpse into the future

Can a robot give you sound investing advice? That’s the premise behind
upstarts like Wealthfront and Betterment, which attempt to automate the
best practices of seasoned investors and offer them to customers at a
much lower cost than traditional fund managers. In early 2016, Wealthfront
announced it was taking an AI-first approach, promising “an advice engine
rooted in artificial intelligence and modern APIs, an engine that we believe
will deliver more relevant and personalized advice than ever before.” While
there is no data on the long-term performance of robo-advisors (Betterment
was founded in 2008, Wealthfront in 2011), they will become the norm for
regular people looking to invest their savings. This is already happening
with younger people—in the above announcement, Wealthfront notes that
60% of its customers are under the age of 35.

Examples of Artificial Intelligence: Home

Social Networking
1 – Facebook

When you upload photos to Facebook, the service automatically highlights

faces and suggests friends To tag. How can it instantly identify which of
your friends is in the photo? Facebook uses AI to recognize faces. In a
short video highlighting their AI research (below), Facebook discusses the
use of artificial neural networks—ML algorithms that mimic the structure of
the human brain—to power facial recognition software. The company has
invested heavily in this area not only within Facebook, but also through the
acquisitions of facial-recognition startups like Face.com, which Facebook
acquired in 2012 for a rumored $60M, Masquerade (2016, undisclosed
sum),  and Faciometrics (2016, undisclosed sum).

Facebook also uses AI to personalize your newsfeed and ensure you’re

seeing posts that interest you, as discussed in an Emerj interview with
Facebook’s Hussein Mehanna. And, of particular business interest to
Facebook is showing ads that are relevant to your interests. Better targeted
ads mean you’re more likely to click them and buy something from the
advertisers—and when you do, Facebook gets paid. In the first quarter of
2016, Facebook and Google secured a total of 85% of the online ad market
—precisely because of deeply-targeted advertisements.

In June 2016, Facebook announced a new AI initiative: DeepText, a text

understanding engine that, the company claims “can understand with near-
human accuracy the textual content of several thousand posts per second,
spanning more than 20 languages.” DeepText is used in Facebook
Messenger to detect intent—for instance, by allowing you to hail an Uber
from within the app when you message “I need a ride” but not when you
say, “I like to ride donkeys.” DeepText is also used for automating the
removal of spam, helping popular public figures sort through the millions of
comments on their posts to see those most relevant, identify for sale posts
automatically and extract relevant information, and identify and surface
content in which you might be interested.

2 – Pinterest

Pinterest uses computer vision, an application of AI where computers are

taught to “see,” in order to automatically identify objects in images (or
“pins”) and then recommend visually similar pins. Other applications of
machine learning at Pinterest include spam prevention, search and
discovery, ad performance and monetization, and email marketing.

3 – Instagram

Instagram, which Facebook acquired in 2012, uses machine learning to

identify the contextual meaning of emoji, which have been steadily
replacing slang (for instance, a laughing emoji could replace “lol”). By
algorithmically identifying the sentiments behind emojis, Instagram can
create and auto-suggest emojis and emoji hashtags. This may seem like a
trivial application of AI, but Instagram has seen a massive increase in emoji
use among all demographics, and being able to interpret and analyze it at
large scale via this emoji-to-text translation sets the basis for further
analysis on how people use Instagram.

4 – Snapchat

Snapchat introduced facial filters, called Lenses, in 2015. These filters track
facial movements, allowing users to add animated effects or digital masks
that adjust when their faces moved. This technology is  powered by the
2015 acquisition of Looksery (for a rumored $150 million), a Ukranian
company with patents on using machine learning to track movements in
video.

Glimpse into the future

Facebook is betting that the future of messaging will involve conversing

with AI chatbots. In early 2015, it  acquired Wit.ai, an engine that allows
developers to create bots that easily integrate natural language processing
into their software. A few months later, it opened its messenger platform to
developers, allowing anyone to build a chatbot and integrate Wit.ai’s bot
training capability to more easily create conversational bots. Slack, a social
messaging tool typically used in the workplace, also allows third parties to
incorporate AI-powered chatbots and has even invested in companies that
make them. Soon, your shopping, errands, and day-to-day tasks may be
completed within a conversation with an AI chatbot on your favorite social
network.

Online Shopping
1 –Search

Your Amazon searches (“ironing board”, “pizza stone”, “Android charger”,

etc.) quickly return a list of the most relevant products related to your
search. Amazon doesn’t reveal exactly how its doing this, but in a
description of its product search technology, Amazon notes that its
algorithms “automatically learn to combine multiple relevance features. Our
catalog’s structured data provides us with many such relevance features
and we learn from past search patterns and adapt to what is important to
our customers.”

2 –Recommendations

You see recommendations for products you’re interested in as “customers

who viewed this item also viewed” and  “customers who bought this item
also bought”, as well as via personalized recommendations on the home
page,  bottom of item pages, and through email. Amazon uses artificial
neural networks to generate these product recommendations.

While Amazon doesn’t reveal what proportion of its sales come from
recommendations, research has shown that recommenders increase
sales (in this linked study, by 5.9%, but in other studies recommenders
have shown up to a 30% increase in sales) and that a product
recommendation carries the same sales weight as a two-star increase in
average rating (on a five-star scale).
3 – (More) Fraud Protection

Machine learning is used for fraud prevention in online credit card

transactions. Fraud is the primary reason for online payment processing
being more costly for merchants than in-person transactions. Square,
a credit card processor popular among small businesses, charges 2.75%
for card-present transactions, compared to 3.5% + 15 cents for card-absent
transactions. AI is deployed to not only prevent fraudulent transactions, but
also minimize the number of legitimate transactions declined due to being
falsely identified as fraudulent.

In a press release announcing the rollout of its AI technology, MasterCard

noted that 13 times more revenue is lost to false declines than to fraud. By
utilizing AI that can learn your purchasing habits, credit card processors
minimize the probability of falsely declining your card while maximizing the
probability of preventing somebody else from fraudulently charging it.

Glimpse into the future

The key to online shopping has been personalization; online retailers

increase revenue by helping you find and buy the products you’re
interested in. We may soon see retailers take it one step further and design
your entire experience individually for you. Google already does this with
search, even with users who are logged out, so this is well within the realm
of possibility for retailers. Startups likeLiftIgniter offer “personalization as a
service” to online businesses. Others, like Optimizely, allow businesses to
run extensive “A/B tests”, where businesses can run multiple versions of
their sites simultaneously to determine which results in the most engaged
users.

Mobile Use
1 –Voice-to-Text

A standard feature on smartphones today is voice-to-text. By pressing a

button or saying a particular phrase (“Ok Google”, for example), you can
start speaking and your phone converts the audio into text. Nowadays, this
is a relatively routine task, but for many years, accurate automated
transcription was beyond the abilities of even the most advanced
computers. Google uses artificial neural networks to power voice search.
Microsoft claims to have developed a speech-recognition system that can
transcribe conversation slightly more accurately than humans.
 2 – Smart Personal Assistants

Now that voice-to-text technology is accurate enough to rely on for basic

conversation, it has become the control interface for a new generation of
smart personal assistants. The first iteration were simpler phone assistants
like Siri and Google Now (now succeeded by the more
sophisticated Google Assistant), which could perform internet searches, set
reminders, and integrate with your calendar.

Amazon expanded upon this model with the announcement of

complimentary hardware and software components: 

 Alexa, an AI-powered personal assistant that accepts voice commands

to create to-do lists, order items online, set reminders, and answer questions
(via internet searches)

 Echo (and later, Dot) smart speakers that allow you to integrate Alexa
into your living room and use voice commands to ask natural language
questions, play music, order pizza, hail an Uber, and integrate with smart
home devices.

Microsoft has followed suit with Cortana, its own AI assistant that comes
pre-loaded on Windows computers and Microsoft smartphones.