Those Incredible AI Flying Machines | Stephen Wise | Integration Professionals

Today start-ups are promoting flying vehicles that do not require a human pilot. These innovative companies are applying their products to improve productivity and profitability. The business case is easier to understand then the technologies involved – an AI enabled flying vehicle could work longer, faster, and more reliably on certain repeatable tasks then a drone with a human pilot.

A drone without AI is a device with sensors collecting data - a human pilot is still needed. A drone with hard-coded responses to given conditions (such as maintaining height given changing terrain) is fun but not equipped for demanding tasks.

AI enabled capabilities allow human-like performance in reasoning, problem-solving, and planning for specific tasks without ongoing human intervention. No one wants to look at thousands of images 24 X 7 to pick up anomalies. The ability to give the drone a general mission and specific tasks to be completed in a safe and reliable way opens the door for commercial applications.

Farmers could continually scout their fields to test for issues related to disease, irrigation, or infestation. For example, follow the crop furrows and identify sectors that require additional spraying. Energy companies could monitor their transmission lines and pipelines for early signs of damage. For example, do a high-speed pass monitoring for signs of encroachment or corrosion and a repeat detailed pass when certain warning signs are found. These are not new practises – but in the future, decisions can be made based on acquiring more complete data faster, and less expensively.

Tesla received a patent[1] for controlling his boat but did not achieve commercial success on that one. New high value enterprise applications for AI enabled flying machines are imminent. What is your company doing in order to participate?

Stephen D Wise
Integration Professionals
Dramatically Improve Traction

[1] Method of And Apparatus For Controlling Mechanism Of Moving Vessels Or Vehicles. Nikola Tesla of New York, N.Y Patent No. 613,809 (1898)

Disruption: Connected Healthcare | Stephen Wise | Integration Professionals

Rapidly converging technology advancements are disrupting all industries. Admittedly, my eyes glaze over from time to time when learning about BlockChain or Cyber-Security. I didn’t need these technologies before – why do I need them now? However, disruptive interventions in Health very real.

When I was in middle school, I had a friend living with Diabetes. This was a smart, careful, and aware kid. He was watchful with his diet and measured his glucose and administered his insulin faithfully. Yet, it was frequent that his blood sugar levels would get out of whack; it was very dangerous life-threatening condition. It has been about 100 years since Banting and Best discovered Insulin at University of Toronto, but we are still living in the dark ages managing the condition.

Consider the future: Aiden is a grade ten student diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes about two years ago. He wears a patch that has a sensor and transmitter that continuously monitors his glucose levels. His phone receives the data, sends immediate alerts when the rate of change exceeds a trigger level, all data is sent to the cloud for storage and analysis. Also, his parents and care-givers have access to the data and alerts.

Aiden is part of a virtual support tele-medicine group. The facilitator is a trained professional and regular video calls on Aiden’s phone include education, coaching, treatment adjustment, and monitoring. The group is designed to help Aiden successfully manage his condition and avoid complications. The facilitator maintains helpful information online so that Aiden can access it in between calls.

As part of the long-term play, Medical researchers collect and combine the data from all Diabetes patients. They use Artificial Intelligence predictions to continually look for opportunities to improve treatment and consequently make unexpected gains helping patients to reduce their symptoms.

Consider a second example. Patients with Atrial Fibrillation wear a device on their chest and go about their daily activities. Leveraging machine leaning and artificial intelligence and huge amounts of data collected from all patients, the system has predictive capabilities and accurately detects the beginning and end of arrhythmias. The benefit is improved clinical data for researchers and doctors to determine an appropriate treatment approach.

High-quality and affordable healthcare has been in crisis for several decades. I believe this is a problem that can be solved over the next twenty years. The two examples above are in the field now. Applying Real-time IoT monitoring and cloud storage, Machine Language, Artificial Intelligence to treatment of Cancer, Mental Health, elderly care will force out inefficiencies in the system driving the overall cost of healthcare to manageable levels.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

Artificial Intelligence ABC | Stephen Wise

According to Google's CEO, “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire”. The head of Tesla said AI was probably humanities “biggest existential threat”.

Artificial Intelligence isn’t a new concept. Check out the beautifully filmed movie, Metropolis, from 1927. There are other older references in literature. There are also many more recent research and practical applications of "Artificial Intelligence" over the last thirty years.

Today, it is a field of computer science dedicated to solving certain problems which otherwise require human intelligence – specifically, pattern recognition, learning, and generalization. The leap forward in the last few years is that we are gaining the ability to collect, store and analyze ever ginormous amounts of data.

Yesterday, we could write a computer program to predict when it is a good time to cross-sell or up-sell a specific product to a consumer. For example, based on some demographic data and purchase history. The explosion of travel/points programs in the 90's are good examples of this. You agreed to provide your purchase history and demographic data in return for points and the sponsor of the program received data useful for targeted marketing. In these programs, all the rules were hard-coded.

Tomorrow, we can start with the original algorithm to predict the cross-sell opportunity. Then merge it with ever ginormous data collected and the ability to analyze for new patterns. Instead of relying on the initial algorithm to predict the sales opportunity, the system will rely on additional characteristics that it detects and validates within the very data to alter the business rules it relies on. 

Cool.

But how will it impact the industries around us?

According to the first futurist I followed, Roy Amara, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run," coined by Roy Amara, past president of The Institute for the Future.

Here are sample industries and applications. Wherever we have complex systems – people can get overwhelmed by the amount of data and selecting the best course of action. AI is being applied in research setting today in many fields to use what we already know in better and faster ways.

Keep in mind Roy Amara.

1. Medical
   1. Diagnosis, Drug design/mfr, ICU monitoring
2. Education
   1. Guided learning, Automated testing and marking
3. Manufacturing
   1. Quality checking, Supply-chain communication, Maintenance detection
4. Energy
   1. Demand prediction, Supply distribution

I ask that you take a few minutes right now. Take a sheet of paper, write down the industry you are in at the top. Along the side, list of major business processes you have along the left. Then, along the right, write down some notes about cost savings you could reap if you were able to improve your ability to predict the issues during the process or the outcome.

It may be that one day, the implementation of AI to that process will lead to exponential benefits in your business.

P.S. Feel free to share your analysis via email – I’m interested your findings.

Stephen D Wise

Stephen Wise Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

Trust us. We have block chain and we are here to help.

Block chain's great Promise

Middlemen are part of our daily lives. The great promise of block chain technology is eliminating the middleman. The original / most famous application of block chain is cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. With no middleman, for example, with no bank to have to deal with, we could avoid those annoying fee’s and charges. Sounds great! Really? Who is going to do the work to provide a monthly statement of all your deposits and withdrawals? Who is going to do the work to lend money so you can buy a house or car, or pay for the hundreds of smaller purchases you make? Who am I going to call if I am having trouble logging in and can’t access my money? Who am I going to call if my bank engages in fraudulent activity?

Block chain's technology

Block chain uses crowd sourcing, massive computing resources, and math. The result is a process to allow us to exchange value directly with each other, without using a middle man. You might think we do this already. For example, if I make a deal with the neighbour to cut my grass for $25, you may think there is no middleman. But there is a middleman. I can’t pay unless I deposit my pay cheque and take out money from my middleman/bank. The promise of Block chain is that we can eliminate the middleman and instead of using a middleman/bank to keep track of our money, we will use the crowd to keep track of our money. The block chain response is something like, ‘Isn’t this going to be fantastic? We will deal direct with each other and rely on math and big computers as a proxy for trusting our bank/middleman’. This is not so fantastic. In the current models, we have no way to reverse a fraudulent transaction, no way to track money laundering, and no way to stop terrorist financing. Governments and banks aren’t going to hand over the keys to the economy so easily.

Peak frenzy

We are approaching block chain peak frenzy. I know because I failed my second-year statistics course but still read Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper on distributed databases, probability, and time-stamping. The trouble right now is the conversation is being dominated by charlatans jumping onto the next big thing. If not charlatans it is geniuses interested in the math, or disaffected folks interested in disrupting big corporations. Or, all the above.

Steve Jobs

Something big is happening but block chain is missing it’s Steve Jobs. I think block chain’s Steve jobs will emerge from Toronto, but that is for another article.