Insights May 31st, 2017

In the EXPONENTIAL MINDS’ Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – AI Could Bring World Peace we see an opportunity for world peace, screwing up medical diagnoses, Harley Davidson sells more, and Nikolas Badminton leads an expert panel on AI.

Could artificial intelligence lead to world peace?

An audience of international peace brokers have gathered inside a room in the historic House of Estates. They have come from South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Ukraine, Colombia and elsewhere to hear a scientist speak.
That scientist is Timo Honkela, and his keynote speech on the second day of April’s National Dialogues conference is titled Peace from a Different Perspective – a Dialogue of a Million People.
It’s an intriguing topic, particularly from a specialist in artificial intelligence.
But 54-year-old Honkela is working on a machine that he hopes will facilitate world peace.
“World peace would be a good goal to work for in my remaining days,” he says, smiling over a cup of coffee during a break in the conference.
His humour is as dark as his coffee. Honkela has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, so he has little time left to solve an intractable problem that has plagued humankind for millennia.

Read more at Aljazeera

When artificial intelligence botches your medical diagnosis, who’s to blame?

Artificial intelligence is not just creeping into our personal lives and workplaces—it’s also beginning to appear in the doctor’s office. The prospect of being diagnosed by an AI might feel foreign and impersonal at first, but what if you were told that a robot physician was more likely to give you a correct diagnosis?
Medical error is currently the third leading cause of death in the US, and as many as one in six patients in the British NHS receive incorrect diagnoses. With statistics like these, it’s unsurprising that researchers at Johns Hopkins University believe diagnostic errors to be “the next frontier for patient safety.”
Enter artificial intelligence. AI can potentially transform medical practice and drastically reduce the number of medical errors, as well as provide a host of other benefits. In some areas, AI systems are already capable of matching, or even exceeding, the performances of experienced clinicians. In an interview for Smart Planet, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, co-author of The Second Machine Age, is convinced, “If it’s not already the world’s best diagnostician, it will be soon.”
Read more at Quartz

How Harley-Davidson Used Artificial Intelligence to Increase New York Sales Leads by 2,930%

For Harley-Davidson, AI evaluated what was working across digital channels and what wasn’t, and used what it learned to create more opportunities for conversion. In other words, the system allocated resources only to what had been proven to work, thereby increasing digital marketing ROI. Eliminating guesswork, gathering and analyzing enormous volumes of data, and optimally leveraging the resulting insights is the AI advantage.
Marketers have traditionally used buyer personas – broad behavior-based customer profiles – as guides to find new ones. These personas are created partly out of historic data, and partly by guesswork, gut feel, and the marketers’ experiences. Companies that design their marketing campaigns around personas tend to use similarly blunt tools (such as gross sales) – and more guesswork – to assess what’s worked and what hasn’t.
AI systems don’t need to create personas; they find real customers in the wild by determining what actual online behaviors have the highest probability of resulting in conversions, and then finding potential buyers online who exhibit these behaviors.
Read more at Harvard Business Review

Nikolas Badminton Leads an Expert Panel on Artificial Intelligence

In Spring 2017, Feedzai, a leading data science company shaping the future of fraud detection in commerce, and BayPay Forum, a leading business and event network for payment, commerce and Fintech executives, hosted an engaging evening at Wells Fargo to discuss the real world application of AI across payments and banking.
Nikolas Badminton hosted the great discussion and was joined by: