CSC 320 A.I. Blog

Medical artificial intelligence is said to be one of the most promising health innovations thanks to its wide range of applications. From reading CT scans to early detection of disease, the use of AI in the healthcare industry can provide expert-level accuracy while delivering a more comprehensive and cheaper patient care. Researches have stated that these medical AI, with the capability to do 80% of what doctors can , will pervade 90% of the hospitals. That being said, can AI outperform medical doctors? So, what are the potential AI-driven technologies that are reshaping healthcare? In other words, how far has medical AI got? In 2017, a robot in the United Kingdom, developed by Babylon Health scored 81% on “a representative sample set of questions” from the MRCGP exam, the final written test on diagnostics used to certify doctors ( Source ). Some of the most innovative applications of medical AI lie in the field of medical imaging. For example, IBM’s Watson can recommen...

Benefits of a Humble Intelligence: It's not uncommon for people today to interact with artificial intelligence. With easy access to internet chat bots, video games, and smart phones; it's likely that you've already spent a lot of time talking to, or otherwise interacting with, machines. With their growing abundance in mind, researchers at Yale University sought to learn more about how these machines influence human interaction with other humans. ( Source )  Margaret L. Traeger, Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS) and lead author of the study , explains that "[b] ecause social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in human society, people are encountering them in stores, hospitals and other everyday places. This makes understanding how they shape human behavior important... We know that robots can influence the behavior of humans they interact with directly, but how robots affect the way humans engage with each ot...

There are several companies in the world who are in the race to get their self-driving cars to be commonly seen on the roads the quickest. Many of these companies are under-estimating the time it will take for their vehicles to be fully autonomous. Tesla, for example, has under-estimated multiple times about the time it would take them to create a fully autonomous car ( source ). Nonetheless, there are still several contributions that self-driving vehicles have made to the world, even the roads aren't yet filled with them. For example, some self-driving vehicles have made a large impact on the current COVID-19 pandemic, in that they are able to deliver supplies to hospitals without the risk of human interaction ( source ). "Beep" self-driving car used for transporting supplies to hospitals across the United States. ( source ) The self-driving vehicle, named “Beep” (developed by NAVYA), traveled about “150 miles from the company’s headquarters in Orlando” to deliv...

Companies started to utilize AI in hopes of finding a treatment for the current outbreak of COVID-19. A London-based company BenevolentAI and US company Google are among the companies that are using AI in hopes of finding a treatment for the virus ( source ). Both companies rely on machine learning patterns based on the existing and new data that is being feed to the AI.                                       Knowledge Graph Example ( source )             BenevolentAI was focused on chronic disease before the outbreak but was able to train it’s AI to work on COVID-19. They were able to do this due to volume of data that we are getting from around the world regarding the virus. The company’s AI, using knowledge graph , can look through large a...

Some recent blogs about COVID-19 have investigated the possibility of utilizing artificial intelligence to fight COVID-19 in more direct ways (predicting fatal cases ( source ), testing COVID-19 using only chest X-ray ( source )) which are very crucial to determine the outcome of this fight against the virus. Even though these posts provide important insights into the situation, by looking at the entire situation from a different viewpoint, one issue that will only escalate over time is goods distribution, especially medical equipment and essential items.  If you are staying in the United States right now, you might know that toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and some other essential products are out of stock pretty much everywhere. In all honesty, panic buying can be accused of most of these purchases and one might arguably defend themselves from the virus without stocking up these essential items since there are a lot of alternatives (body wash, bidets,...). Empty shelves a...

The idea of artificial intelligence being used to diagnose and treat disease has been used in science fiction for decades, with movies like Prometheus  and Elysium  (seen below) serving as examples. In these films, machines exist that can rapidly detect and treat illness as well as injury--and even perform a Cesarean section on a Xenomorph growing in your chest! While these machines may seem like typical science fiction nonsense to many, they are not as improbable as you might think. source source COVID-19, or coronavirus, has overwhelmed medical facilities across the globe, and the sheer number of patients is too much for many hospitals and triage centers to handle. Also, due to the novelty of the coronavirus, doctors are unprepared to make hard decisions regarding which patients need ventilators or respirators which puts patients at risk. According to an article in  Computers, Material, and Continua , a team of computer scientists from Columbia University...

In a conversation about A.I., there is always one question that gets asked, and that is, are machines intelligent. In our AI class we have had multiple debates and conversations about this particular issue, but we never really got to a point we all agree on. So are machines intelligent? If so what is intelligence? How do we define it? And how do we test it? Tests such as the Turing test and the Chinese room have used approaches such as conversation to test that and help the AI world define that. So what is next?                           Source  Well Google believes they have achieved the first step in making or distinguishing between what it means to be an intelligent machine.  Google researchers have built a four-legged robot capable of learning how to walk without any human interference. Google's Robotics Team and the Georgia Institute of T...

                              ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Artificial Intelligence, one of the most recent and powerful inventions of humankind, has come into play to fight against the infectious lethal COVID-19 virus.               On February 29, 2020, Washington state confirmed its first death of a patient suffering from the coronavirus. Just 2 weeks later, the state reported a shocking statistic: 40 deaths and more than 600 confirmed cases of the virus. Washingtonians started to call their local hospitals for answering questions about the symptoms and even showing up at ER for medical check-ups. This influx of calls and ‘patients’ not only overloaded local hospitals’ services, but also put lives of many people under risk since they could not reach the health experts to receive appropriate medical advice/...