MILLIONS OF DOLLARS are being spent to develop artificial intelligence software that reads x-rays and other medical scans in hopes it can spot things doctors look for but sometimes miss, such as lung cancers. A new study reports that these algorithms can also see something doctors don’t look for on such scans: a patient’s race.
The study authors and other medical AI experts say the results make it more crucial than ever to check that health algorithms perform fairly on people with different racial identities. Complicating that task: The authors themselves aren’t sure what cues the algorithms they created use to predict a person’s race.
Evidence that algorithms can read race from a person’s medical scans emerged from tests on five types of imagery used in radiology research, including chest and hand x-rays and mammograms. Read More
Daily Archives: August 10, 2021
The smart home is flailing as a concept—because it sucks
A couple of weeks ago, the tech industry group Consumer Technology Association (CTA) released a predictably cheery report on the state of consumer technology. It forecasted record-breaking revenues of $487 billion this year, with laptops, wireless earbuds, personal fitness devices, and 5G phones singled out for especially strong growth.
Yet tucked into that upbeat forecast was a spot of dreariness: Smart home devices, once hailed as tech’s next big computing platform, would experience flat revenues of $15 billion in 2021, with unit sales up 11%.
The CTA says its stagnant forecast is merely a function of competition, as an influx of device makers drive down the cost of hardware. But as someone who’s been living with various smart home gadgets for several years now, I have a different theory: They’re just not worth a big investment unless you have a limitless supply of time and patience. Read More
Eden AI launches platform to unify ML APIs
Large cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM offer APIs enterprises can use to take advantage of powerful AI models. But comparing these models — both in terms of performance and cost — can be challenging without thorough planning. Moreover, the siloed nature of the APIs makes it difficult to unify services from different vendors into a single app or workflow without custom engineering work, which can be costly.
These challenges inspired Samy Melaine and Taha Zemmouri to found Eden AI (previously AI-Compare) in 2020. The platform draws on AI APIs from a range of sources to allow companies to mix and match models to suit their use case. Eden AI recently launched what it calls an AI management platform, which the company claims simplifies the use — and integration — of various models for end users. Read More
South Africa Grants World’s First Patent for AI-Created Invention
On July 28, the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission of South Africa granted the world’s first patent on an invention created by an artificial intelligence (“AI”) inventor. This development marks an important milestone in what will certainly be a significant battle for legal recognition of such inventions in the United States and other countries.
“Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience” aka “DABUS” is an AI developed by Missouri physicist Stephen Thaler. The recently-issued patent is directed to a food container based on fractal geometry. The patent application was filed on September 17, 2019 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. [1] Under the heading of “inventor”, the application identifies DABUS and states “The invention was autonomously generated by an artificial intelligence.” [2] Read More
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