Mediaboss Marketing

Doctor looking at ct scan

The future-fit capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) hold a particularly exciting value proposition for healthcare.

Modern, AI-assisted processes across biomedical research, cancer screening, product development and treatment recommendation modeling, as well as back-office administrative optimization, all promise to transform physician decisioning and diagnosing across both critical and chronic care delivery pathways.

Their applications may be nothing short of groundbreaking.

But AI models run on data, and data is different in healthcare, making any successful integration of next-generation AI tools, particularly those that impact patient care decision-making, a challenge to scale while ensuring clinical safety.

Training data is the major bottleneck holding back AI across the [healthcare] industry, Erik Duhaime, co-founder and CEO of data annotation provider Centaur Labs, told PYMNTS.

To make data-hungry healthcare models work effectively, there needs to be a high quality of annotation, he said.

The algorithm is only as good as the data that its trained on, he explained.

Thats because, as Duhaime emphasized, within healthcare, skill matters.

Read also: Healthcare Industry Could Be Generative AIs Biggest Proving Ground

In healthcare, the importance of high-quality data annotation is much higher than in a consumer-facing application of AI, he said. If you want to write a song in the style of Bob Dylan, or virtually try on a T-shirt, its one thing if the specs are wrong. But its another thing entirely if youre told you have cancer when you dont, or an AI model tells you that you dont have cancer and you do.

Duhaime stressed that the average American will, at some point in their life, experience a medical misdiagnosis, making the stakes even higher for healthcare AI models to be trained on the highest possible quality of data.

Quality matters when lives are on the line, he said.

As for how to ensure the highest possible standard of data quality?

Duhaime said that it comes down to the human touch, specifically, a high quality, expert level of data annotation.

AI is here to augment people developing an AI algorithm itself is not that hard, he said. A company with a great AI solution needs to have great data and a great data annotation process, and that boils down to having great people.

Scalable success within AI requires getting great work out of the best people, he added.

Humans have the most important role to play in developing AI, Duhaime said. Where youll see the future heading is humans being brought more into the loop.

He emphasized that AIs future, within healthcare in particular, will be driven by a hybrid, human-plus-computer approach.

Underscoring that prediction is that the need for quality control isnt going anywhere and cant be outsourced to AI, he said.

There needs to be a step in between the algorithm and the thousand-dollar-an-hour cardiologist who might not be available on demand, he explained. The future will be a little less about annotating training data to build a model then deploying it, and more of a continual dance where there is active learning and reinforcement learning where multiple, highly-trained experts are part of the workflow to continually improve a model.

The healthcare domain requires more reinforcement learning by triangulating expert human feedback than other AI applications where lives arent at stake.

The ongoing challenge is that healthcare data is both historically fragmented, as well as inherently biased according to its source (think patient data from a community hospital versus one in a wealthy ZIP code).

Eventually we will have super high accuracy, autonomous AI solutions doing things like diagnostics when they are low risk, but there will be a long period for a lot of these things where there will be an interplay between humans and computers, so the algorithm is making the person better, and vice-versa, Duhaime said.

You cant have that algorithm failing, he added. Going back to writing that song in the style of Bob Dylan, who cares if it is 1% better? But making your healthcare application 1% better, that provides a tangible increase that can save lives, so maybe it is worth trying to 10x your data set to move from 98% to 99%.

Duhaime emphasized that AI for healthcare has never been about replacing doctors, but doctors who use AI might end up replacing those physicians who dont.

AI doesnt replace work; it changes how work is organized, he said.

As for what the Centaur Labs CEO is looking forward to most?

Duhaime said it is continuing to work with the growing list of organizations that are pushing the bounds of innovation within healthcare, helping build a future based on expert data annotation that ensures scalable clinical safety and moves high-quality AI into production faster to grow the technologys impact from a 95% to a 99%, or a 99% to a 100%.

View original post here:

Centaur Labs CEO: Unlocking AI for Healthcare Requires Expert Annotation - PYMNTS.com

Shunsaku Sagami, founder and CEO of M&A Research Institute Holdings.

Shunsaku Sagami, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of M&A Research Institute Holdings, a mergers and acquisitions brokerage, is Japans newest billionaire. Shares of the company, which specializes in M&As of small and medium-size firms, have skyrocketed and are up more than 340% since its listing last June. Sagamis 73% stake in the firm is now worth just over $1 billion, based on Fridays closing price of 10,090 ($74.36).

Founded in 2018, the M&A Research Institute uses artificial intelligence to match potential buyers with companies that are typically facing the risk of closure, despite being profitable, because their owners are aging and unable to find successors. Sagamis company has become adept at closing deals quickly, taking on average just over six months to complete a transaction versus the industry average of a year. In the quarter ended December 2022, it concluded 33 transactions, with another 426 deals still in progress, according to its latest earnings report.

M&A activity has been soaring in Japan, hitting a record high of 4,304 transactions in 2022, according to Recof, a Japanese firm that tracks the M&A market. These range from big-ticket deals to the modest size transactions that Sagami targets. Last year, U.S. investment firm KKR privatized Japans Hitachi Transport System in a deal valued at $5.2 billion. M&A Research Institutes past deals include the sale of a 200 million (revenue) IT firm with no successor to a 1.5 billion (revenue) rival looking for expansion.

Sagami, whose first job was in advertising and not in high finance, was prompted by his own experience to venture into the M&A field. In 2015, he set up a fashion media company called Alpaca that was acquired by Tokyo-listed public relations agency Vector and later rebranded as Smart Media. Sagami, who was in his mid-twenties at the time, continued to work at the company and helped it to make further acquisitions.

While there, he spotted what he thought were inefficiencies in the dealmaking process, he wrote in a post on the M&A Research Institutes website. Meanwhile, Sagami also witnessed his grandfathers business being forced to close because there was no successor to keep it running. Sagamis overarching goal was to help preserve Japans SMEs. More than 99% of all companies in Japan are SMEs and about two-thirds of them have no successors, according to Teikoku Databank, a financial research firm.

The M&A Research Institute deploys an AI-powered matching system to help search for potential buyers of businesses whose owners are keen to sell out. It charges a success fee, payable only when the deal is concluded. This client-friendly pricing system and AI-driven approach have given it an edge over the competition, the firm says.

Success spurred Sagami to take the M&A Research Institute public on the Tokyo stock exchanges growth market in June last year, less than four years after the firm was founded.

The M&A Research Institute reported a net profit of $7.1 million on revenue of $15.7 million for the quarter ended December 2022. The firms annual revenue surged nearly 200% year-on-year to $28.8 million in the fiscal year ended September 2022, with its profit jumping nearly four-fold to $9.8 million during the same period. The number of M&A advisors in the firm has more than doubled to 90 by the end of December.

Finding that business owners who cashed out were asking the company how to invest their new-found wealth, Sagami has now expanded into asset management.

With assistance by James Simms

Read the original here:

Super Active 32-Year-Old Dealmaker Is Japan's Newest Billionaire - Forbes

Ms Totten is Chief Marketing Officer of Akari, the company she co-founded in 2019 and which has reinforced her status as one of the UKs most influential technology thinkers. Her company is very probably unique in the UK and Scottish technology sector by being wholly-owned and led by an all-women executive team.

This woman from Glasgows East End, who still lives near childhood home, is helping to design the future of work and ensuring that the process is driven by empathy and compassion: virtues that are normally first to burn in the white heat of technology. Its a perception that Ms Totten is keen to dismantle.

Weve been very fortunate to have a close relationship with Microsoft and, as such, weve been in the midst of two big paradigm shifts: Covid-19, which ushered in a radically different working environment with people working remotely and moving towards a hybrid arrangement and the rise of AI and automation.

READ MORE:The English love a royal party so why don't Scots?

Over the next five years, 500 million apps will be created, more than all that will have been produced in the previous four decades. A lot of IT departments aren't ready for that that change because it will be so explosive. It's as big as the Industrial Revolution.

Im glad she mentioned Artificial Intelligence before I did. Doesnt it, by its very definition, threaten to reduce the vast majority of those workers possessing an older skill-set to the status of disposable drones, eventually to be deemed surplus to the requirements of super-intelligence systems?

She dismantles my summation rather elegantly. If you'd asked me 10 years ago to think about AI Id have thought of the negative connotations. My skillset is in sales and marketing. Why have a marketing manager in charge when something like ChatGBT can supply your web copy? However while these chat bots and such like may regurgitate certain word patterns, they don't replace the human spark of imagination. Chat GBT and AI are the doers, but we're still the thinkers. They do what we tell them to do. So I think it supplements rather than replaces.

In manufacturing they've been using automation a lot longer than us. My gran worked in a major Glasgow biscuit factory right up until she retired in her 60s. She saw a lot of change occur with automation, but she didnt lose her job. For her and her fellow workers it freed up the tiresome stuff and allowed them to focus on the important things. It allowed them to be seen.

We saw a lot of academic disparity during Covid. If you were at school in a fairly affluent area or a private school, you didn't lose out on school time. Everything kept running through technology. But this same technology can teach skills that allow children to catch up on missed work far more rapidly.

Margaret Totten (Image: free)

Maybe so, I say, but during the pandemic there were many children living in households or neighbourhoods for whom a laptop or a tablet might be considered an unaffordable luxury.

For me, AI can help bridge that gap. If you've got someone who is struggling with a concept, and they don't have the same access to a tutor or a teacher, or in some cases, even the parent, they can ask it. I think AI and automation will become far more of a leveller than it will be a destroyer.

And so, we talk about all the untapped talents that lie dormant in Scotlands most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the way in which children from these places are judged and found wanting just because of the way they speak. And how little weight is given to achievements gained in the face of profound social and economic adversities.

When I co-founded Akari a big part of it was embedding inclusion, and especially around empowering females in the workplace. But two other areas have also demanded our focus; one being neuro-diversity.

At a Microsoft conference we discussed why only about 10% of adults with autism were in full-time paid employment and why only 18% of children with autism are currently in higher education. And that's a massive disconnect to me as a mother of a son with high functioning autism who's always gone to a mainstream school and who is thriving.

How, in this so-called progressive country can 90% of a group of people be unemployed? It doesn't make sense. The other area is this definition of socio-economic equality. The postcode I grew up in has one of the worst life expectancies in Europe, which is crazy in this affluent nation. So how do you challenge that? So we took children from these areas over to Microsoft and tried to encourage them with one of mums old maxims: if you can see it, you can believe it and if you can believe it, you can be it. She always wanted me to look at things and see what I can achieve rather than what I couldnt.

READ MORE:Live classical music is under threat as never before

So, how did this woman, one of the UKs most influential tech innovators prevail in a world almost exclusively reserved for men? Why did she even want to choose this terrain, given the barriers she knew would be put in her way? She credits her time at St Mungos Academy, one of Glasgows most famous old comprehensive schools and the influence of two teachers.

I was the only girl in my class doing Higher Computing higher. I was never made to feel different. I loved computing and I'm very, very geeky. I was into Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic books. But as someone who loves reading and who loves sci-fi, the internet opened up a whole new world and I was designing specialist fan websites for Buffy. You had to teach yourself these skills and that progressed into working as a business analyst. I became very good at Excel and 20 years ago that opened a lot of doors.

Shes dismissive of the concept of progressiveness as weaponised by the Scottish Government and the fake actors who brandish it to signify radicalism. Progressiveness must come with a plan, or else its meaningless, she says. "We have shared values with our Chair, Stuart Fenton and Andrea Bright our CEO. They are two people with whom I chose to work because they share the same values and the same authentically progressive ideas as me.

"One of the reasons Stuart wanted to work with Akari is that he was concerned by the huge number of lay-offs in the tech world, which he felt were unnecessary. He once told me: This is a sector which is making billions and consistently growing and making profits and yet there are tens of thousands of lay-offs across the board. He thought there was a way to do better. So he got together with us, a data company which is now opening 30, 40, 50 new roles.

Andrea shares that vision, which is that real progressiveness is about promoting equality and compassion, but doing it with a plan that leads to real results. Without this all youll have are a couple of nice soundbites and some nice feelings, but no real progression because you didnt plan for it. So we are a very progressive organisation, but in the real sense of the word.

Shed like to see the Scottish Government engage much more with firms such as Akari, who are in the vanguard of shaping the future of work across the globe and developing best employment practice in doing so.

They need to be pushing modern apprenticeships and different routes of entry into the market. There needs to be education across the board about how you can access roles in technology. This is a growing sector and it will continue to grow.

Its a very innovative sector. Were now talking about automation and AI on a scale never before seen. This equates to new roles that need to be opened and so, we need to open up the framework to allow people access to them? One way is through modern apprenticeships. Do we need to revamp the modern apprenticeship programme?

The Scottish Government need to open up those routes to entry and they have to be supporting graduates and apprenticeships. So, where are the programmes which allow us to take on some graduates and apprentices? Why is nobody knocking on our door and those of other successful firms in this sector, and all domiciled in Scotland.

More:

Kevin McKenna meets tech thinker Margaret Totten | HeraldScotland - HeraldScotland

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

THE WHOLE thing with Mrs. Davis, Peacock's genre-bending sci-fi thriller comedy about a nun, her cowboy ex-boyfriend, and the search for the holy grail at the behest of a potentially evil and inescapable Artificial Intelligence, is that everything in the show is absurd, but kind of not too far off from anything in our world. We don't have a Mrs. Davis (the name the aforementioned A.I. goes by in the show), but we do have Siri, and Google, and ChatGPT, and...

Shop Now

Mens Kings Sl Sneaker

$64.99

britishknights.com

You get the point. So it should come as no surprise, really, that the super cool sneakers that figure prominently in Mrs. Davisthe Kings SL Sneaker from British Knightsaren't fictional or absurd at all; they're 100% real. And, just like Wiley (Jake McDorman) grasping onto a giant sword in an attempt to prove his worthiness, you can wear them for both style and comfort as soon as you want to.

Of course, anyone who's seen Mrs. Davis through episodes 4 and 5 knows that there's a whole lot more to these sneakers than meets the eyebut we'll spare those spoilers for another time. But know that there's a whole conspiracy plot that revolves around one indisputable thing: these British Knights sneakers are damn cool.

Our everyday lives may not be like Wiley, the wealthy cowboy leading a resistance group against a powerful AI. And it may not be like Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin), a magician-hating nun who used to go by the name Lizzy until she crossed paths with a world-famous divine force.

But, again, one thing is universal: those British Knights sneakers are cool. And they're only $64.99.

It'd be tough for any A.I. to make a rational case against a bargain like that.

You Might Also Like

Continue reading here:

Those 'Mrs. Davis' Sneakers Are Real and You Can Buy Them Now - Yahoo News

The head of the worlds largest sovereign wealth fund has called on governments to speed up the regulation of artificial intelligence as it revealed it would set guidelines for how the 9,000 companies it invests in should use AI ethically.

Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of Norways $1.4tn oil fund which owns on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally said he believed that there is not enough regulation of the fast-growing sector and that he wanted new rules to govern how AI is used.

We think authorities and governments should regulate. We are not seeing a pipeline of regulation coming yet, he added.

The fund is a big investor in tech companies such as Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Microsoft, which are all aiming to use AI to transform their businesses.

Tangen said the fund would unveil a set of standards in August for how it wants companies that use AI to behave. That would bring it into the fund's responsible investment framework, which sets the standards for ESG investing in Europe given its huge size.

Governments around the world are grappling with whether and how to regulate AI or to give innovation a free hand amid worries about how far superintelligent computers could go if left unchecked. The EU is drafting what is seen as the toughest rules currently on AI.

The oil fund will also consider whether to use AI to help it with proxy voting on tens of thousands of motions at next years annual shareholder meetings when it reviews the current season in the autumn, its chief corporate governance and compliance officer, Carine Smith Ihenacho, said in the same interview.

Tangen, who has also warned that climate change will keep inflation high, said the fund was already using advanced algorithms to reduce trading costs and complexity and to boost internal productivity.

Im super excited by AI. We have a target for increasing efficiency in the fund by 10 per cent over the next 12 months. Its a big hairy goal. We are seeing it in so many places where its driving efficiency, Tangen said.

The fund makes 36mn trades a year, and Tangen believes AI can help it eliminate trades, for instance different rebalancing models that currently could push it to buy a stock one day and sell it the next.

The way we are putting money into the market, we are using AI models to predict when in the day, or over the month- or quarter-end we should deploy the capital. We are reducing trading activity because we are using AI models, he said.

So you can reduce the number of trades, and there are huge savings to be had there too, he said, adding that: Its not like its on complete autopilot. We are monitoring it. Its not like were the giving the fund to robots, and saying hey, see you later.

Tangen said the fund had a big project with a very big but undisclosed goal to cut trading costs significantly by changing other things such as how it incentivises portfolio managers as well as using AI.

Last week the fund held its own hackathon involving 130 people looking at how the sovereign wealth fund can best use AI itself.

See the rest here:

Norway's $1.4tn wealth fund calls for state regulation of AI - Financial Times