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Call it the scandal that will not die. Or, more accurately, the scandalmongering that will not die. In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of new assertions that presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Trump campaign did, in fact, collude with Russia to fix the 2016 election. No matter that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors, an aggressive bunch with a big budget and all the powers of U.S. law enforcement, investigated the collusion allegation for years and failed to establish that it ever happened.

Now, there are more and more references to something called the "Russia hoax hoax." Anti-Trump types are unhappy that Trump, and some Trump defenders, and even some who aren't Trump defenders, now talk about the Russia investigation as a "hoax." Calling the Trump-Russia investigation a hoax, they argue, is a hoax in itself thus the "Russia hoax hoax."

"The Real Hoax" is the title of a web piece by the Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch. "It Wasn't a Hoax" is the title of an article by the Atlantic's David Frum. "The End of the Great Russia Hoax Hoax" is the title of a Deep State Radio podcast featuring prominent Trump-Russia promoters Natasha Bertrand of Politico, Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast, Josh Campbell of CNN, and Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institution's Lawfare website. Lawfare also produced a podcast featuring Rauch and Frum, as well as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, moderated by Brookings's Benjamin Wittes.

Why all the new activity? The Trump-Russia true believers are deeply concerned about the fallout from special counsel John Durham's investigation of the investigation. In particular, Durham's indictments have demolished any possibility of believing in the Steele dossier, which played a big role in the Trump-Russia investigation.

It really did, no matter who tries to deny it. Remember, top FBI officials hired former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate Trump for the bureau. (It didn't work out because Steele couldn't stop talking to the press.) FBI leaders also wanted to include Steele's unverified allegations, later shown to be ridiculously thinly sourced, in the Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. In January 2017, the nation's top intelligence chiefs briefed outgoing President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump on Steele's tales. Then, when that briefing was leaked, the dossier became huge news when CNN reported it. Hours later, BuzzFeed published the whole thing. Ever since, it has been a near-sacred document for the truest of the true collusion believers.

But now, Durham has shown that some of the dossier's allegations, which we already knew were financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, were not only laughably sourced but also the work of a Clinton-connected politico who fed gossip to Steele's hired dirt-gatherer. The Steele dossier looks more and more like an elaborate and sadly effective political dirty trick.

It's not that the Russia hoax hoax crowd wants to defend the dossier. Rather, they are concerned that some will look at Durham's dismantling of the dossier and conclude that the entire Russia investigation was a hoax. Indeed, in that Brookings podcast, Rauch said he was concerned that some writers he respects Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Eli Lake, and Peter Berkowitz among them have dismissed the entire investigation. So, the anti-Trumpers have invented the Russia hoax hoax, the idea that anyone who, relying on Durham's findings, pronounces the whole Russia investigation a hoax is himself perpetrating a hoax. And doing Donald Trump's bidding, too. And that must be stopped.

The basic argument of the anti-Trump writers is that there really was Trump-Russia collusion. They didn't make it up! They go through the known events of the Trump-Russia timeline Trump's famous "Russia, if you're listening" statement, the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting, the "contacts" between Trump campaign figures and various Russians, the polling that then-Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort provided to a Russian who was a longtime business associate and also, perhaps, an intelligence agent, and the various actions of Michael Cohen and Roger Stone and argue that it all adds up to an indisputable case of collusion, no matter what special counsel Mueller could or could not find.

This is not the place to answer each of the points in detail. Suffice it to say some of them are just plain wrong, while others are just plain weak. For example, when discussing the "Russia, if you're listening" line on the Brookings podcast, Rauch said that "Trump publicly ... asked the Russians to illegally ... steal and dump Clinton campaign documents." But in his July 27, 2016, news conference, Trump was not referring to Clinton campaign documents. When he mentioned "30,000 emails that are missing," he was clearly referring to emails from a personal account that Clinton, when secretary of state, deleted on her own, allowing her lawyers to stonewall a House investigating committee. Trump said so specifically: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." No one would expect Rauch to have done reporting deep inside the Trump campaign, but if he had, he would have known that the 30,000 missing Clinton emails, emails from her secretary of state days, had long been a topic of extensive discussion and speculation at senior levels of the campaign.

On the other end of the scale, the Trump Tower meeting is the best single exhibit for the collusion theory. But even it falls short. Promising negative information on Hillary Clinton, some Russians teased top Trump officials into a meeting. Then, they bored the Trump team with an adoption-based pitch to repeal the Magnitsky Act. The meeting ended pretty quickly with the Trumpers hurrying for the door. Nothing ever happened.

Other instances of alleged "collusion," such as the random set of contacts between Trump figures and Russians any Russians qualified, apparently don't tell us anything. The Manafort polling matter boiled down to a classic Manafort operation the polling, according to close associate Richard Gates, was not secret, and Manafort was using it to show that he was a big deal in hopes of getting money to pay for his profligate personal spending, which is what Manafort was always trying to do. (For a deeper look at each of the collusion charges, please see my 2020 book OBSESSION.)

Perhaps Rauch's strongest point is his claim that the Russia investigation could not have been a hoax because the Justice Department inspector general found that the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane was sufficiently predicated, although the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, noted that the FBI had to meet a "low standard" to start the investigation. But here's the problem: What if an investigation is sufficiently predicated and then cannot establish that a crime has been committed, much less who might have committed it? And what if investigators knew that early on yet kept the investigation going and going and going?

That's what happened in the Trump-Russia investigation. Mueller was appointed in May 2017. By Christmas, after a period of extraordinary cooperation from the Trump defense team, the Mueller prosecutors knew they could not establish that conspiracy or coordination, the terms they employed in the investigation, ever took place. (See OBSESSION again.) And they didn't play word games; Mueller wrote that "even as defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute." So, whatever you want to call it conspiracy, coordination, or collusion Mueller did not find it.

The bottom line is, the Russia hoax hoax effort is pretty weak tea. Plus, the part coming from the Brookings Institution group looks a little strange, given that a number of figures at the liberal think tank had a part in handling the dossier as it made its way, unknown to the public, through the Obama administration and the media.

But there is another angle to the Russia hoax hoax story that is more interesting than the conventional analysis from Rauch, et al. Going through court papers in the Capitol riot prosecutions, the writer Marcy Wheeler, who posts as emptywheel, has noticed that not only do the riot defendants believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, many also believe that Democrats, through the "Russia hoax," tried to steal the 2016 election from Trump. When they are accused of spreading the "Big Lie" their 2020 stop-the-steal narrative they counter by saying, in effect: "You call stop-the-steal the Big Lie? What about your claim that Russia rigged the 2016 election for Trump? That's the real Big Lie, and it was everywhere in the media for years after the election."

Wheeler noted the recent MSNBC appearance of Jan. 6 rally organizers Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. (The two are not accused of any crimes.) Host Chris Hayes went through some of the wildest 2020 stolen-election theories and said, "You do get that it wasn't stolen, right? ... that all of those claims were not true, right?" In response, Stockton turned the question around on Hayes, pointing to the media's yearslong Russia frenzy. "Do you now admit," Stockton said to Hayes, "that the Russia memes that you guys ran 24 hours a day in the early days of Trump ... [were] undermining democracy? ... There were dozens of ridiculous claims. ... There were tons of ridiculous clips."

Wheeler wrote: "A key purveyor of the Big Lie [Stockton] excuses his actions because MSNBC reported on a Russia investigation that was based off real facts." She continued: "This is just one example where Trumpsters excuse their own participation in the Big Lie by turning a bunch of different prongs of reporting on Russia in 2017 some undoubtedly overblown but much based on real facts about real actions that Trump and his aides really took into the equivalent of wild hoaxes about efforts to steal the 2020 election."

What is going on here? First of all, the Russia hoax hoax arguments are coming from writers and commentators who believed deeply in collusion, so deeply that even when an extensive investigation failed to establish that collusion took place, some of them faulted the investigator and kept on believing. Now, in Trump's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, the stop-the-steal movement, and the Capitol riot, they see election-denial efforts that uncomfortably echo their own but turned up to 11 and, ultimately, into a riot and physical violence.

What if Trump had handled the post-election period differently? What if he had accepted the verdict of the election and had not accused Democrats of cheating, not launched court challenges, and not called for protests? What if, instead, Trump had followed the 2016 model and surreptitiously used the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and a willing media, to slander and undermine Biden and his administration in hopes of driving them from office? That would have been following a now-established Democratic/media precedent.

But Trump did what he did. And the Trump-Russia believers did what they did. And now, those believers see Trump followers such as Stockton, defending his denial of the 2020 election results, throwing their old, unproven Russia allegations back at them. So now, they have come up with the idea of a "Russia hoax hoax" a new way to claim that it is the other guy who is making up false charges.

Originally posted here:
Never say die: Trump-Russia collusion theorists strike again - Washington Examiner

Nearly six months in, "The View" has yet to settle on a permanent replacement for Meghan McCain. And now, the longtime co-hosts are upping the pressure to pick a successor. | Todd Anderson/Disney Resorts via Getty Images

Before taking off for the holidays, the four long-standing hosts of The View had a message for executive producer BRIAN TETA: Were tired of the rotating cast of Republican guest hosts.

When MEGHAN MCCAIN departed in August, Teta initially told the Wrap that he was taking a little time to find a replacement. Since then, ABC has tried out a variety of conservative fill-ins, including S.E. CUPP, ALYSSA FARAH, MORGAN ORTAGUS, CONDOLEEZZA RICE, CARLY FIORINA, and GRETCHEN CARLSON.

Nearly six months in, the show has yet to settle on a permanent replacement. And now, the longtime co-hosts JOY BEHAR, WHOOPI GOLDBERG and SUNNY HOSTIN are upping the pressure to pick a successor, and voicing their displeasure at having to introduce new guest hosts week after week in a seemingly endless process that they find disruptive to the flow of the show.

Right now, we still do need a really conservative voice, Hostin told New York Magazine in November. And we need someone thats not duplicative of anyone else on the panel.

According to a spokesperson for The View, the program will continue to audition potential hosts in the new year, bringing some women back for a second turn. Farah will return in January, and the show will bring in other big names, like BARI WEISS and LISA LING neither of whom exactly fit the conservative label while the network continues to conduct focus groups on the audiences reaction.

Sources close to the show said that the search has stalled as executives struggle to find a conservative cast-member who checks all the right boxes. They will not consider a Republican who is a denier of the 2020 election results, embraced the January 6 riots, or is seen as flirting too heavily with fringe conspiracy theories or the MAGA wing of the GOP. But at the same time, the host must have credibility with mainstream Republicans, many of whom still support DONALD TRUMP.

The problem is that they bring people on under the mantle that this woman is a conservative, when theyre Never Trump, so they dont represent the country, said one of the rotating guest hosts.

At the same time, the anti-Trump conservative cant be seen as too chummy with the other co-hosts, as the networks market-research shows that the audience wants to see the women spar. Sources said that this has hurt the chances of ANA NAVARRO, a regular fill-in on the conservative chair who worked as a surrogate for JOE BIDEN in 2020: She is perceived by the producers as too friendly with the other hosts and not a traditional Republican.

They are really looking for a unicorn, said a former show staffer. They want someone who is going to fight but not too hard, because they dont want it to be ugly and bickering.

It doesnt help that theres a perception that whoever sits in the conservative host slot is on borrowed time, with prominent Republican former co-hosts like NICOLLE WALLACE, ELIZABETH HASSELBECK, ABBY HUNTSMAN and McCain leaving the show with claims of being bullied by their co-hosts and ABC executives on-set and off, while veterans like Goldberg and Behar have thrived.

Sources said that the show was eager to recruit young libertarian KAT TIMPF, but she turned them down because of the shows reputation for treating conservatives poorly and her contract with Fox. Timpf declined to comment to Playbook. Others have said that the show has a responsibility to fill the conservative chair with a strong Republican co-host ahead of the midterms if they are going to be a credible political talk show.

Our plans are on track as we continue to look for the right person to join our panel of smart, dynamic women, said a View spokesperson. We look forward to welcoming guest co-hosts for return appearances and introducing new names into the mix in the new year.

Good Monday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza, Tara Palmeri.

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IN MEMORIAM Our illustrious colleagues at POLITICO Magazine have put together a package of obituaries and remembrances of the political players, agitators, chroniclers and pioneers who died this year and why they mattered. Among those profiled: COLIN POWELL, BOB DOLE, BOB MOSES, RICHARD TRUMKA, bell hooks, RUTH ANN MINNER, DONALD RUMSFELD, SHELDON ADELSON, RUSH LIMBAUGH, LEE HART, VERNON JORDAN, G. GORDON LIDDY, ROSE OCHI and CARL LEVIN.

Clockwise from top left: Vernon Jordan, Sheldon Adelson, Ruth Ann Minner, and Walter Mondale. | Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux Pictures; Ethan Miller/Getty Images; Dee Marvin/AP Photo; Stephen Voss/Redux Pictures

Click here for all 33 profiles, written by the likes of CONDOLEEZZA RICE, Reps. TOM MALINOWSKI (D-N.J.) and JUDY CHU (D-Calif.), former Rep. ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN (R-Fla.) and more.

BIDENS YEAR IN REVIEW WATCH: Biden got by with little help from his friends: A Beatles remix

During the first year of the Biden presidency, the nation just seemed to want to double down on divisiveness. Biden thought his first year was going to be like a happy Beatles song. The country needed help. It was time to get back and come together over him. We could get by with a little help from our friends! Please enjoy a very Beatles parody of Bidens hard days night and year, 2021.

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BIDENS MONDAY:

10:05 a.m.: The president will receive the Presidents Daily Brief.

11:30 a.m.: Biden will join the White House Covid-19 response teams regular call with the National Governors Association to discuss the pandemic.

12:15 p.m.: Biden will depart the White House en route to Rehoboth Beach, Del., where he is scheduled to arrive at 1:15 p.m.

2:30 p.m.: The president will virtually receive his weekly economic briefing.

THE HOUSE and THE SENATE are out.

PHOTOS OF THE YEAR

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington as they try to storm the building on Jan. 6. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

Police with guns drawn face off against rioters trying to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

A rioter hangs from the balcony in the Senate Chamber on Jan. 6. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

THE PANDEMIC

THE OMI-CHRONICLES

Coronavirus cases are being reported at record levels across the world surpassing even last winters devastating peak in some places, write WaPos Bryan Pietsch and Annabelle Timsit. The UK, Italy, Ireland and France are among those nations that broke their previous records over the weekend. Here in the U.S., health officials warn that the country could soon see more than 1 million new cases per day, far beyond last winters peak of 248,000.

Sunday travel plans got totally derailed. As of Sunday evening, more than 1,300 flights with at least one stop in the United States, and over two times as many around the world, had been canceled, NYTs Marc Tracy writes.

Health experts are urging city and state officials to do more to ensure that the most vulnerable particularly nursing home residents get boosters quickly, NYTs Sharon Otterman and Joseph Goldstein write. New York, like much of the country, was slow to push boosters before the new variant arrived a few weeks ago, and has largely left administering third doses to the long-term care facilities themselves, some of which are struggling with the task.

Business leaders are asking Congress for another dip into the national piggy bank. The question Congress will face when it returns in January is whether the latest Covid-19 wave justifies a new rescue beyond the $1 trillion of emergency small business assistance lawmakers have approved since March 2020. Most of the programs have been tapped out or are winding down, Zachary Warmbrodt writes.

Meanwhile, Bidens plan to use USAID to help vaccinate the world in 2022 is running out of money, Erin Banco reports. Over the past year, the agency has largely relied on more than $1.6 billion allocated through the American Rescue Plan to help facilitate the shipment and administration of Covid-19 vaccine doses internationally. The agency has either used that money or already earmarked it for several months into the new year to help countries prepare to receive and distribute the doses, the officials said.

THE WHITE HOUSE

BEHIND-THE-SCENES BACKBITING Daniel Lippman has the scoop on an explosive whisper campaign that tried to sink STEVEN BONDYs appointment as U.S. ambassador to Bahrain. This is one such story youve not read before. It features a decorated diplomat with an unblemished record, about to claim a career-defining prize: an ambassadorial posting to a key Middle East ally. It involves serious accusations and counter-accusations of racism, none of which were made publicly. Hidden not far beneath the surface are personal histories and policy disagreements in this case between appointees of former President Donald Trump and the Deep State bureaucracy that havent been put to bed with the advent of a new administration. To tell the tale properly, we need to go back three years and start in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

THE ECONOMY

HOLIDAY SHOPPING UP BIG Despite many worries that the new surge coupled with headache-inducing supply chain woes would stunt holiday sales this year, data says that doesnt seem to be the case. American consumers spent at a brisk pace over the shopping season, as an early rush to stores amid worries about supply and delivery problems muted the effects of a Covid-19 surge that disrupted some businesses and crimped spending before Christmas, WSJs Suzanne Kapner and Paul Ziobro report.

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POLICY CORNER

THE NEW RULES OF MONOPOLY A new breed of antitrust activists say its time to rewrite the rules that have long protected competition in the American economy, reports Leah Nylen. And unlike many of the hottest issues embroiling Washington, the antitrust debate doesnt break down along neat partisan or ideological lines. Supporters of sweeping change include progressive Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. ELIZABETH WARREN and Federal Trade Commission Chair LINA KHAN, as well as conservative Republicans like Missouri Sen. JOSH HAWLEY and Colorado Rep. KEN BUCK, all of them facing resistance within their own parties.

ALL POLITICS

MAGA MOVES Trumps staunchest allies in Congress are aiming to grow their ranks in the midterms by primarying establishment Republicans. The goal, organizers of the effort say, is to supersize the MAGA group in the House from its current loose membership of about a half-dozen and give it the heft that, combined with its close alliance with Trump, would put it in a position to wield significant influence should Republicans win the House majority, WaPos Colby Itkowitz writes. A number that jumped out at us: In 2020, Trump won 45 [House] districts by more than 15 percentage points. Under new maps already finalized in more than a dozen states, he would have won 78 districts by that margin.

THE NEW GOP WINSOME SEARS road to becoming Virginias lieutenant governor and the first Black woman elected to statewide office in the commonwealth was unlikely. Now, she wants to change the conversation among Black Republican voters. This is the question that Ms. Sears embodies: whether she is a singular figure who won a surprise victory or the vanguard of a major political realignment, dissolving longtime realities of race and partisan identification, NYTs Campbell Robertson writes in Richmond, Va. Democrats say there is little evidence for the latter, and that Ms. Sears won with typical Republican voters in an especially Republican year. But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues and that some are starting to realize that. The only way to change things is to win elections, she said. And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.

AMERICA AND THE WORLD

FIRST IN PLAYBOOK PBS In Their Own Words series will debut a new episode on former German Chancellor ANGELA MERKEL on Tuesday, Dec. 28. The special will feature interviews with HILLARY CLINTON, GEORGE W. BUSH and others to explore how Merkel overcame fierce opposition, a vicious press and rampant sexism to lead Germany and Europe with a steady focus on peace and freedom. In an exclusive clip shared with Playbook, Clinton and Bush talk about Merkels dealings with world leaders like Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN. Bush even tells a story about when he introduced his dog, Barney, to Putin. The 2:49 clip

ON THE GROUND In Ukraine, the military is training civilians as a precaution if Russia takes the extraordinary step to attack the country, drawing on a lesson from the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the past two decades, when guerrillas provided enduring resistance in the face of vastly superior American firepower, NYTs Andrew Kramer writes in Kyiv.

JUDICIARY SQUARE

LAW OF THE LAND Federal prosecutors are increasingly using racketeering statutes to go after a broader array of criminal activity, applying them in ways that deviate from the laws original goal of dismantling organized crime, WSJs Deanna Paul reports.

Alexander Vindman portrayed himself on Sunday nights season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm. While on book tour in the episode, Vindman overhears Larry David on the phone asking a Santa Monica city councilwoman for a favor while dangling a large donation in front of her.

IN MEMORIAM via APs Jake Bleiberg: Sarah Weddington, a Texas lawyer who as a 26-year-old successfully argued the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, died Sunday. She was 76.

via NYTs Vimal Patel and Azi Paybarah: Richard Marcinko, the hard-charging founding commander of Navy SEAL Team 6, the storied and feared unit within an elite commando force that later carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, died Saturday at his home in Fauquier County, Va. He was 81.

TRANSITION Jon Selib will be managing director and global external affairs leader at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He previously was SVP of global policy and public affairs at Pfizer, and is a Max Baucus alum.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD Michael Ly, director of public policy at the American Kidney Fund, and Katie Leesman, an associate at Ballard Spahr, welcomed Vinh Michael Ly last Monday. Pic

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) Laura Lott of the American Alliance of Museums Shhrazade Semsar Emily Murphy Julie Benkoske NBCs Savannah Guthrie Mercedes Schlapp Kurt Volker Andi Lipstein Fristedt Gray Televisions Jacqueline Policastro Osaremen Okolo Jessica McCreight Brown Marc Smrikarov of Chatham Strategies James Burnham Andi Pringle Emily Hytha Googles Jeff Murray Kamau Marshall Tierney Sneed Joe Harris Josh Litten BCW Globals Karen Hughes POLITICO Europes Tim Ball and Nick Vinocur Arthur Kent Benji Backer of the American Conservation Coalition Hemanshu Nigam Mike Thomas Barclay Palmer Joseph Collins Andrew Chesley Catherine Marx former Reps. Abby Finkenauer (D-Iowa) and Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) (6-0) James King

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POLITICO Playbook: 'The View' struggles to find a Republican - Politico

A recent study by Gartner indicates that by 2025 the 10% of enterprises that establish Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI and ML efforts than the 90% of enterprises that don't. With such a high value estimated to be derived only from the adoption of ML/AI practices, it is difficult to not agree that the future of enterprises rests heavily on AI and ML technologies with other digital technologies.The pandemic has unveiled a world that embraced technology at a pace that would have otherwise taken ages to evolve.

Traditional practices that saw monolithic systems, lack of flexibility and manual processes were all blocking innovation.

Also Read:Artificial Intelligence: A Pathway to success for enterprises

However, mass new-age technology acceptance induced by the pandemic has helped enterprises overcome these challenges. Modern technologies like AI and ML are opening a new world of possibilities for organisations.

Seizing the early-mover advantage will particularly benefit organisations in taking important business decisions in a more informed, intuitive way.

The applicability of new-age technologies is growing every day. For example, marketers are starting to use ML-based tools to personalise offers to their customers and further measure their satisfaction levels through the successful implementation of ML algorithms into their operations.

This and there are more examples of how AI/ML algorithms are enabling organisations run their businesses smartly and make them profitable.Additionally, enterprises are recognising the benefits of cloud infrastructure and applications with ML and AI algorithms built in.

They allow companies to spend less time on manual work and management and instead focus on high-value jobs that drive business results. ML can result in efficiencies in workloads of enterprise IT and ultimately reduce IT infrastructure costs.

This stands especially true in India, where consulting firm Accenture estimates in one of its reports that the use of AI could add $957 billion to the Indian economy in 2035 provided the "right investments" are made in new-age technology. India, with its entrepreneurial spirit, abundance of talent and the right sources of education has mega potential to unleash AI's true capabilities - but they need the right partner.

The biggest limitation in using AI is that companies often run into implementation issues which could be anything from scarcity of data science expertise to making the platform perform in real-time.

As a result, there is slight reluctance in accepting AI among organisations, and this, in turn, is leading to inconsistencies and lack of results.

Also Read:Three ways AI can help transform businesses

However, with the right partner, India's true potential can be harnessed. As we move into an AI/ML led world, we need to lead the change by building the requisite skills.

While many companies don't have enough resources to marshal an army of data science PhDs, a more practical alternative is to build smaller and more focused "MLOps" teams - much like DevOps teams in application development.

Such teams could consist of not just data scientists, but also developers and other IT engineers whose mission would be to deploy, maintain, and constantly improve AI/ML models in a production environment. While there is a huge responsibility lying on IT professionals to develop an AI/ML led ecosystem in India, companies must also align resources to help them be successful. In due course, AI/ML will be the competitive advantage that companies will need to adopt in order to stay relevant and sustain businesses.

Forrester predicts that one in five organisations will double down on "AI inside" - which is AI and ML embedded in their systems and operational practices.

AI and ML are powerful technology tools that hold the key to achieving an organization's digital transformation goals.

(The author is Head-Technology Cloud, Oracle India.)

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How leveraging AI and machine learning can give companies a competitive edge - Business Today

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

To overcome these errors, MIT researchers have developed a framework that helps machines see the world more like humans do reports MIT News. Their new artificial intelligence system for analyzing scenes learns to perceive real-world objects from just a few images, and perceives scenes in terms of these learned objects.

The researchers built the framework using probabilistic programming, an AI approach that enables the system to cross-check detected objects against input data, to see if the images recorded from a camera are a likely match to any candidate scene. Probabilistic inference allows the system to infer whether mismatches are likely due to noise or to errors in the scene interpretation that need to be corrected by further processing.

This common-sense safeguard allows the system to detect and correct many errors that plague the deep-learning approaches that have also been used for computer vision. Probabilistic programming also makes it possible to infer probable contact relationships between objects in the scene, and use common-sense reasoning about these contacts to infer more accurate positions for objects.

If you dont know about the contact relationships, then you could say that an object is floating above the table that would be a valid explanation. As humans, it is obvious to us that this is physically unrealistic and the object resting on top of the table is a more likely pose of the object. Because our reasoning system is aware of this sort of knowledge, it can infer more accurate poses. That is a key insight of this work, says lead author Nishad Gothoskar, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) PhD student with the Probabilistic Computing Project.

In addition to improving the safety of self-driving cars, this work could enhance the performance of computer perception systems that must interpret complicated arrangements of objects, like a robot tasked with cleaning a cluttered kitchen.

Gothoskars co-authors include recent EECS PhD graduate Marco Cusumano-Towner; research engineer Ben Zinberg; visiting student Matin Ghavamizadeh; Falk Pollok, a software engineer in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; recent EECS masters graduate Austin Garrett; Dan Gutfreund, a principal investigator in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; Joshua B. Tenenbaum, the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and senior author Vikash K. Mansinghka, principal research scientist and leader of the Probabilistic Computing Project in BCS. The research is being presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in December.

A blast from the past

To develop the system, called 3D Scene Perception via Probabilistic Programming (3DP3), the researchers drew on a concept from the early days of AI research, which is that computer vision can be thought of as the inverse of computer graphics.

Computer graphics focuses on generating images based on the representation of a scene; computer vision can be seen as the inverse of this process.Gothoskar and his collaborators made this technique more learnable and scalable by incorporating it into a framework built using probabilistic programming.

Probabilistic programming allows us to write down our knowledge about some aspects of the world in a way a computer can interpret, but at the same time, it allows us to express what we dont know, the uncertainty. So, the system is able to automatically learn from data and also automatically detect when the rules dont hold, Cusumano-Towner explains.

In this case, the model is encoded with prior knowledge about 3D scenes. For instance, 3DP3 knows that scenes are composed of different objects, and that these objects often lay flat on top of each other but they may not always be in such simple relationships. This enables the model to reason about a scene with more common sense.

Learning shapes and scenes

To analyze an image of a scene, 3DP3 first learns about the objects in that scene. After being shown only five images of an object, each taken from a different angle, 3DP3 learns the objects shape and estimates the volume it would occupy in space.

If I show you an object from five different perspectives, you can build a pretty good representation of that object. Youd understand its color, its shape, and youd be able to recognize that object in many different scenes, Gothoskar says.

Mansinghka adds, This is way less data than deep-learning approaches. For example, the Dense Fusion neural object detection system requires thousands of training examples for each object type. In contrast, 3DP3 only requires a few images per object, and reports uncertainty about the parts of each objects shape that it doesnt know.

The 3DP3 system generates a graph to represent the scene, where each object is a node and the lines that connect the nodes indicate which objects are in contact with one another. This enables 3DP3 to produce a more accurate estimation of how the objects are arranged. (Deep-learning approaches rely on depth images to estimate object poses, but these methods dont produce a graph structure of contact relationships, so their estimations are less accurate.)

Outperforming baseline models

The researchers compared 3DP3 with several deep-learning systems, all tasked with estimating the poses of 3D objects in a scene.

In nearly all instances, 3DP3 generated more accurate poses than other models and performed far better when some objects were partially obstructing others. And 3DP3 only needed to see five images of each object, while each of the baseline models it outperformed needed thousands of images for training.

When used in conjunction with another model, 3DP3 was able to improve its accuracy. For instance, a deep-learning model might predict that a bowl is floating slightly above a table, but because 3DP3 has knowledge of the contact relationships and can see that this is an unlikely configuration, it is able to make a correction by aligning the bowl with the table.

I found it surprising to see how large the errors from deep learning could sometimes be producing scene representations where objects really didnt match with what people would perceive. I also found it surprising that only a little bit of model-based inference in our causal probabilistic program was enough to detect and fix these errors. Of course, there is still a long way to go to make it fast and robust enough for challenging real-time vision systems but for the first time, were seeing probabilistic programming and structured causal models improving robustness over deep learning on hard 3D vision benchmarks, Mansinghka says.

In the future, the researchers would like to push the system further so it can learn about an object from a single image, or a single frame in a movie, and then be able to detect that object robustly in different scenes. They would also like to explore the use of 3DP3 to gather training data for a neural network. It is often difficult for humans to manually label images with 3D geometry, so 3DP3 could be used to generate more complex image labels.

The 3DP3 system combines low-fidelity graphics modeling with common-sense reasoning to correct large scene interpretation errors made by deep learning neural nets. This type of approach could have broad applicability as it addresses important failure modes of deep learning. The MIT researchers accomplishment also shows how probabilistic programming technology previously developed under DARPAs Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning (PPAML) program can be applied to solve central problems of common-sense AI under DARPAs current Machine Common Sense (MCS) program, says Matt Turek, DARPA Program Manager for the Machine Common Sense Program, who was not involved in this research, though the program partially funded the study.

Additional funders include the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency collaboration with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Intels Probabilistic Computing Center, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Aphorism Foundation, and the Siegel Family Foundation.

Republished with permission ofMIT News. Read theoriginal article.

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Machines that see the world more like humans do - Big Think

Technology and healthcare go hand in hand. Many people are asking themselves where theyre going. The industry continues to benefit from massive investment in digital health trends such as telemedicine, IoT devices, and virtual reality surgical training, which has helped improve global health equity.

Here are 12 reasons technology is changing how we think about IT and healthcare:

Nanotechnology promises many things, but it may actually be closer than you think. Researchers from the US and South Korea have created nanorobots capable of delivering drugs to clogged arteries and drilling through them. This technology, which is controlled by an MRI machine and has wide-ranging applications, looks promising. However, there are still some issues that need to be resolved in the lab before they can apply it to humans. Google has established Verily, a Life Sciences division within Alphabet that is partnering with Johnson & Johnson in order to further explore the technology.

It has never been easier to deal with large amounts of data. Analytics, cloud computing, machine learning, and machine learning have allowed us to access more data and allow us to see it in new ways. AI promises to allow us to sift through the mountains of data to gain new insights. This will enable us to identify potential risks and reduce costs. Other promising applications include reducing waste and expediting the drug discovery process.

The biggest source of frustration and confusion in healthcare is billing. It is easy to make mistakes and it can be frustrating to chase down people. Patient Access Solutions makes the whole process simpler and the audit process more efficient.

Augmented reality offers many promising applications in healthcare. It can help us keep our information organized, avoid errors, and improve the quality of our care. Its possible to access patient information during an interaction, making it more personal and powerful.

3D printing promises to revolutionize medical technology, from prosthetics to instrumentation, to implants. It has the potential for a complete revolution in the medical field as we continue to refine and improve our processes.

Shockwave therapy, also known as acoustic shockwave therapy (LiESWT) or low-intensity additional corporeal shockwave treatment (Acoustic Soundwave Therapy), is the best method to solve the problem. It increases the blood flow to the penis permanently. This type of therapy has been used in clinics for over a decade. However, a new shockwave therapy device, the Phoenix, allows men to improve their erections from the privacy and comfort of their own homes.

As our demand to interface quickly with computers and digital information grows, it might make sense to use recent advancements in neural interface technology. Cyborgization is a concept that allows humans and machines to work seamlessly together in many contexts. This will allow us to provide quality care in new ways. The possibilities are limitless, from providers being able precisely to control robotic surgical tools to patients having integrated systems that monitor vital stats and alert of impending trouble.

Electronic prescription filing is growing for many reasons. It reduces errors, speeds up medical reconciliation, and alerts providers to potential adverse interactions or patient allergies.

Digital diagnostic tools are becoming more powerful. Its easier than ever to get a second opinion and confirm a difficult diagnosis with 4K video and high-resolution cameras. There are also more options to consult if you have difficulty solving a case.

While patient history is an important part of quality care, it is often the patient who is the most difficult to access. Patient portals allow you to access all the patients information and medical history from one place.

Providers compliance is centered on health records and personal information (PHI). They are also an important source of anxiety for IT professionals in healthcare who are responsible for security. Blockchain is made up of two components. The first is a public transaction log, which cannot be accessed by anyone else.

Cognitive technology increasingly uses digital records and AI advances to process large quantities of data in new ways. It identifies patterns that can be used to predict disease early and help catch it before it happens. Computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing are just a few of the other uses.

It protects encrypted data from being altered or changed. It can improve patient care by linking patients to their data rather than to their identities.

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