Understanding Artificial Intelligence: Technology meets Human Potential
Becoming increasingly part of our everyday lives, Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are evolving quickly and becoming ever-more sophisticated. From personal assistants to self-driving cars, AI is re-shaping fundamental aspects of society and opening up a variety of possibilities within the tech sector.
Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processed by machines, mainly computer systems. The processes mainly include learning, reasoning and self-correction. With the increase in speed, size and diversity of data, AI has gained its dominance in businesses globally and brings benefits wherever it is applied.
AI can perform several tasks, such as recognising patterns in data more efficiently than a human, offering deeper insights to businesses. A true AI system is one that can learn on its own, can improve on past iterations, getting ever smarter and more aware and enhancing its capabilities and knowledge.
Whether we realise it or not, we are surrounded by AI in many areas of our lives and this reality is bound to increase. With the next decade being forecasted to mainly focus on AI systems such as autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles, the AI industry boasts of evolving into a more powerful, predictive environment. Some of the mainstream examples of AI in everyday life are the virtual assistants we can find on our phones.
Everyone is familiar with Apple’s personal assistant, Siri. She’s the friendly voice-activated computer that we interact with on a daily basis. She helps us find information, gives us directions, adds events to our calendars, helps us send messages and so on. Siri is a pseudo-intelligent digital personal assistant. She uses machine-learning technology to get smarter and better able to predict and understand our natural-language questions and requests.
Netflix provides highly accurate predictive technology based on customer’s reactions to films. It analyses billions of records to suggest films that you might like, based on your previous reactions film choices. This tech is getting smarter and smarter by the year as the dataset grows. However, the tech’s only drawback is that independent movies go unnoticed, while big-named features balloon on the platform.
The AI Market: Opportunities in expansion
Companies acting on the AI space have been enjoying a fruitful period over the last couple years as the world starts to grasp the potential of this technology.
Machines are expected to perform 42% of all current tasks in the workplace by 2022 — a jump from the current 29%. This opens up many opportunities for different companies and startups to find their niches in this growing market.
North America takes the biggest share of the market with considerable advantage, whilst Asia is on its way to surpass Europe in second place.
Seeing Machines: Leading AI systems
A veteran is the field of AI is Seeing Machines (SEE), a London-listed company who is the world leader in driver-machine interaction. Seeing team uses artificial intelligence technology that observes the driver or operator’s attention — reliably, unobtrusively, and in real time — and intervenes seamlessly when necessary.
Operating in North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific and with over 15 years of experience in the market, the Company has pioneered the development and commercialisation of proprietary algorithms and hardware that help machines interpret the human face and eyes in order to understand the human state.
Seeing Machines specialises in computer vision algorithms that precisely track eye gaze, head position and pupil size, and their state-of the-art AI technology analyses the data to quickly and accurately detect driver drowsiness, distraction and microsleep events. The company has developed solutions for multiple transport sectors worldwide.
Seeing started working with the off-road (mining) sector in 2006 developing the Driver Safety System (DSS) which uses head position and eye tracking to minimise fatigue and distraction in mining equipment operators and drivers. Seeing Machines’ DSS is the world’s most effective heavy vehicle driver safety system and has been adopted by multiple global industries. This product is known as Guardian
Guardian is an AI powered system connected to a 24/7 monitoring centre and cloud analytics engine that gives fleet owners a variety of customisable intervention and analytics programs.
Last August, Guardian travelled 1 billion km across 24 countries. Guardian has been used in commercial trucks and buses covering more than has detected over 3.6 million fatigue and distraction-related driver events.
“The 1.3 billion km of data we have gathered since launching Guardian underpins our clear market leadership in the development and deployment of effective driver monitoring systems that demonstrably enhance transport safety across a range of verticals,” said Ken Kroeger, CEO of Seeing Machines.
In October last year, the company launched their collaboration with Emirates Airlines to research and develop eye-tracking and facial recognition features that will enhance safety and security in airplanes.
This is the first blog in our AI series. Keep an eye for our next blog on AI and Blockchain and understanding the power of these two ground breaking technologies coming together.
If you want to get involved in AI either as an investor or entrepreneur, we are not short of opportunities for you to explore the best projects in the AI space:
Make sure you register for TechNOVA AI in London, on October 15 and get a 10% discount with the code ‘cassiopeia10’.
If you are based in continental Europe, don’t miss Fintech+, a leading AI conference and marketplace in Switzerland, on October 1–2.
