From lifesaving health analysis to crime fighting cleverness, here’s some amazing ways that artificial intelligence is helping make our world a better place.
Research shows that AI can now diagnose skin cancer more accurately than experts.
A recent study, published in the Annals of Oncology, demonstrated that a developed AI was able to diagnose cancer more accurately than 58 skin experts. The AI had been trained using images of skin cancer and the corresponding diagnoses. Human doctors got 87% of the diagnosis correct, while their machine counterpart scored a 95% detection rate.
This technology could reduce the number of false positives when symptoms are being assessed, meaning fewer people would undergo unnecessary treatment. It could also help reduce the overall wait times for patients who need surgery.
Alma Angotti, a former US regulation official for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, says AI has the power to analyse more than just financial activity alone:
“It can highlight social, economic and even political conditions from hundreds of thousands of sources. For example, law enforcement can look at young women of a certain age entering the country from certain high-risk jurisdictions. Marry that up with social media and young people missing from home, or people associated with a false employment agency or who think they are getting a nanny job and you start to develop a complete picture. And the information can be brought up all at once, rather than an analyst having to go through the Dark Web.”
The Living Planet Index, produce by WWF, estimates that wildlife population sizes have dropped by 68 per cent since 1970. The charity champions the use of AI as a tool of conservation technology to help.
One of the most useful applications is in acoustic monitoring, recording the sounds of wildlife ecosystems on weatherproof sensors. Many animals, from birds and bats to mammals and even invertebrates, use sound for communication, navigation, and territorial defence, providing reams of rich data on how a species population is doing. AI provides a fast and cost-effective way to analyse hours of recordings for patterns of behaviour.
Conservation Metrics, a California-based company, has used acoustic listening and machine-learning to monitor endangered populations of both red-legged frogs in Santa Cruz, diverting water to help them mate successfully, and the forest elephants of the Central African Republic, helping to protect them from poachers.
Predictive AI can be used to detect things that could easily be missed by the human eye. At the University of León in Spain, scientists worked with the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute to create a tool to identify objects in crime scene photographs.
The team uses the images to train AI to spot crucial clues. The image-recognition tool catalogues information about items in the scene and can recognise known faces and estimate age and gender. All of this makes it possible for officers to quickly find details without having to manually look through hundreds of photos.
New game-changing innovations to improve the capability of the Child Abuse Image Database are speeding up investigations by automatically categorising indecent images.
Three revolutionary new tools have been rolled out to improve the capability of the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID), in a huge boost to bring child sexual abusers to justice and safeguard victims.
The new tools being phased out are: