Artificial Intelligence or machine intelligence is one of the “most talked about” and searched topics in this century. Artificial Intelligence is closely related to other terms e.g. Data Science, Big Data, Automation, Robotics, Machine learning, Neural Networks, etc.
The opportunity in terms of jobs and work is growing exponentially in this field globally and we should take advantage of this opportunity.
At the end of this article, you will get an overall idea of ” What is AI ? “, its “Areas of applications “, ” Some amazing companies around the world who are working on AI and what they are building ? ” etc.
What should be our pre-requisite skill sets to get into this field?
You can get a good idea about data science, its applications, and importance in my other post here.
Table of Contents
Is ‘Artificial Intelligence’ a ” Buzz Word ” ?
We have been hearing the term “Artificial Intelligence” quite frequently nowadays. For me, I started hearing this since March / April 2016. It becomes more and more relevant when I started noticing several inventions in the field of computer science related to AI.
More people started using this term now on a regular basis. AI and its applications have grown exponentially. Eventually, by knowingly or unknowingly this technology will be a part of our everyday life according to the recent statistics.
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
Artificial Intelligence ( Machine intelligence we use interchangeably) is the intelligence of machines and how they react under certain circumstances in a human-like fashion. We, human beings react to and make decisions in different situations e.g. if you feel cold in winter you wear warmer clothes.
This decision we make because it has been fed to our brain from childhood. If its cold the first action to take is to wear warmer clothes. Similarly, if we have a fever, we have to take medicines or go see a doctor. Our brain provides specific instructions that led to some actions. This is an example of human intelligence.
Similarly, when we say a machine is intelligent, it means it is more likely to perform a specific action when we provide some input to it in various forms. The machine should accept various inputs of different forms. The actions the machine performs are based on previously fed input in a similar situation.
When machines receive the inputs they analyze it first. Based on the analysis, they make decisions and generate instructions that perform certain actions.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Human vs Intelligent Machines
Intelligent machines can do various complex jobs like humans. There are some advantages to using machines over humans.
- Machines are good at repetitive work over humans. For humans, this will be tiresome and boring after some repetitions.
- Machines are faster than humans.
The main disadvantage of using intelligent machines over humans is they will replace humans with better efficiency.
There will be potential job losses if machines start doing all the work that humans do. Large Corporations will benefit a lot if they can replace human workers by machines. It is a one-time investment for installing the machines to do the work at a much cheaper rate. Machines will reduce the tremendous cost for Corporations.
Applications of AI
In the picture below, I have depicted six major application areas of Artificial Intelligence.
Lets get into the details of some of them one by one.
Agriculture & Farming
AI has done revolution in the agriculture and farming industry.
- Zoom lense powered with AI technology can detect, within how many days a fruit or vegetable or crop will be in a position to be picked up for sale from the field. This data gives the sales team an insight into the total number of sales possible by that farming company.
- Automated machine adjustments based on weather forecasting is another example of Artificial Intelligence. AI-powered machines are able to facilitate crop production from the hostile effects of weather e.g. floods and this is a major break-through.
- AI is making a major contribution by identifying the pests and to figure out whether it guarantees the quality of the crops, fruits, vegetables, and other produce.
By 2025, AI-powered Agriculture will be a multi-billion dollar industry as per the current statistics.
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Fraud Detection using AI
Banks and other financial institutions face a variety of frauds every year which costs them a lot of money. The most common is “Identity Theft“. In this type of fraud, fraudsters steal the identity of a person and use that for applying for load, payment transfer, or buying things online using his credit or debit card.
Some times fraudsters create fake accounts using someone else social security numbers (SSN) and use that to commit financial frauds.
There is another very big fraud that exists in the world of financial fraud, its called Money laundering. Money laundering is a way to convert your dirty money once you receive in the form of cash from illegal activities e.g. drug trafficking, bribery, human trafficking, etc into legit money by opening shell companies ( which are usually fake ) as if it looks like the money is coming from some legitimate source.
Statistics say that companies pay almost a quarter of the total investments of AI in fraud detection. Once someone hacks into a person’s bank account, the banks are responsible to settle that loss and it costs them a lot of money.
To identify whether these activities are fraud or not, banks and financial institutions are eventually relying on powerful AI-based systems that work hand to hand with the banks.
Solutions
Previous bank transactional data can help to identify fraud detection with AI therefore AI system needs to figure out the behavioral pattern of how these transactions happened. We can use the Supervised Model or Unsupervised Model.
In Supervised Model, the dedicated AI fraud detection system needs to be fed the data about the behaviours of the past transactions. How did those transactions happen? Based on that pattern, the system should be able to identify if the current transaction behavior therefore whether its normal or if there is some sort of anomaly.
In the case of the Unsupervised Model, pattern recognition has to happen on the go. So If there is not enough past data to refer then some kind of analytic model needs to be designed.
Artificial Intelligence in E-Commerce
AI has done a revolution in the E-commerce sector. It has taken E-commerce to the next level. One of the most significant impacts which I found extremely interesting and useful is ‘the recommendations’ provided to the buyers.
Giant E-Commerce Corporations are implementing AI systems ( e.g. Amazon ) which identify what category of products users are browsing. They collect that information and when the user’s log-in/ visits the site next time, it gives suggestions about similar products. Not only in that site but if they are connected to other social sites like Facebook etc, they get recommendations of that exact same or similar products in the recommendation area.
Other areas of the E-Commerce sector also benefit from Artificial Intelligence.
Automatic Chat Systems / Chatbot
Nowadays we see this type of chat system in many of the online applications where the system directly communicates with site visitors. The answers are given based on the set of questions and possible answers fed to the machine. This is a very typical example of AI application.
AI saves money for small corporations/start-up companies who can eliminate the cost of hiring human employees for their sales & customer support at the initial level. AI can handle that pretty good.
Other areas of applications of AI in E-Commerce
AI systems are also being useful in inventory management using predictive analysis, Better payment systems, after-sales support, and CRM, etc.
INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Based on the current inventory volume and the demand, it can predict what will be sales volume for the current financial year. It can find out the name and description of the product from its picture if we forget by chance.
CRM
Once the product/service is sold to the customer, it is very important for us to get in touch with the customer on regular basis by providing support and promotional flyers for upcoming products and maintain a permanent relationship with the customer through email/phone messages. The AI integrated with CRM systems is dedicatedly performing such actions.
AUTOMATION IN FOOD INDUSTRY USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI or Machine Intelligence is comparatively new in the food industry than other areas as I discussed above e.g. Transportation or Banking. But Slowly it will be an integral part of the food industry. The following are some of the applications of AI.
Grouping the Produce
AI integrated with the sensor-based high-quality optical camera is able to identify and sort produces based one their size, color & freshness, etc. It can separate them into different categories/groups used for a different purpose. e.g. based on the size of the potato it can decide whether they will be used for french fries or hash browns etc.
Help to innovate new products
Will it be amazing if restaurants know which flavor is acceptable by people belongs to a particular demographic? This information can change their entire business model.
Some AI companies are offering solutions to this problem. Their predictive model with analytics is being used to determine whether a particular product with certain ingredients will be a hit, based on the past behavior of consumers. This will help restaurants or food companies to innovate new recipes.
Maintaining Employee Hygiene
AI can ensure the personal hygiene of the employees as well as the quality of the product in a Food plant. Sensor-based cameras are used to identify whether employees are wearing masks, gloves, or taking other preventive controls while working.
Based on the footage and pattern rocgnition it can decide what kind of preventive measures should be taken by the company in such cases if rules are not being followed by the employees.
Artificial Intelligence ensures the Cleanliness of the Equipments
AI ensures the cleanliness of the food equipment used by using ultrasonic sensing and optical fluorescence imaging technology. It can detect if there are food stains on the equipment not visible with human eyes, thereby maintains the quality of the equipment.
The researchers of the University of Nottingham are developing an AI system that will potentially save 125 Million USD by saving the cleaning process and resources.
Controlling the SCM
AI ensures that the end to end process of production of food products / produce from the farm field to the hand of the consumers must be transparent and error-free. The entire supply chain management ( SCM ) process has been automated by AI. It guarantees the following three factors in SCM as every food company must rely on a robust SCM system
- Forecast pricing and inventory using their predictive analysis
- Ensures the food safety and quality of the products in every single step
- From the Farm Field to Consumer Transparency
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN TRANSPORTATON & AUTOMOBILE – SELF DRIVING CARS
There is nothing new to tell about self-driving cars and its contribution to human civilization. There are so many advanced researches are going on. A bunch of organizations, from giant Silicon Valley companies like GOOGLE to medium, small, and even startups are investing their talent, skill, and money to develop successful AI-driven Self-driving cars and anything peripherals to make it available on road.
The first self-driving car was identified in the year 2005, in a robotics competition show in the USA. The winner car of that show was able to go 7 miles only. Several organizations have invested their time and money in tremendous research. From ” Will it is possible ?” to bring it to a ” Ready to launch ” phase, it took almost a little over 10 years.
To name a few companies such as GOOLE, TESLA, VOLVO, TOYOTA, etc started pouring their billions into the research and development of self-driving cars.
How it works ?
Basically there are a couple of things such as Lidar, sensors, and cameras that are connected to the car that produces a large amount of data from the surroundings (60-meter range ) of the car.
When passenger gives the destination, the inbuilt AI technology calculates the distance from the source to destination and starts moving autonomously. It uses these data using image processing and recognition techniques.
It analyses it and uses the Machine Learning and Neural Network to identify objects e.g. Trees, pedestrians, Traffic signals, Curb, Bike, etc. and make decisions on speed, lane change, stops, freeway exit, etc.
The most talked-about AI-driven self-driving car company in the market today is Waymo. Some ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft are also in the process of using self-driving cars for their rideshare app.
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Talking in detail about self-driving cars and how it works will be beyond the scope of this post. I will create a separate blog for this.
AI IN STOCK MARKET TRADING
With compared to all other domains, AI has also entered into Stock Trading where Researchers and Investors are investing in AI research and development to facilitate stock trading.
Companies are installing AI into supercomputers which can work a million times faster than the human brain and make financial decisions based one some previous successful test transactions.
The predictions are more accurate than the human brain as it can cover more parameters which human brains can miss at times.
Traders are using AI-driven bots for buying and selling stocks and the results are better than normal.
But overall the question is still there and Will Artificial Intelligence be able to beat the Stock market?
However, the AI-driven stock trading platform is still under development. More and more researches are going on and a few companies have show initiative to integrate AI and stock trading.
OTHER AREAS OF APPLICATIONS
Following are some other areas of applications, where AI has solid impact
- Sports
- Entertainment
- Construction
- Astronomy
- Education
I can discuss about them in some other article. So thanks for reading my article and please leave your comments and share this article with in your circle. Also if you have any questions regarding anything related to AI, don’t hesitate to contact me.
My Email : jyotirmoy@content-shark.com
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