Latest Examples of AI Applications
Artificial Intelligence

Latest Examples of AI Applications

Mandi D 8 September 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance rapidly and make its way into more aspects of daily life. The latest examples demonstrate just how sophisticated AI systems have become and the wide range of applications they now enable.

One groundbreaking new use of AI is in healthcare, where systems can now analyze MRI scans to detect potential tumors and other abnormalities faster and more accurately than doctors. Researchers at Stanford recently unveiled an AI system that achieved a 3% error rate in detecting diseases, surpassing average human radiologist performance for the first time. This technology has the potential to improve diagnostics and catch life-threatening conditions earlier.

AI is also transforming how we get around with self-driving vehicle projects advancing. Alphabet subsidiary Waymo recently launched its first commercial driverless taxi service in Phoenix, allowing riders to hail vehicles with no human driver. This marks a major milestone for autonomous transportation, which promises increased road safety and accessibility. Meanwhile, Tesla continues adding self-driving capabilities to its consumer vehicles, with over 100,000 Teslas now equipped with the latest “Full Self-Driving” feature engaged.

Other consumer AI applications abound, like digital voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. These systems rely on natural language processing to understand commands, answer questions, and control smart home devices. Alexa and Google Assistant have also been embedded into more third-party products, with companies like GE releasing appliances that can respond to voice instructions.

As these examples demonstrate, AI is streamlining and enhancing processes in medicine, transportation, consumer technology and beyond. While concerns remain around topics like data privacy and AI ethics, the technology continues marching forward at a rapid pace. The coming years promise even more exciting and impactful applications that will shape our future.

Gaming

Game-playing provided fertile ground for developing and testing foundational AI algorithms. Notable gaming applications that drove early progress include:

  • Classic board games like chess and checkers which pushed forward heuristics, game theory, and tree search algorithms in the 1950s-1970s. Programming computers to play chess at a competitive level was a long-standing AI challenge. IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 using massively parallel processing and alpha-beta pruning search. Checkers saw even earlier progress with Arthur Samuel’s checkers program developed in the 1950s, which pioneered machine learning techniques to improve through self-play.
  • Go represented an even harder challenge than chess, with its huge game tree complexity. AlphaGo from Google’s DeepMind defeated top human players in 2016 using a novel combination of Monte Carlo tree search with deep neural network value networks to evaluate board positions. Further advances like AlphaGo Zero attained superhuman performance via self-play reinforcement learning without human game data.
  • Multi-player poker has emerged as an AI challenge problem requiring reasoning under uncertainty and opponent modeling. Libratus from Carnegie Mellon University made breakthroughs in imperfect information games by developing new abstraction and equilibrium finding techniques. Poker AI must handle bluffing, unpredictable opponents, and hidden information.
  • Video games have become virtual laboratories for testing AI agents, providing complex simulated worlds to train intelligent behaviors. Platforms like Atari games, StarCraft, and Dota 2 have driven advances in deep reinforcement learning. The diversity of environments and emphasis on vision, planning, control and collaboration in games has accelerated research.

Beyond games, AI techniques are now pervasive across major sectors of industry, economy, and society. Finance was an early pioneer in adopting AI, but usage has now exploded across domains like healthcare, transportation, commerce, manufacturing, security, and more. Let us survey major application areas.

Finance

The finance industry was one of the earliest and most aggressive adopters of AI technology. Use cases include:

  • Algorithmic high frequency stock trading to capitalize on micro-movements in markets. Machine learning tracks market data and news flows to predict price movements and execute automated trades with millisecond response times. This accounts for over half of all US equity trades.
  • Portfolio management and investment analytics. AI algorithms help investors optimize asset allocation, portfolio construction, and risk management. Predictive time series models guide investments into stocks, derivatives, foreign exchange, and cryptocurrencies.
  • Credit scoring using predictive data analytics. AI assesses loan and insurance applications by analyzing applicant details, credit history, and economic trends. This helps quantify credit risks to guide approval decisions and set interest rates.
  • Fraud detection systems. By mining transaction data, AI can identify abnormal patterns associated with financial fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and cybercrime. Anomaly detection helps surface suspicious activities.
  • Automated customer service agents. Banks deploy chatbots and virtual assistants to handle customer interactions and simple transactions. This improves convenience and reduces staffing costs.
  • Contract analysis and process automation. AI analyzes legal and regulatory documents to extract terms, risks, obligations and other insights. It also automates repetitive back-office tasks like accounting, compliance and reporting.

The global financial sector will likely continue accelerating its adoption of AI technology to optimize operations, reduce costs, and gain competitive advantage. Many traditional roles in finance are being transformed by increasing integration of AI alongside human skills.

Healthcare

AI is revolutionizing medicine and ushering in a new era of smart healthcare powered by data. Application areas include:

  • Early disease diagnosis using machine learning to detect patterns from medical images that are imperceptible to humans. AI can identify tumors, inflammation, fractures, and other clinical abnormalities. It also aids in prognosis predictions.
  • Medical imaging analytics, including segmentation, registration, and interpretation of complex scans like X-rays, MRIs and CT scans. This helps doctors make faster and more accurate diagnoses.
  • Drug discovery. AI can help design new molecules and drugs through computational methods. It also aids preclinical testing via biological simulations. This automates and accelerates pharmaceutical R&D pipelines.
  • AI-powered treatment recommendations that consider symptoms, medical history data, genomic factors, and population trends. AI assistants can help doctors select optimal therapies per patient.
  • Virtual nursing assistants that act as collaborative intelligent agents. They answer patient questions, assist doctors with diagnosis ideas, reduce errors, and automate documentation.
  • Robotic prosthetics and implants. Computer vision, tactile sensors and robotics enable artificial limbs with natural movement. Brain-computer interfaces even connect prosthetics directly to the nervous system.
  • Mental health therapy chatbots. Conversational agents provide accessible first-line treatment for common conditions like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, especially in underserved regions.
  • Predictive analytics for optimizing hospital operations including staff Rotations, equipment maintenance, resource allocation, and discharge planning.

Healthcare stands to benefit enormously from augmented intelligence systems. But AI adoption faces challenges around patient privacy, liability, system security, and job displacements requiring re-training of workers. Appropriate human oversight and governance mechanisms are critical.

Transportation

Transportation sectors are adopting AI across air, ground and sea to optimize logistics, planning, safety and autonomous operations via:

  • Self-driving vehicles equipped with computer vision, LIDAR sensors, neural network controllers and other capabilities enabling full autonomy. This will disrupt the auto industry and ridesharing services.
  • Predictive maintenance that leverages sensors and anomaly detection algorithms on vehicle components to minimize breakdowns. This reduces costs and downtime.
  • Route mapping and optimization using historical traffic data and real-time congestion monitoring to minimize transit times. Companies can improve fleet efficiency.
  • Demand forecasting and capacity planning algorithms that help businesses predict peaks and allocate resources to meet variable transportation needs.
  • Autonomous drones using computer vision and aerial mobility algorithms to enable package delivery without human pilots. Companies like Amazon are exploring drone delivery.
  • Smart air traffic control systems that adaptively guide aircraft through congested airspace safely and efficiently. AI helps optimize in-flight rerouting.

Transportation applications of AI are growing rapidly, but fully autonomous systems still face challenges around edge cases, security vulnerabilities, testing rigor, and public acceptance. Ethical risks abound so governance is crucial.

Commerce

The modern economy is increasingly algorithmic with AI integrated into retail, social media, search platforms, and digital marketplaces:

  • Product recommendation systems that suggest items tailored to user interests and preferences, as expressed through browsing histories, purchases, searches, likes, and reviews. This employs collaborative filtering algorithms.
  • Conversational commerce through chatbots that engage users in natural dialogs to answer questions, provide advice, take orders, and drive purchases. Voice-based interfaces are also gaining adoption.
  • Targeted personalized advertising to maximize ROI. This uses predictive analytics to estimate conversion probability based on demographics, behaviors, emotions, and purchase propensity models.
  • Dynamic pricing estimation using machine learning to optimize price points based on demand forecasts, competitor data, inventory levels, and other signals. Prices can rapidly adapt to market conditions.
  • Supply chain and inventory management. AI helps companies track assets, predict needs, reduce waste, and keep stock levels optimal based on projected demand across retail channels.
  • Process automation for customer service, accounting, compliance and other repetitive tasks. Chatbots in particular are displacing service agents for common inquiries.

Overall, AI augments human capabilities in commerce while raising concerns around privacy, manipulation, and labor displacement. Thoughtful governance and ethics practices are required to mitigate such risks.

Industry

Manufacturing sectors are upgrading factories with AI to improve productivity, quality, and automation. Use cases include:

  • Intelligent robotic systems that automate repetitive tasks on assembly lines, mechanical parts fabrication, food processing, and warehousing. Computer vision guides the robots to handle varying objects.
  • Computer vision for visual defect and quality inspection on manufactured items. AI can detect faults and anomalies more reliably than human inspectors.
  • Predictive maintenance algorithms that optimize equipment servicing and minimize downtime failures. This leverages sensor data and anomaly detection.
  • Process optimization using IoT data and predictive analytics. By forecasting equipment failures and optimizing control parameters, overall throughput improves.
  • Inventory optimization and logistics. Monitoring inventory levels and production needs allows dynamic adjustment of order timings and quantities.
  • Cybersecurity AI to detect vulnerabilities, threats and anomalies on industrial control systems. It identifies attacks and adapts defenses.

The convergence of AI, robotics and IoT is transforming manufacturing through greater automation. But companies must manage the risks of sensitive systems and job losses. Workforce retraining will be critical.

Security

AI has diverse applications in public safety, crime prevention, and security:

  • Surveillance using computer vision for automated monitoring of public areas. This includes facial recognition, gait analysis, object tracking, and micro-expression analysis to identify persons of interest.
  • Threat detection by analyzing social media posts, communications patterns, web searches, and other data sources to uncover attack planning and gather intelligence about bad actors. This can fuel preemptive interventions.
  • Crime pattern analysis by mining police reports and news feeds to identify connections between incidents, predict hotspots, and optimize resource allocation.
  • Autonomous defense systems like anti-missile defenses that automate threat response through machine reflexes. AI may also aid certain battlefield decisions.
  • Fraud detection beyond finance into domains like insurance claims assessment, identity verification, credentials validation, and amenities abuse. Anomaly detection identifies suspicious patterns.
  • Optimizing emergency response logistics using traffic data to plan optimal routes and resource distribution when responding to natural disasters, accidents or terrorist incidents.

AI shows great promise for bolstering security and public safety. But its application also poses risks around privacy, profiling, surveillance overreach, and military ethics. Regulation and vigilance are warranted. There are open questions around whether certain functions like lethal force should ever be fully automated.

Other Sectors

Many other sectors are actively assimilating AI capabilities:

  • Education has applications in automated grading, adaptive learning platforms, student performance prediction, curriculum design, and administrative analytics. AI-powered education promises more effective and personalized instruction.
  • Legal fields use AI for document processing, research, risk profiling, dispute mediation, and contract analytics. It aids lawyers via legal research and case preparation.
  • Agriculture employs AI for soil, crop, and cattle monitoring. Predictive analytics optimize irrigation, fertilizer use, harvest timing, and livestock health maintenance. Farm robotics are also gaining support.
  • Climate science leverages AI for weather forecasting, disaster prediction, environmental trend analysis, and Earth system modeling. It complements physical models with big data analytics.
  • Social media platforms optimize engagement and ad revenues through AI content curation, recommendation engines, sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling. This drives viral content.
  • Smart cities optimize traffic flows, public services, pollution control, crime prevention, and disaster response via interlinked AI systems analyzing sensor data. AI coordinates civic operations.

The list goes on. In summary, the real-world deployment of AI algorithms is accelerating across practically all sectors of industry, economy and society. An AI-powered revolution is underway. But thoughtful governance and ethics practices are required to steer this technological force towards broadly beneficial outcomes.