Top 5 AI superheroes
From lifesaving health analysis to crime fighting cleverness, here’s some amazing ways that artificial intelligence is helping make our world a better place.
1. Detecting skin cancer
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.
2. Preventing human trafficking
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.”
3. Conserving species
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.
4. Crime scene identification
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.
5. Fighting against online child abuse
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:
- A fast-forensic tool to rapidly analyse seized devices and find images already known to law enforcement
- A fast-forensic tool which allows a rapid analysis of a device against images on CAID, significantly freeing up police time. Before this, officers were having to grade up to 200 images an hour from grade ‘C’ to ‘A’. The image-categoriser will sort these before officers have to see them and see up to 2,000 images an hour graded. While police officers will have to look at the images it is hoped this is the first step to use computers to relieve investigators of the psychological pressures of viewing the imagery.
- The third innovation helps identify victims using scene-matching technology in indecent images
