Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Artificial intelligence (AI) often gets a bad rap, with the headlines telling us that it will lead to super-intelligent robots taking over the world. Fears are growing too that the rapid growth of AI capabilities will lead to mass job losses in certain industries or will be harnessed by cybercriminals for nefarious means.

These concerns, while all valid, shouldn't mask the advancements the human race is achieving thanks to AI, in areas such as science, medicine and law enforcement.

Theresa May's recent announcement that the government is to invest millions in developing AI to aid its fight to catch cancer early is one prominent example.

In this article, CRN catches up with six firms - both in the channel and in the wider tech industry - that are using AI as a force for good.

Simon Parkinson, COO, DotGroup
AI application: Healthcare (Assistive technology)

DotGroup is a data management consulting firm that predominantly works with IBM technologies, including Watson. The company works with a number of charities who help people with limited mobility and communicative skills due to degenerative diseases or acquired brain injuries. "The systems that these people use to type messages, some computers will change that to voice or text. The speed with which those messages are created is extremely slow. The specific use that we are trying to develop with our AI solution is to improve the speed of that text space communication method by trying to use predictive text," Parkinson explained.

Dot Group is also using Watson's AI capabilities to determine the state of mind of the individual trying to communicate, in order to put emotion into their text.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry?"One is it can remove the need for human interaction. A lot of the people that our charities work with need full-time carers and helpers. A lot of these people are locked in their homes with very little outside exposure. If that patient can communicate effectively without the need for a helper, then they gain more independence which improves their quality of life, which makes them less frustrated and makes them able to interact with the outside world in a more effective way.

"A second benefit is helping patients, particularly those with degenerative conditions like motor neurone disease. The patient's condition and symptoms change month by month, year on year to the point where they will die. Some will start able to use a keyboard, and then will have to move to using a joystick and then possibly using a switch in their eye muscle.

"The tech we deploy has to learn about that patient, it has to learn when the condition is deteriorating and then offer alternative communication aid for that. That can sometimes be hard for a human to detect."

What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?"There are ten IBM partners who have come together with IBM to try to do some not-for-profit work with charities to try to help create some added value using IBM tech; it's called the Watson Guild. We are building prototypes for free and if we can actually build a prototype that adds value, the charity gets the intellectual property given to them at the end of the cycle.

"Sometimes chatbots and robots are replacing humans but unfortunately that's the nature of the world we live in - everyone's trying to save costs and exploit technology. But we've been doing that for 50 or 60 years; I don't think AI is any different.

"There are so many negative connotations around AI and robotics, ‘taking over humans' and all the rest. In this context, with the assistive tech, it's all about the patients. It's not about replacing humans, it's about giving [patients] a better quality of life, which typically means that they are healthier and more satisfied. It's frustrating when you see all the negative side of things."

Continue to next page to read how AI is aiding law enforcement...

Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Elan Raja, CEO Scan Computers and Eyal Lemberger, IT security consultant at Lemberger & Associates

AI application: Law enforcement

Scan Computers and Lemberger & Associates work with Hail-O, an AI algorithm which processes and grades indecent images of children into three categories of severity. Eyal, a former computer forensic investigator with Greater Manchester Police explains: "The actual work of a forensic investigator would probably be a day's worth of work, but about two weeks' worth of scrolling through those images on every case. That has caused a massive backlog in the UK."

The job can also take a huge mental toll on those people who have to sift through thousands of these images. Hail-O aims to reduce the psychological toll on forensic investigators, as well as freeing up forensic investigators and resources to work on other serious crimes.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry? Lemberger (pictured right): "As a forensic investigator I could probably, at best, grade about 10 images a second but that's only if all the images are the same [category] on my screen. But if there would be different categories I couldn't get anywhere near that. Hail-O at the moment can do around 150 images a second."

Raja: "The advantages are that it will assist law enforcement officers in the analysis. Secondly, it will reduce the psychological impact that graders will go through in analysing tens of thousands of images over the period of their working life. In addition, if it frees up [forensic investigators], it will allow what is already a constrained resource to spend more time on creative angles they can take to combat these horrific crimes.

"We've seen in the channel GPU technology evolve over the last decade to a point where more and more research institutions are using the GPU as a processor of mass information. Nvidia [a Scan Computers partner] has put a lot of focus on AI and more specifically deep learning. Having access to this technology and an ecosystem of software that supports this mass processing, having available data and changes in government legislation are all ingredients that we are feeding into Hail-O to allow some form of deep learning to come into play where we can hopefully have an algorithm that keeps learning, with which we can collaborate with law enforcement agencies."

What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?

Raja (pictured left): "Technology isn't to replace human involvement, it's to reduce the time of repetitive tasks and assist any human involvement to make faster and more accurate decisions. It's to aid human decision-making, not replace. There is so much misconception and Hail-o is an example where it aids human decision-making.

"The phrase AI is a very loose phrase. I personally feel that it's being tipped in the market to give a particular scenario of where machines are actually thinking for themselves. I don't think we are at that point, at this moment in time. However, its advances in software have really allowed people to start the mass processing of data from many different sources."

Click to page three to learn how ML is helping to prevent heart disease...

Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Ross Upton, founder and CEO Ultromics

AI application: Healthcare (diagnostics)

Founded in 2017, Ultromics has developed an echocardiography analysis tool which aims to reduce diagnostic errors of coronary artery disease by 75 per cent. The AI algorithm is currently being trialled at six NHS hospitals, with plans to extend to 20 NHS hospitals by the end of this year.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry?

"I think the biggest benefactor will be patients. In the medical imaging sector there's a lot of misdiagnoses that happen that could be prevented by technology - such as AI - which will ultimately benefit patients in the long-term. The secondary benefit will be massive cost savings for healthcare systems, such as the NHS.

"AI has the ability to increase accuracy in diagnosing disease. In the case of Ultromics, we are able to improve upon the diagnostic accuracy of stress echo scans versus a consultant doctor. That leads to fewer patients being sent home with a disease when they should have gone to surgery, or fewer patients unnecessarily going for surgery when they should have been sent home."

What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?
"The healthcare industry is a very tightly regulated space, so a lot of those fears won't ever be realised because it is so well-regulated. AI technology is scrutinised to get through into healthcare, and that scrutiny will ultimately be beneficial to AI technologies coming through because it means that they'll come through in a position to augment clinicians and not replace them. I think that's where a lot of the fear comes in. People are worried about robots ending up treating them or making decisions, and I don't think that will ever be the case so long as we have good regulatory bodies in place, which we do at the moment."

Click next to read how AI is helping businesses become sustainable...

Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Daniel Botterill, CEO Ditto Sustainability

AI application: Sustainability

Ditto Sustainability has patented a technology that is used to create software advisor bots which replicate the expertise and accountability of humans. The company specialises in using AI to provide specialist knowledge to help businesses and individuals become more sustainable, environmentally-friendly and socially responsible.

Ditto Sustainability works with experts in areas such as waste management and energy use on how to advise companies to put processes in place to enable them to be more sustainable. This expertise is put through Ditto's AI platform, where users interact with it through a web interface. "Instead of using a real consultant, use our application to determine your sustainability performance or drive sustainability or drive knowledge within your community," explained Botterill, adding that it was a more cost-effective and accessible way of driving sustainability in an organisation.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry?"People think of AI as being machine learning (ML)…but the way that we can use it to capture expert knowledge to scale and automate it - I think it's a very new thing for this industry. I think the technology and these new adaptations are pretty new overall. A lot of the sector can be quite backwards and archaic in its views. If you think how the waste companies manage waste as an example, the processes, the data, the platforms that are used to manage those processes are really quite old fashioned and quite poor. Overall there are quite a lot of limitations in technology to help companies be sustainable.
"I think the advantages of what we do is that we provide a much more cost-effective way for businesses to access the knowledge. Instead of going to pay a consultant one or two thousand pounds a day to share their advice, you can do it for a fraction of the price. You can reach far more people in one go. AI in this instance has really helped get that knowledge out to the masses more than the traditional services can."What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?
"I take a much more positive view. I think technology, especially AI, will help every business be more sustainable by accessing knowledge in a much more cost effective way, and in the ways the technology can analyse and interpret data.

"My view is that a lot of the problems people have around AI is its lack of ability to account for the decisions that it has made or conclusions that it has reached and I think that scares [them]. We found a platform system that, by its nature, will always explain itself, will always self-account, and will always provide that justification for why it has made a recommendation. I think that's a huge component for AI - is that ability to self-account and explain the decisions that it has made."

Read on further to hear how AI is being used in the battle against cybercrime...

Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Patrick Bayle, EMEA Channel engineer Cylance

AI application: Cybersecurity

Established in 2012, Cylance landed on the antivirus scene with its innovative use of AI in endpoint security. It uses AI and ML to learn from malware and then predict future cybersecurity threats.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry?

"The reason WannaCry has been so devastating is because the technology that has been securing enterprises for 30-odd years is based upon reacting. Something malicious has to be seen first before it can then be protected against.

"With the proliferation of malware…it has essentially turned into a big data exercise which is why we're using AI for it. We're taking as much known bad malware as we can and looking for patterns that exist and can be uniquely differentiated between good files. The AI part of it is that if we've never seen something before, such as WannaCry, we can make an educated guess based upon the machine learning that we have already done.

"You can make a really good prediction that something is malicious so you have protection against what is the biggest pandemic at the moment, which is zero-day malware. Everything is technically zero day - it's never been seen before.

"I think the industry has been bogged down with trying to fill gaps and filling in the holes by acquiring different technologies and then bolting that on top."
What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?"The larger our organisation gets, the more humans we need. Part of the data science process is to have humans label and process and tune and tweak the data that we feed in, and also confirm that the results we get out of the back of it are what we expected. There's never a fear that we'll completely get rid of humans because there's still a need for humans to go and install software and manage the small amount of updates that we have once or twice a year. We've seen a bunch of enterprises now retrain their staff to make them do stuff that computers can't necessarily always do."

Continue to final page to read about how AI is being used to improve training in the NHS...

Six ways AI is being used as a force for good

AI may be much maligned in some quarters, but here we examine six case studies where the channel and wider tech industry are using AI as a cause for genuine good, encompassing applications ranging from assistive technology to law enforcement

Jane Ayres, CMO OCSL

AI application: Healthcare (personnel)

OCSL works with a number of the NHS's Global Digital Exemplars, which are universities and trusts which deliver care through pioneering technology and information. Exemplars then share this knowledge to enable other NHS trusts to incorporate this learning in order to provide more efficient healthcare and organisation.

What is the benefits of AI to this industry?"We're currently working with a leading healthcare society, which helps people who work within the healthcare sector. We're working with them to use ML to help them understand what's happening within their sector. So they've seen a lot of people not renewing licences or who need to get more guidance and help in furthering their career.

"It's very slow when you're working with the large amounts of people that they have. Through using ML and AI, we've been able to help them query and analyse that data a lot more quickly, to enable them to deliver information back to their own bodies to make changes in terms of what they're offering, for example courses, exams or ongoing training. It's much more relevant and is going to help more people get back into the sector. I think we can all agree there's such a shortage of staff in the NHS, so it will help with that."What do you think about the negative perception and fears about AI?"[That healthcare society body] had multi terabytes of data in a whole different variety of file types and they simply couldn't search and query the data in the right way. They also had multiple disparate systems in many locations and by using data lake technology we were able to help them get value from that data in a way that you just couldn't do with people. But people were still needed. It still required interpretation from the people who worked within that organisation. It's about getting that tech to work in tandem with the people. We shouldn't be afraid of it, we should obviously be mindful, but it's about making the technology and the people work hand in hand."