Real AI isn’t about building a know-it-all computer, but rather one that’s a good learner, able to sort overwhelming amounts of data, and diligently catalog recurring patterns. For example, while working with sensor readings and other flight data from airliners, AI might spot the conditions that caused a plane to burn up too much fuel, a project that IBM is already undertaking with plane manufacturer Airbus.
Read about IBM Watson on Fast Company
Quality online content has exploded to the point that it’s hard to even keep track of all the shows from Netflix, let alone Amazon, Crackle and Hulu. They’re not all winners, though. We’ve combed through dozens of online offerings to find the ones that are truly worth your valuable couch time.
Read about the best online originals on Tom’s Guide
According to linguist and cognitive scientist Kieran Snyder, empty words in documents like job descriptions could be precisely what’s hurting diversity, by discouraging people from even applying. “Everybody hates that language, but underrepresented people hate it more, probably because it’s a cultural signifier of some kind. It sort of communicates, this is an old-boy’s network kind of company.”
Read about language and gender bias on Fast Company
“We’re throwing pills at the problem, but we’re not giving people something to go along with those pills, which is namely the software that helps them understand: Is this working for them?” says Thomas Goetz, cofounder of patient-focused healthcare startup Iodine.
Read about Iodine on Fast Company
Glide is far from the first video-chat service: Skype was founded a dozen years ago, and FaceTime debuted on the iPhone 4 in 2010. And of course Snapchat has video. But Glide has one killer feature for deaf people: the ability to leave a video message rather than having to prearrange a live call.
Read about Glide app on Fast Company
GE Healthcare just introduced its candidate for that holy grail: a service called GE Health Cloud that will link up medical devices around the world, process the data, and store patient records securely online so they can be viewed from anywhere. The company, which promises Health Cloud meets U.S. HIPAA privacy requirements for healthcare records, is launching the new service in late spring of 2016 with radiology devices like CT, ultrasound, and MRI scanners, and starting off with 500,000 of GE’s machines.
Read about GE Health Cloud on Fast Company
When I ask Rozan if he’s talking about compression, treating something such as temperature readings like the musical notes that get squeezed into an MP3 file, he says that’s not efficient or fast enough. While Teraki isn’t taking an MP3 approach, the company is, in a sense, treating data like music. Sensor readings aren’t simply streams of bits; they are sets of frequencies. And mathematicians have long had tools for describing complex frequencies with simpler components.
Read more about Teraki on Fast Company
For people with obscure conditions, sometimes called mystery diseases, UDP has been a last resort that combines weeklong medical examinations, genetic sequencing, and data analysis in an effort to finally find a diagnosis and treatment for patients who are at wit’s end.
Read more about the Cloud Hospital on Fast Company
If only online ads were more targeted, Duggal says, everyone would be happy. “We believe that if we can show more relevant ads, it’ll be more useful for users. They will be less inclined to block them, we will have to show fewer ads, advertisers will be willing to spend more for each ad. And the revenue for publishers and data providers like us will go up.”
Read more about personalized ads on Fast Company
The potential market for group messaging is enormous—in theory, as big as the current market for email. “I communicate through company email about 0 times a day now thanks to @SlackHQ,” reads another typical tweet about Slack. In a market so vast, there are plenty of other companies challenging Slack for a piece of the pie.
Read more about Slack rivals on Fast Company
