Four Weekly Tech Newsletter – July 25

A round up of the latest tech stories, curated for you weekly, by Four.

Lead articles from July 25

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid...

None of them helped. Some have been used in hospitals, despite not being properly tested. But the pandemic could help make medical AI better. When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools.

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Explainable AI - How does it matter to a data scientist?

Opening up black box machine learning models with explainable AI (XAI). What is XAI? “My dog accidentally knocked down the trash and found old cheesy pasta in it, and is now convinced that trash cans provide an endless supply of cheesy pasta, knocking it over every chance she gets.” Sometimes, you would have seen your ML) model do the same too. A notorious example is how a neural network learned to differentiate between dogs and wolves.

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Human assisted artificial intelligence

A pathway to trustworthy and unbiased AI. While the country continues to struggle convincing people it is safe and smart to get vaccinated against Covid-19 despite emergency authorization and advocacy from the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), other growing numbers of people are willing to jump in with both feet when it comes to trusting their lives to Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has no standards or organizational oversight.

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AI adoption is driving cloud growth

The adoption of cloud technologies continues to accelerate. According to the newest report from Canalys, in Q2 2021, companies spent $5 billion more on cloud infrastructure services compared to the previous quarter. While a number of factors are responsible, including an increased focus on business resiliency planning, the uptick illustrates the effect AI’s embracement has had — and continues to have — on enterprise IT budgets.