TECHNOLOGY UPDATE
Business gets savvy with “livelier” AI
The global artificial intelligence (AI) software market is forecast to grow 54% this year to reach $22.6 billion - where AI is predicted to contribute to worldwide economic growth, and where organisations are looking for ways to benefit from innovations in this field especially as they relate to enhancing data insights.
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I is becoming faster and smarter. Already, researchers have created software that borrows concepts from Darwinian evolution to build AI programs that continuously improve without any human input. Of course, a distinction must be made between advanced algorithms and AI. For example, a navigation app that recommends the fastest route between two points relies on the former. There are a finite number of possible routes to follow and the math required is straightforward and predetermined.
Continuous intelligence Andreas Bartsch, Head of Service Delivery at PBT Group, says: “Within AI, there are three key trends that will contribute to its acceptance as a more effective way of deriving value from data. The first of these is continuous intelligence (CI).”
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CI can be defined as combining data and analytics with transactional business processes and other realtime interactions. It leverages augmented analytics, event stream processing, optimisation, business rules management, and machine learning. “It comes down to providing companies with a more effective way of conducting data analysis at greater scale, with higher volumes, and in near real-time. Think of CI as having the ability to perform analysis on huge data volumes without requiring any human intervention. It is also unaffected by the complexity of data, instead examining it in unbiased ways and creating data stories that become integral to the analytical process,” adds Bartsch. He explains that CI effectively allows companies to make informed decisions as events occur. It integrates historical and streaming data to deliver insights
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA SEPTEMBER 2020
into not only what is happening now, but why is it happening. For instance, detecting fraudulent activity in real-time and alerting users, stopping breaches, and preventing tampering can save insurers millions of Rands.
Explainable AI The second trend is that of explainable AI (XAI). XAI is a set of tools and frameworks that help people understand and interpret predictions made by machine learning models. It addresses the challenge of machine learning algorithms that are very ‘black box’ oriented meaning there is not a human understanding of the processes happening on the inside. It is just about the results. “As can be expected, XAI is about the user experience and receiving the output of any given AI scenario or algorithm and understanding it in the
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