Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Surprise! More blowback on Schumer & friends’ $32B ask for AI funding. We haven’t heard the last of the gnashing of teeth over last week’s “bipartisan” unveiling (by two Democrats and two Republicans) of a roadmap for AI spending. Noting Sen. Schumer’s framing of the proposal as a must for keeping the U.S. from falling behind China on AI, editorial leaders at The Wall Street Journal lay out a punchy rebuttal. “Now’s not a time for more pork-barrel spending,” they write. “The Navy could buy a lot of ships to help deter China with an additional $32 billion a year.” Get their brief argument here.
   
• Our neighbors to the North are tussling over how much to spend on AI too. The Globe and Mail just published an opinion piece authored by two thought leaders with expertise in economics, computer science and governmental innovation. They point out that France is riding high on commitments for investments in AI infrastructure and applications totaling $16.2 billion from Amazon, Microsoft and Morgan Stanley. By comparison, they state, the $2.4 billion Canada has so far invested in AI is “already mostly obsolete.” As Canada reviews its AI investment focus, “we should not only emulate the breadth of investments being made in France but also leverage private partnerships to amplify the impact and reach of our efforts,” the two experts assert. “Canada’s AI competitiveness depends on it.” Read the rest.
   
• Here’s another AI thought leader getting his thoughts out into the public square. Soroush Saghafian, PhD, founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard, does so by letting his brain get gently picked by a contributing writer for Fast Company. “Imagine a healthcare system where preventive measures are as accessible as receiving a notification on your phone,” Saghafian says to the contributor, Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, MBA, an MIT senior lecturer in business and engineering. Article here.
   
• Reddit is emerging as a social media platform fresh for the data plucking. Scientific American makes note of the development. Its writer is interested in recent research that used Reddit posts to let large language AI identify misinformation that would cause people to behave in a certain way. Such as, for example, refusing to get vaccinated during a pandemic. Of course, misinformation flowed in both directions—pro- and anti-vaccine—during the COVID-19 crisis. In any case, the AI technique at hand taps the preexisting “fuzzy-trace” theory, which holds that people “pay more attention to the implications of a piece of information than to its literal meaning.” Read the SciAm piece here.  
   
• Tomorrow’s healthcare workers may learn from AI-powered dummies. Employed as practice patients, such mannequins are already in use at Darlington College in the U.K. The unfailingly polite stand-ins have pulses, respond to spoken words, react realistically to a number of medical situations and, when appropriate, appreciate the occasional defibrillator jolt. More here.
   
• Can you distinguish between the three main methodologies used to train machine learning in healthcare? By name, they’re supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. If you’d like to brush up, the American Medical Association has you covered.
   
• And while you’re at it, here’s a fresh overall primer on AI in healthcare. This one is from Healthnews, which is interestingly enough headquartered in Lithuania. (That was enough to get me to read it.)
   
• You didn’t just buy a new laptop, did you? Starting June 18, the new Copilot+ models will be available for Windows lovers (and potential Mac deserters) starting at $999. The big breakthrough: They’re designed with AI in mind. As Microsoft pitches the products in a May 20 blogpost, “We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC—from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud—with AI at the center, marking the most significant change to the Windows platform in decades.” The post is here, and there are already practical libraries on the product drop everywhere else online. (The New York Times covers it by posing an oddly compelling question: “Can AI make the PC cool again?)
   
• Recent research roundup:
   
  • Northwestern State University of Louisiana: NSU launches international Artificial Intelligence research collaboration
     
  • Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center: AI could automate oropharyngeal cancer staging (from Inside Precision Medicine)
     
  • UNC Health: Researchers wrestle with accuracy of AI technology used to create new drug candidates
     
  • Open University of Catalonia: Toward validation of WHO app with AI to detect skin diseases
     
  • Newcastle University: AI reveals critical gaps in global Antimicrobial Resistance research
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: Many imaging journals still lack policies on the use of AI in manuscript writing
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: FDA clears advanced AI model for predicting heart failure risk
     
  • Health Imaging: New software could improve diagnosis of lung conditions for patients who cannot tolerate contrast dye