This week’s list of top data news highlights covers November 16, 2024 to November 22, 2024, and includes articles on using AI to discover deposits of valuable metals and a new drone that helps preserve wildlife.
Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an early warning system to detect imminent lithium-ion battery failures using AI. NIST trained a machine learning algorithm on roughly 1,000 audio samples of exploding batteries, which emit a distinctive click-hiss sound right before explosion. The system could provide crucial minutes of warning before a battery failure, improving safety in homes, office buildings, and electric vehicle parking garages where lithium-ion batteries are widespread.
Perplexity, an AI search engine, has launched a new shopping assistant that allows users to research products, compare options, and make purchases with one-click checkout using AI. The system uses conversational prompts and image inputs to provide product comparisons in everyday language, featuring reviews, objective answers, and AI-generated product cards with relevant specifications.
3. Matching Patients and Clinical Studies
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed an algorithm called TrialGPT to connect potential volunteers with appropriate clinical research studies listed on the U.S. government’s website. The system processes patient summaries containing medical and demographic information, then the algorithm analyzes this information to select relevant clinical trials for which the patient is eligible.
4. Streamlining Government Services
Palm Beach County in Florida has implemented an online search tool called AskPBC to improve public access to county services like making public records requests. Polimorphic, a New York-based software provider for the public sector, developed the tool to process natural language queries and provide accurate responses based on information from the county’s website and government data. The tool helps streamline government assistance on different requests and makes it easier to find the relevant information on the county website.
5. Discovering Valuable Metals
A California-based company called Earth AI discovered significant deposits of palladium and platinum, which are critical materials for clean energy technologies, using AI. The company analyzed geological data and satellite imagery to identify areas with high probabilities of containing these valuable metals, demonstrating the potential of AI to discover new deposits of rare and valuable materials used in clean energy technologies.
Researchers at Google DeepMind have developed AlphaQubit, a system that can identify errors in quantum computers with high accuracy using AI. AlphaQubit uses a neural network-based decoder, which researchers trained on hundreds of millions of examples of errors, to predict when a qubit experiences faults. AlphaQubit outperformed existing decoders, which could help overcome existing problems in qubit functions to produce more reliable and scalable quantum computers.
7. Fighting Bias in Healthcare
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a virtual reality (VR) training program to help doctors recognize and mitigate unconscious biases in patient care. The VR simulations place doctors and nurses in scenarios where they interact with virtual patients from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, as well as observe potentially biased treatments of patients. These observations better inform practitioners of what biased decisions look like, and the tool provides immediate feedback on their own performance.
8. Streamlining Content Creation
YouTube has launched an AI tool called Dream Screen that allows creators to generate backgrounds in various cinematic styles using text prompts, enabling them to place themselves in fictional settings. The new tool can boost the creators’ content engagement on YouTube Shorts and allow more creative freedom for short clips.
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy has deployed a thermal drone to track endangered koalas in a wildlife sanctuary, spotting 10 koalas in an approximate 600-acre area of the preserve. The drone uses thermal imaging technology to detect the heat signatures of koalas hidden in the dense forest canopy.
A Florida-based company called OneRail has developed a platform to optimize last-mile delivery operations for retailers and wholesalers. The platform uses AI to analyze order data and historical performance metrics and automatically select the most efficient shipping modes and carrier networks, connecting to a vast network of 12 million drivers across 400 cities in the United States and Canada. The platform could help overcome a large problem for retailers—the last stage of the delivery process—which often leads to late deliveries due to technical issues or costs.
Image credit: MiningWatch Portugal
