This week’s list of top data news highlights covers August 24, 2024 to August 30, 2024, and includes articles on Bahrain’s plans for data-driven urban planning and a new AI platform that automates legal casework.
The State of Colorado has partnered with an app called Aira to help people who are blind or have low vision explore its 42 state parks. The app provides free access to round-the-clock live assistants who use the GPS location and cameras on visitors’ phones to guide them around the parks and answer questions about surrounding landscapes.
Scientists from Peking University in China, the University of Washington, and AI firm INF Technology Shanghai have used 1.6 million experimentally measured bioactivities to train a new AI model called ActFound that could boost new drug research and discovery. ActFound could help researchers overcome existing challenges in predicting how substances will interact with a biological target, like a protein or cell receptor. Bioactivity prediction helps scientists identify useful compounds from a large number of candidates while minimizing time-consuming and expensive experiments.
The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services has launched an online tool that helps families find childcare nearby and monitor supply and demand trends by providing access to data on childcare providers in the state. The tool includes a dashboard that updates in near real-time with new childcare openings.
Klarna, a Sweden-based company that enables shoppers to pay for purchases in installments, has reduced the time it takes to resolve customer queries from 11 minutes to 2 using its AI chatbot. The has reduced the company’s labor costs from customer service and allowed it to increase overall wages.
5. Streamlining Urban Planning
Planet, a San Francisco-based satellite imagery company, has partnered with Bahrain’s property registration agency to streamline the government’s monitoring of urban changes and help the agency make data-informed decisions regarding urban planning. Planet will provide satellite data regarding infrastructure and urban changes in Bahrain to the government biweekly and will use AI to analyze changes in infrastructure, buildings, and environmental shifts.
6. Summarizing Virtual Meetings
Google Meet has launched a feature that uses generative AI to summarize a virtual meeting by taking automatic notes in Google Docs and attaching the file to the calendar event after the meeting ends.
Researchers at the University of Idaho have partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop an autonomous robot that uses AI to scan, identify, and pinpoint weeds up to half an inch wide and remove them by zapping with electricity. Autonomous weed removal can help the Forest Service save costs when planting new trees and reduce reliance on chemical pesticides.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Dundee in Scotland are partnering to analyze brain scans of roughly 1.6 million people in the country using AI and machine learning algorithms. Matching the data from brain scans with linked health records can help scientists find patterns that could assist doctors in better determining a person’s risk of developing dementia and diagnosing the disease at a much earlier stage.
A Seattle-based startup called Supio has designed a platform for personal injury law firms that collects and aggregates case data using AI. Supio allows legal staff to generate demand letters for personal injury cases, summarize information, and search the evidence through an AI chatbot.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Xi’an Jiaotong University in China have developed a deep learning model to predict the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries using only a handful of charge cycle data points. Electric devices that use these batteries could use these accurate battery life predictions for intelligent battery management.