Once considered as the preserve of science fiction, artificial intelligence has transformed into “science fact” nowadays. Or, in the words of AI pioneer Andrew Ng “AI is the new electricity” and truly AI is changing every facet of our lives similar to how electricity revolutionised 100 years ago. From astronomy and space research to biology, earth sciences, chemistry, economics, microbiology, physics, and zoology - AI and deep learning remains the key. In the coming years, we will ride on autonomous vehicles, own smart AI assistants, get movie recommendations from AI and what not.  

So, here we listed some of the key areas where AI made huge inroads and introduced key advancements to help convert ideas into products.  

Autonomous driving 

From warehouses to farmlands, from tourism to hospitality – AVs have seen practical usage. To name a few, Tesla, Amazon, Cruise, Waymo, Uber, Optimus ride and Baidu remains some of the significant players. Tesla introduced its in-house supercomputer to work on problems relating to automated driving, Baidu rolled out its paid driverless taxi services in China, Amazon acquired the option to buy a 20 per cent stake in the self-driving truck startup, are some of the recent moves in the autonomous driving space. Several operations which an AV needs to perform are based on sensor information and AI algorithms. Moreover, vehicles must gather data, plan their course, and execute the course. These tasks, particularly the latter two, necessitate non-traditional programming approaches and rely on AI techniques such as machine learning.  

Healthcare 

With countless applications in the field of healthcare, the AlphaFold v2 from the DeepMind research lab of Google is one of the outstanding contributions to humanity this year. A milestone in the field of cellular biology, the AI can predict the 3D structure of proteins accurately, thereby opening avenues for new research and accelerating the drug discovery process. Another group from the University of Liverpool utilised machine learning to predict unrevealed associations between viruses and mammalian species to mitigate zoonotic and livestock diseases in the future. Similarly, researchers from Japan introduced DeepACT – an AI system to spot productive and healthy stem cells to grow new tissues in case of any injury.  

The healthcare industry is in desperate need of reform. There is practically unlimited potential to use technology to deploy more precise and efficient interventions at exactly the right moment in a patient's care, from chronic diseases and cancer to radiography and risk assessment. 

Space  

Still, in its nascent stage, AI or to be more precise machine learning plays an important in analysing massive amounts of telemetry or earth observation data from spacecraft. A team of researchers use machine learning and artificial intelligence for scanning the moon’s surface that can help spot potential exploration and lunar landing sites. In yet another development, Evana Gizzi from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed a software - Research in Artificial Intelligence for Spacecraft Resilience (RAISR), which uses artificial intelligence to diagnose faults in spacecrafts and space systems in real-time.  

Combating Climate Change 

With the effective use of data, learning algorithms, and sensing devices, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a disruptive paradigm that has increased the ability to analyse, anticipate, and mitigate the danger of climate change. It makes calculations, forecasts, and makes decisions to help reduce the effects of climate change. Take, for example, IBM introduced Environmental Intelligence Suite, a SaaS solution to help organisations fight climate change. The suite can monitor for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, air quality, and send alerts when detected, can predict potential impacts of climate change using climate risk analytics and helps take efforts to mitigate the problem.  

Some of the key areas to tap AI potential is using satellite images and ML to spot gas leaks, using ML to improve energy efficiency in heavy industries, using AI to accelerate EV charging infrastructure and forecasting wildfires in advance. 

Logistics  

AI with its ability to unlock the true potential of big data has been the game-changer for the demand and supply chain and logistics operations. From managing warehouse operations to predicting the future demand of the market – AI is helping efficient utilisation of resources. Further, AI allows for real-time route optimisation and the employment of robots can enhance modern workforce capability as they can identify, sort, move and identify track inventories.  In the logistics industry, delivery drones are gaining appeal as a secure and dependable way to distribute various products, particularly medicines with short shelf life.