Siri can make calls for you and Watson can beat Jeopardy champions at point blank. But can these two AI heavyweights put together a dream team for you? Well, Artificial intelligence-powered software can create a selection of players that can beat 99% of all Fantasy Football participants’ squad.

These very promising numbers are already tickling the imagination of gamblers. But the program was not crafted for them to take advantage of. It has a more noble purpose. The joint research teams from UK and Greece are developing the program in order to come up with medical staff dream team that could one day help in saving lives during emergencies.

In Fantasy Football, participants are the managers of the team. They have the luxury of selecting and trading real-life football players in their squad within a defined budget. The allowable transfers and trades are also limited. Based on the real-life players performance on the field every game, the participants earn points. If you have played NBA Fantasy before, the football counterpart follows just about similar format.

How did the researchers come up with such computer program? They went back to previous seasons of Fantasy Football and replicated the results. Three computer scientists found against 2.5 million human participants, the software can beat all but 2,500—a remarkable figure that inspired them to go further with the study and targets 100%.

Daily Mail quoted Dr. Sarvapali Ramchurn of the University of Southampton:

“Team formation is a significantly challenging problem for existing emergency responders, and typically what they do is they train a lot, and they try and understand each other and try to understand what other capabilities they might need for different kinds of emergencies.”

“But this is not entirely feasible unless you really analyse the statistics of how these emergency responders perform, both individually and as a team.”

To hopefully perfect the program, the researchers are planning to inject the “human touch”. Dr. Ramchurn added, “We’re planning to enter for real now, in the real [fantasy] league, and see whether we can actually show off how well the fantasy football player is playing against actual humans every week.”

Dr. Ramchurn is joined by fellow University of Southhampton’s Tim Matthews and Greek researcher Georgios Chalkiadakis of Technical University of Crete.

Health

Still within the fence of the healthcare industry, artificial intelligence has been making waves of innovation. The latest is the Robotic Computer Automated Coding solution by Artificial Medical Intelligence (AMI). The program will be fully integrated with EMscribe, AMI’s primary language processing unit.

“This exciting Robotic Computer Automated Coding approach is completely unique from other Computer Assisted Coding offerings and helps hospitals improve the bottom line revenue cycle performance through increased speed, efficiency and elimination of coder variability,” said Stuart Covit, COO, Artificial Medical Intelligence Inc.

Instead of being forwarded to medical coders first, medical records go straightly to the hospital’s billing department and are automatically coded with 100% accuracy. Meanwhile, coders are to verify and validate the output of the program as a part of the workflow. The positive impacts of the Robotic Computer Automated Coding solution include healthcare facilities’ improved coding performance, processing time and expenditures.

In another news, one of Silicon Valley’s notable figures, Vinod Khosla says that technology will replace 80% of doctors in the future, during the recent Health Innovation Summit hosted by Rock Health. The statement of the Sun Microsystem’s co-founders sparked outrage from the healthcare community. Khosla noted that machines fed with large amounts of data and with the right computing power, can deliver more accurate, timely and objective results than most traditional doctors. The hyperbole attracted critical opinions and remarks from the audience. Some felt “nauseated” after his speech.

Environment

We have seen a lot of environmental awareness and going green campaigns made possible by technology. Even AI-powered systems partake in these laudable causes. Perhaps the biggest of it all is ZenRobotics’ Wall-E that summoned an estimated amount of $17 million in funding. This high technology primarily involves recycling procedures to address the planet’s mounting trash problems. The Recycler has a built-in sensors, 3D laser detectors and Near Infrared Radiation (NIR) to analyze garbage composition and segregate raw materials from waste.  It runs by the mantra of four R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Robots.

Another interesting recycling program that became of a company is that of Mark Bowles. His ecoATMs placed in malls and grocery stores attract consumers to exchange their broken electronics for cash. The 5-foot high kiosks scattered in 10 states in the country is powered by artificial intelligence which are equipped with a system that can recognize 4,000 phones, MP3 players and tablets with 97.5% accuracy.  After analyzing both the physical and electrical damage, it spits out cash offers. Bowles is an advocate of electronics recycling for more or less four years now.

Artificial intelligence is rising to various occasions and demands of the world. It has been drawn in the far-fetched issues of environment and health sciences. Setting aside, machines taking over humans, it’s been more helpful than scary nowadays. Tune in for regular updates on AI here at SiliconANGLE.com.