The Itera Research team always tries to be at the center of all the coolest events. Therefore, we did not manage to pass by such a major event as the 2021 web summit.

In addition to vivid impressions, we managed to find out where the world will move in the next few years and breakthroughs in which areas we should expect next year.

So we decided to share insights, because experts, as always, are very excited about the latest technologies and developments in the field of AI and how it can radically change our lives in the near future.

Since working with AI is a new direction for our company, we have prepared five use cases for AI, demonstrated at one of the world’s largest technology conferences, which returned to Lisbon after the 2020 conference was canceled due to the pandemic.

Healthcare

Iker Casillas, the legendary Spanish footballer whose sporting career was ended after a heart attack in 2019, has become an investor in a startup that uses AI to detect irregular heart rhythms and helps to alert the user and help services in advance of possible heart diseases.

Madrid-based Idoven is analyzing data from home-based heart monitoring kits to monitor people’s heart conditions and, most importantly, to identify impending problems.

“We are the first company in the world capable of doing this,” CEO Manuel Marina-Breiss told AFP.

AI is also being used by mental health startups

Woebot is a chatbot that helps people get rid of anxiety by adapting their responses based on information about a person’s emotional state obtained using artificial intelligence.

“If someone is in trouble or really feeling bad, Woebot will offer them to work on it or just get rid of it,” explained its founder Alison Darcy, a clinical research psychologist.

The idea of ​​pouring your heart out to a chatbot may be unnerving for some, but the Silicon Valley startup points to research that people sometimes prefer to trust an unbiased robot.

Environment

AI is not the solution to climate problems.

According to researchers at the University of Massachusetts, training a system with a single algorithm can use nearly five times the emissions a car makes over its lifetime.

But artificial intelligence is also making a wide range of industrial processes more efficient, from cement production to data center cooling.

It can also be used to reduce the amount of garbage we send to landfills.

British startup Greyparrot is using artificial intelligence to recognize different types of waste moving along a conveyor belt, picking out recyclables from plastic to glass better than the machines used by most businesses today.

Road safety

Can AI stop traffic accidents? Irish startup Provizio is developing technology that uses machine learning to analyze data from sensors attached to a car.

Founder Barry Lunn hopes that in the future, emergency braking systems will engage 10 times faster than before.

Сoding

The era of artificial intelligence, which avoids any need for human assistance and writes its own computer code, is much closer than you think.

A joint project of the software development platform GitHub and the OpenAI research lab presented a joint project called Copilot.

This tool can independently search and fill in gaps in the code, using AI to understand what the developer wants from this program.

But researchers at New York University suggest that computers still need us: about 40% of the time there are still bugs in the code.

Deep Fakes

In recent years, there has been a growing concern about deepfake technology, which can be used to create realistic images of people who act as the creator wants.

On the example of Tom Cruise’s deepfake, which was quite popular this year. Many people began to seriously think about how far this can go, and what crimes can be committed by pretending to be another person.

Reface, an American startup founded by Ukrainians wants to use AI deepfake for more gaming purposes, allowing the user to change the head of Justin Bieber or Mona Lisa to their own.

But co-founder Ivan Altsybeev envisions a future where people can do entire remakes of their favorite TV shows with themselves.

AI is developing at a rapid pace, and what was called state-of-the-art six months ago may turn out to be a mid-range development today. Whereas previously a narrow layer of specialists was employed in the field of artificial intelligence, now, with such a huge demand for solutions, there are simply not enough qualified personnel capable of coping with the constantly evolving technology.