7 AI in STEM

Agriculture

• AI, machine learning, and IoT sensors are providing a wealth of real-time data to inform algorithms that can transform food production, agricultural efficiency, improve crop yields and ultimately reduce cost and waste. In time this can help supply food to a growing world population.

Environment

• Environment decisions such as determining if there are imperfections in solar panels.
• A podcast from Nvidia’s AI Podcasts has two guests from GE, Danielle Merfeld, and Arvind Rangarajan, that discuss how AI is used in the renewable energy business. (31 mins. 12 sec.)
• Save the bees: Data used to help bees survive is gathered through sensors, microphones, and cameras placed in hives and analyzed by artificial intelligence. For more information check out the World Bee Project.
  

  

• Climate change: “Machine learning can improve climate informatics—machine learning algorithms power approximately 30 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Artificial intelligence can also help educate and predict the impacts of climate change on different regions.” (Marr, 2021)
• Wildlife conservation: Teams all over the globe are using AI to help with wildlife conservations efforts the University of Hawaii’s Kauai Endangered Seabird Recovery Project for instance uses AI to analyze audio to determine the number of collisions between birds and powerlines. The University of Southern California uses AI to locate and stop poachers of endangered species.

Healthcare

• AI is used in a variety of ways to impact patient care. For instance, AI can be used to improve diagnostics and automate image analysis. AI is also being used to identify new drugs and therapies, as well as track the long-term impact of existing drugs. AI can also lend the power of predictive patient risk identifiers through the rapid analysis of patient data. Another positive example of AI uses in healthcare is robotic surgeries which are minimally invasive.
• Healthcare is taking advantage of available data to improve diagnosis and image analysis.
• Cancer screenings: AI powered by deep learning algorithms is currently helping to detect various cancers in patients and predict the spread of and development of disease.

Natural Resources

• Prioritize upgrades Los Angeles suffers from aging infrastructure and frequent water shortages. The USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS) is working to identify ways to maintain the water supply and decide which areas to upgrade first.