🔥 What’s up, Wellington?  This week’s Applied Artificial Intelligence newsletter comes from Wellington! Known affectionately as the ‘world’s coolest little capital’, Wellington is New Zealand’s centre of government and the world’s southernmost capital city, boasting the best quality of life in the world. The abundance of creative tech in Wellington has been built up over the last 20 years, and the mix of movie, startup and ICT has led to a very active and innovative army of techies doing all sorts of wonderful things in this city. 

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Mid-last month, Wellington.AI hosted its first ever event with the theme of “AI for Public Good”. 

Michael Lovegrove (CEO of Bot the Builder) explained how AI has the potential to save lives, speaking vividly about his new chatbot for a New Zealand youth support and development organisation ‘Youthline’, while Nick Gerritsen (investor and entrepreneur) officially launched SAM: the world’s first AI politician!

The peer-to-peer AI clinic session sparked creative discussion in three key areas: using AI to aid in pattern matching and volume recreation for VR, identifying biosecurity risk items in shipping containers or personal luggage via x-ray analysis, and getting Siri to understand Māori place names.

If you’re interested in hearing more from the night, you can watch the full-length guest speaker presentations below!

SAM has captured worldwide attention as the world’s first AI politician, and was even identified by NASDAQ (read below) as one of two most exciting AI projects in their global AI sector research report! With a vision to have a positive impact on political discussion and democracy, the project aims to use AI and natural language processing technology to both provide a better way for the electorate to engage with politics, and to inform better political decision-making on issues like water quality, housing, or climate change. SAM is being developed by Wellington-born company TouchTech.

Wellington’s own Intela AI recently launched a private beta for their Farrago intelligent data cleansing tool. Powered by deep learning, Farrago can save hundreds of (mundane) man-hours cleaning data or identifying common records across multiple database. There are use cases across every type of organisation and industry; from duplicates in CRM databases, to local government issuing multiple building consents. Read more and join the beta list.

Adolescent depression, anxiety and suicide is the highest it has ever been, with New Zealand sadly having the highest rates of teen suicide in the developed world. Bot the Builder is working with Youthline (a helpline for adolescents) to develop an artificially intelligent chatbot that can provide advice around given situations, so that troubled teens have support 24/7, not just when a call centre is open. The aim here is not to replace counsellors. Rather it is to empower them so that they can serve more people who need the help. 

Xero is a leading FinTech pioneer born out of Wellington and sees its future in AI. Xero is active in three key areas, ensuring trust and transparency around data use, leveraging ML to power a ‘low touch’ accounting product and extending their platform to become a the heart of the small business ecosystem. Their AI projects range from computer vision to predicting accounting actions to network analysis of the small business economy.

The Auckland-based Soul Machines is revolutionizing the interface between AI and humans, with their lifelike, emotionally responsive Digital Humans. 

Even scammers are getting some AI heat with Re:scam, an AI platform built to keep scammers busy answering questions instead of targeting new victims. This tool disrupts scammers to reduce their effectiveness and damage their profits.

New Zealand has a political agenda for AI and the AI Forum is keeping pressure on policy makers to keep driving forward alongside the community. Come along to AI Day in March 2018 to hear more!

Madrid AI #2 - December 21 - 2017 - get your tickets here

Berlin AI #7 - January 17 - 2018 - get your tickets here

Hamburg AI #3 - January 17 - 2018 - get your tickets here

Stuttgart AI #1 - January 25 - 2018 - get your tickets here 

Big shout out to the Wellington AI team for curating this edition! Would you like to contribute to our newsletter, or have something interesting to share? Tweet us @thecityai or shoot us an email!

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Curated with ❤️ from Wellington,

Wellington AI & City AI teams