🤖 [CITY.AI] - Applied Artificial Intelligence #5 – Sao Paulo Edition

🔥 What’s up, Sao Paulo? Our fifth Applied Artificial Intelligence newsletter is curated by Clarissa Accioly, a tech entrepreneur working with applied research in Artificial Intelligence in several sectors, from health care to banking and logistics in the vibrant city of Brazil, it’s financial center.

We’re still in the wake of excitement after World Summit AI last month in Amsterdam. The Opening Video will give you an insight into why 🔆

Join the conversation by following us on Twitter & checking our applied AI publication on Medium ⭐️

This first edition of Sao Paulo AI was a clear expression of a growing feeling that technology must be applied for the greater good, and not for commercial purposes only. This has not been an isolated feeling, but on the contrary a trend happening in different places around the world and therefore a signal to Tech Giants and start-ups that people developing and using technology – and especially AI – must do it for a reason, a purpose. 

How this is shaping the application of AI within the community of Sao Paulo, insights into the launch of Sao Paulo AI, and what caught her attention globally - find out below:

Just a few days ago we hosted the first edition of SaoPaulo.AI, the second event of City.AI in South America, just two days after Bogota’s edition (more in the coming editions).

We had a full house at the auditorium of a major Brazilian hospital, Hospital Sirio Libanes. On stage, Vladimir Pizzo, the hospital’s director of technology, presented insights into their application of Deep Learning to Intensive Care. He’s shared lessons learned using machine learning to predict the mortality rate and length of stay in their Intensive Care Unit, which have proven to be 26% more accurate than current statistical models by using less data.

Followed by Barbara Barbosa, a leading data scientist at Creditas, a Brazilian financial technology firm focused on secured consumer loans. As an expert on NLP and applications to customer service in a financial institution, she’s shared lessons learned on information extraction from open text data through textual mining techniques using python. This included pre-processing techniques such as stemming, removal of stop words and use of ‘tf-idf’ to extract information from texts and use them as input to other machine learning algorithms.

The gathering was very interactive and included discussions with data science researchers using deep learning to process descriptive and context health care data in order to provide truly personal health assistance. The result was an enthusiastic AI Clinic Session and with a very engaged crowd eager to push for more enablement of AI. 

Recently, Financial Times published an article about the increasing number of developers quitting their jobs in big techs and endeavoring into social enterprises. It is a similar movement to that from the financial industry a few years ago, when experienced professionals left their jobs at banks to start what today is called Impact Investing.

This mindset change in financial markets professionals was actually the main driver for AI to go to market in Brazil. The demand for machine learning came as a solution to the surprisingly high interest rates and cost of transactions in the country. Some of the wealthiest investors just decided to make the market accessible by technology.

Companies such as Creditas, Vérios and Geru use machine learning to be an alternative to established financial institutions and make capital markets accessible to individual middle class customers. In May this year the count of Fintech start-ups in the country reached 244 excluding several independent initiatives from traditional banks. 

From robot advisors to fraud detection, AI is getting everywhere. While fintechs excel in specific applications – a Robot Advisor is already among the Top10 equity funds – most traditional institutions concentrate their focus on using AI for automation and efficiency.

And although legacy systems are still an issue for big banks, they find creative ways to benefit from external innovation by investing a lot of resources in Proof of Concepts and Start-up ecosystem. For instance, most hubs for tech start-ups in Sao Paulo are funded by banks.

Either way, big banks becoming more efficient and transparent through technology, as much as stat-ups growing to be fair provider of full-stack financial services, the 200MM Brazilians are being positively affected by artificial intelligence. After all, universal access to finance enables democracy!