Industry Track: Invited Talk

How AI Revolutionalizes Businesses

Speaker

Kazuo Yano, PhD, IEEE Fellow
Corporate Officer, Corporate Chief Scientist, Hitachi, Ltd.

Abstract

This talk introduces the world-first general-purpose artificial intelligence. The AI, added-on to general systems, makes the system to learn and grow automatically. It has been applied to over 24 cases in 7 domains to enhance productivities. By combining this general-purpose AI with the inputs from wearable sensors, we have shown the happiness and productivity of people are enhanced. Using acceleration data from wearable sensors combined with questionnaires, we have discovered that the collective happiness of people is quantified by sensors. It is surprising that the signal of happiness is encoded in the diversity of physical motion. The correlation is as high as r=0.94. By combining this collective-happiness index with the AI, we have confirmed that the happiness of people, such as in a call center, a retail store, and a development project, are enhanced. Because such services are operated by part-time workers, their productivity is supposed to be determined by how to skill up the fluid workers in a short time. However, the productivity, in fact, is strongly influenced by the collective happiness. This shows that the process of enhancing the capability of people is not just a transfer of knowledge and skill, but, in fact, is closely related to collective happiness of people. Now we can enhance the happiness and productivity of people systematically with AI and wearable sensors.

Biography

Kazuo Yano is a Corporate Officer, Corporate Chief Scientist, Hitachi Ltd. Also the Director of Hitachi Artificial-Intelligence Laboratory. He is known for the pioneering works in semiconductor field, such as the world-first room-temperature single-electron memories. In 2003, he has pioneered the measurement and analysis of social big data, especially using wearable sensors. It was much earlier than the term "big data" was coined and his works has been leading the field. The sensor has been introduced in a Harvard Business Review as the pioneering work among "the Wearables: A History". His work is on quantifying the happiness is widely quoted in medias. His recent work on the world-first general-purpose artificial intelligence, which has been applied to over 24 cases in 7 domains, has attracted much attention in wide variety of businesses. He has applied over 350 patents and his papers are cited by over 2900 papers. His book, "An invisible hand of data," is cited as one of 2014 top-10 business books in Japan. He received 1994 IEEE Paul Rappaport Award, 1996 IEEE Lewis Winner Award, 1998 IEEE Jack Raper Award, Kujin Award from Hitachi Henjinkai in 1995, 2007 MBE Erize Prize, the Best Paper Award of International Conference on ASE/IEEE Social Informatics 2012.

 

Industry Track Co-Chairs

Ken Ohta, NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Arkady Zaslavsky, CSIRO, Australia